billtron

The Downton Files [Downton Abbey - X-Files Opening Mashup] (by freakstorm2)

“COUNTRIES
GHANA
MOROCCO
NIGERA
US
GENRE
HIP-HOP
FEATURED ARTISTS
BALOJI
BLITZ THE AMBASSADOR
FOKN BOIS
KRS ONE
RAKIM
Hip hop crosses borders, so the hip hop train is suitably trans-national and can traverse borders, linking up countries and continents, often in the same stop!”

- The Trans-National African Hip Hop Train • Afropop Worldwide

Downton Abbey / X Files Theme (by Mat Montgomery)

Architects: Nómade Architects
Location: El Chaltén, Santa Cruz, Argentina
Design Team: Fabricio Contreras Ansbergs, Kieran Randall
Structure: Adrián Montoya
Construction: Tomás List
Client: Murphy Family
Area: 135 sqm
Year: 2012
Photographs: Courtesy of Nómade Architects

Implantation
This single-family housing project of 130 m² is located in the ecological place Los Huemules, at 10 km from the town of El Chalten in the province of Santa Cruz, Argentina. Nature was the protagonist when designing the place. The house follows the scale of the forest as well as the forest participates within the common areas. The house has a light footfall, as it is raised 45cm from the natural 0.00, thus trying to avoid a violent encounter between the natural and the artificial. 

Program
The house is located in an enclosed space, which accepts the spatial flexibility required in order to have comfortable areas. The design shows a clear separation between public and private spaces, each with its relevant constraints. The simple resolution plan provides a fluid space between the main spaces of everyday use.

Image
This contemporary house is warm and traditional and has wood and metal claddings. The facades don’t compromise the overall harmony of the composition. There is a volumetric effort to maintain an horizontal scale by creating a link between the large space below the natural foliage of the beech and the house.

Materiality
The traditional wooden construction system on a concrete slab provided fast materialization and safe housing. The chosen materials solve the desired isolations from weather and also provide the spatial and textural warmth.

Sustainability
Upon request and interest of the designers the house responds to environmental awareness. The wood used for construction is certified ensuring the preservation of forests, which was treated with burned oil for protection and durability. The road leading to the house seeks to preserve as much vegetation as possible, thus maintaining its ecological linearity and preserves the natural protection from high winds in the area.

Caburé House / Nómade Architects originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 12 Jan 2013.

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The truth IS out there. After a few people (Mitch, James C.) have noted the similarity it wasn’t until I watched the show myself that I realized how similar Downton Abbey‘s theme is to the X-Files intro. According to wikipedia the X-Files theme reached #2 in the UK Singles Chart. Really??? John Lunn - "Downton Abbey Theme" (2010)
29
Mark Snow - "X-Files Theme" (1993)
Here’s a fun tidbit about the X-Files theme music from its Wikipedia page: The theme song’s famous whistle effect was inspired by the track “How Soon is Now” from The Smiths‘ 1985 album Meat Is Murder. After attempting to craft the theme with different sound effects, Snow used a Proteus 2 rack-mount synth that featured an effect called “Whistling Joe”. After hearing this effect, Carter was “taken aback” and noted it is was “going to be good”. According to the “Behind the Truth” segment on the first season DVD, Snow created the echo effect on the track by accident. He said that the song had gone through several revisions, but Carter felt that something was not quite right. Carter walked out of the room and Snow put his hand and forearm on hiskeyboard in frustration. The keyboard, however, had an echo effect setting that had accidentally been activated. The resulting riff pleased

MUSIC HISTORY/MUSICOLOGY/ETHNOMUSICOLOGY (2009-10)
[note: 2008-2009 page remains available/active. See archive links below]
(Schools listed once, in alphabetical order - Application due date in parentheses)
Current Wiki Time: Sun Aug 04 06:11:57 CEST 2013
Last Page Update: 2012-12-10 17:05:00.0

Schools with known acceptances (doctorate-granting institution in CAPS):
Amherst College: "scholar/performer" of jazz/pop music/etc. (Jason Robinson, CS/EP, UCSD, 2004)
Anglia Ruskin University: Popular Music (Justin Williams, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, 2010)
Bowling Green State University: Western Art Music after 1945 (Marcus Zagorski, STANFORD, 2006)
Bowling Green State University: 17th/18th-cent. Music (Arne Spohr, KOLN, 2006)
Bowling Green State University: Instructor in Ethnomusicology (Kara Attrep, UCSB, 2008)
Carleton University, Ottawa: (James McGowan, EASTMAN SCHOOL OF MUSIC [2005], James Madison University)
Case Western Reserve University: Popular Music Studies/Senior (Rob Walser, MINNESOTA, 1991)
Chapman Univ

In an address delivered on 10  January 1932 William Cardinal O’Connell described crooners as “whiners and bleaters defiling the air.”

“No true American would practice this base art,” he continued. “I like to use my radio, when weary. But I cannot turn the dials without getting these whiners, crying vapid words to impossible tunes.”

“If you will listen closely when you are unfortunate enough to get one of these you will discern the basest appeal to sex emotions in the young. They are not true love songs—they profane the name. They are ribald and revolting to true men.”

This according to “Cardinal denounces crooners as whiners defiling the air” (New York times 11 January 1932, p. 21), which is reprinted in Music, sound, and technology in America: A documentary history of early phonograph, cinema, and radio (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012) pp. 319–20.

Below, Rudy Valée defiles the air in Florenz Ziegfeld’s Glorifying the American girl).

“Sound does not persist, neither across space nor across generations, so the tremendous rattle of horse-drawn drays, the clink of cupboards, the sneezes and shuffles of domestic life fall into the vacuous, silent crevices of history. “How did diners respond to the switch from pewter to china?” Schwartz wondered aloud. “How did a midwife register the sound of a new baby coming into the world? How did a person walking out in the woods register the sound of thunder or lighting?” In the course of nearly two decades of research, he had examined diaries, listened to wax cylinders, poured over digitized copies of the Brooklyn Eagle from 1901, and yet these subtle historical shifts in the soundscape eluded him. (“Even,” he said, “for a book of nine hundred pages, too intimidating.”)”

- A Manhattan Landmark in the History of the Anti-Noise Movement : The New Yorker

“Miss District of Columbia plans to undergo a preventive double mastectomy to reduce her risk of breast cancer, which killed her mother and grandmother. Miss Montana was the pageant’s first autistic contestant. Miss Iowa has Tourette’s syndrome. And Miss Maine lost more than 50 pounds before winning her state crown.”

- Miss New York wins Miss America pageant | Fox News

Lapa’s Selarón, the Chilean artist who made the famous colored steps of Lapa (the neighborhood I just wrote about), was found dead this morning at the bottom of the steps. Here’s the news in English and in Portuguese.

Here’s my article (“How color came to Lapa one step at a time”) from a little over 2 years ago on the man. RIP.

Part 2 and 3 are on Youtube.

My review of Chris Rojek’s Pop Music, Pop Culture came out recently in the the Journal of Consumer Culture, here (paywall). A sample:

Chris Rojek’s Pop Music, Pop Culture, opens with an argument that the term “pop music” has a lot to recommend it, and we’re not better off just using “popular music” instead, as Simon Frith has suggested. This argument turns on two points: (1) that the pop genre (as opposed, say, to rock or hip hop) has wide appeal and (2) other forms of “popular” music—Bob Dylan and 2Pac are Rojek’s examples—share many characteristics with pop. Both arguments are compelling. In consumer society pop has a real claim as “the people’s music,” as Rojek says. And the term “popular” has so many overlapping implications with “folk” or “vernacular” that it potentially obscures the obvious commerciality of artists like Dylan or Bruce Springsteen. Talking about those artists in the same breath as Michael Jackson or Justin Bieber is perfectly appropriate, and labeling them all “pop” nicely emphasizes the very common circumstances of their production, promotion, distribution, and consumption, even if fans of the former would prefer not to think so.

But the two approaches lead in different directions. This book is not, it becomes clear, an analysis and celebration of pop specifically. Instead Rojek inverts Frith’s suggestion, expanding the meaning of “pop” to include everything “popular”—and perhaps a lot more. By the middle of the book Rojek’s topic seems to be a very broad view of music in society, so even in a discussion of “pre-capitalist, tribal societies,” Rojek mentions the “general features of pop music in this period” (61–62). And elsewhere Rojek seems to turn back on his own early valorization of pop, saying for instance that the Beatles transformed pop songs from “mere entertainment” to “channeling the myths, dreams, and popular politics of the day” (68)—seeming to dismiss as trivial the same entertaining pop he initially set out to defend. This is too bad. By expanding the term so far outward from entertainment and commerce, we lose the initially promising project of examining the genre of pop music as a privileged site in the expression of consumer values—a project which would have substantial interest for an audience in consumer studies.

The Minnesotasan says:

The law (or convention?) in the United States mandates that when images of postage stamps are printed, a line is drawn through the denomination. I believe it's also required that the images be produced at a size larger or smaller than the actual stamp. These alterations were originally created to prevent people from cutting out stamp images and using them for postage. They would seem to be hopelessly outdated now that stamps are phosphor coated, and the modifications to the images are virtually useless in the face of modern image-editing software. Still, it continues to be done, as in this image from the Virtual Stamp Club.

Freedom. Liberty. Equality. Justice. (Forever?)

This is an Ask a Geek Feminism question from one of our readers (it’s still not too late to ask more questions):

One of the things I’ve been trying to work on recently is being more accepting and supportive of trans people (although this specific question can relate to several other contexts). I have heard a trans person say they’ve been hurt by being called “unnatural,” and I’ve heard coworkers make similar remarks. Would it be a good defensive for me to say to those coworkers, if the opportunity arises, “So are computers.”* ?

I wonder if that would resonate with the tech people I spend most of my time around – oh, yeah, we live and love things that are “unnatural” all the time, so maybe we shouldn’t look down on others for something else “unnatural” – but I’m worried about potentially causing more hurt to anyone listening by implying they are unnatural.

I personally just despise framing things as “natural” and “unnatural”, myself, but I don’t know if that response helps or not.

* or cars. or antibiotics. or sewage systems. really, most things.

There are always multiple ways to respond to any given microaggression, and some will work better or worse in different situations and with different people. It’s also great when allies stand up for us and point out when certain words or phrases or jokes are unacceptable, since we get tired of doing it all the time, and also because sometimes a cis ally — or a trans person who isn’t known to be trans in the particular situation they’re in — will be listened to whereas a person who is known to be trans won’t.

Personally (and I’m just speaking for myself here), I don’t think your hypothetical response is bad, or unwittingly transphobic, but it’s not my favorite possible response. There are trans people who champion transhumanism (putting the trans in transhumanism?) — for an example of what such a worldview might look like, see Donna Haraway’s “The Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway’s student Sandy Stone — worthy of a geek woman profile herself — wrote “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”, a deeply flawed but historically influential essay in which she encouraged trans people to aspire to more than just fitting in as someone who’s typically read as a cis woman or cis man). Some of them see hormone replacement therapy and surgery as sought by some trans people as radical body modifications, and see themselves as being part of a cyborg movement.

Moreover, both your co-workers and your hypothetical response assume that trans people, by definition, seek medical intervention to bring their external body into congruence with their neurological or subconscious sex. I assume that what is being thought of as “unnatural” is the use of medication or surgery. However, many trans people do not undergo any medical interventions, whether by choice or due to the many economic and social injustices that make this type of health care especially difficult to access for many people. So really, the people being tarred with the “unnatural” brush are actually a subset of trans people.

In the rest of this answer, though, I’ll show how the accusation of ‘unnatural’ is only used to protect the power structure as-is: people accept all sorts of things that were once considered unnatural if those things prove to help white heterosexual cis men.[1] Specifically, they accept medical technology, beautifications and body modifications usually used by women (so long as they jibe with the male gaze), and (since it’s become economically beneficial for white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, at least to some extent) women working outside the home and in professional jobs.

Medical technology. Since not all trans people (myself included) want to see themselves as better than human, or beyond human, I think there are better answers. Like you said in your question, antibiotics are unnatural. So are hip replacements, cochlear implants, anti-depressants, insulin, thyroid replacement hormone, breast reductions and augmentations, artificial legs, organ transplants, crutches, wheelchairs, and pacemakers. These are all medications, procedures, devices that are used by both cis people and trans people. I think very few people would want to go back in time to a world without medical technology. For trans people who avail themselves of them (or want to), medication (that is, exogeneous hormones) and surgeries are treatments for a medical condition. It’s not that being trans is a disease or a disorder — or that being the sex we’re born as (for example, the sex I was born as is male although I was coercively assigned female at birth) is a delusion or a problem — it’s that some of us have brains and bodies that function best when testosterone is our primary sex hormone even though we were born with gonads that primarily produce estrogen, and some have brains and bodies that function best when estrogen is our primary sex hormone even though we were born with gonads that primarily produce testosterone. And some of us have, deeply wired into our brain, a mental map of an external body that has different genitals (or other features) than the body we were born with. In the latter case, surgery to make our bodies the shape that our brain expects is treating a medical condition, which is a body that didn’t form in the way that our brain expects. And in the former case, hormone replacement is just a matter of supplementing a hormone our bodies don’t make enough of, much like taking synthetic thyroid hormone for someone with hypothyroidism.

None of this is “natural”, but again, if “natural” means going back to a world where nearsighted people get eaten by wolves because there are no eyeglasses, don’t sign me up. There’s something very ableist about wanting to live in a world where medical interventions aren’t available: it basically means you want to live in a world where disabled people are all left to die. Since most of my friends and I would be dead in that world, no thanks.

Alternatively, you could certainly argue that anything that exists is natural, in the sense of occurring in nature. Human beings have developed technology because we evolved brains that made us capable of developing it. That’s 100% natural. So is anything that we’ve created using natural materials. Like the health food store that tries to sell you “100% chemical-free” food, people who talk about what’s “natural” and “unnatural” are using clichés to fool you into accepting a category that’s actually semantically empty. Trans people are natural because we are trans, and we exist; full stop. We’re not confused cis people or flawed versions of cis people, but rather, individuals in our own right.

Sometimes claims that trans people are “unnatural” are really claims that trans people are some sort of modern creation of medical technology, as if we didn’t exist before medical interventions that sometimes make our lives easier existed. This argument gets it backwards and erases our agency — it’s not like cis male doctors were dying to treat trans people; rather, we had to fight tooth and nail to get some small modicum of access to treatment (and that access has always been easier to get for white trans people who can at least act like they conform to the stereotypes for their self-identified gender). And anyway, gender-variant people exist in every culture and have been noted throughout history.

Some people disbelieve this reality because they believe in an oversimplified, fifth-grade-biology view of evolution in which reproduction is all-important and features that seem to discourage reproduction can’t possibly survive. As Joan Roughgarden showed in Evolution’s Rainbow and Bruce Bagemihl showed in Biological Exuberance, it ain’t necessarily so. Understanding evolutionary theory does not entail believing in some sort of “invisible hand” that directs all organisms’ behavior so as to maximize reproduction; it also doesn’t require attaching moral value to reproducing. Those last two are about ideology, not science. If anything is unnatural, it’s the belief system that nothing in nature has any purpose besides reproduction (or indeed, that there are purposes aside from what people and perhaps other conscious beings ascribe to it). Bagemihl, in particular, outlines an alternative framework (at the end of Biological Exuberance) in which we view pleasure and abundance, rather than reproduction, as what living beings optimize for. In this framework, there’s nothing strange about animals (human and otherwise) who engage in homosexual, bisexual, and pansexual behavior, or who are gender-fluid or intersex or occupy genders besides the two that most Western humans recognize. Since we have a choice about the ideas we use to give meaning to raw data, we might as well pick ones that don’t come pre-bundled with a whole lot of social hierarchy implying that cis men and women are better than others, or that people who procreate are better than people who don’t — eh? There’s nothing natural about attaching moral connotations to the ability to reproduce.

Closely related to the “natural” microaggression is the microaggression of referring to both cis men and trans women as “biologically male” and trans men and cis women as “biologically female”. The sexes most of us get assigned at birth are better characterized as “sociological sex” than “biological sex”. When a baby is born in an industrialized, medicalized setting in the Western world, typically what happens is that a doctor (or midwife, or other medical worker or in some cases, a parent or family member) inspects the baby’s genitals and determines whether, as an adult, the baby will be able to play the penetrative role in heterosexual intercourse between two cis people. If the doctor decides that the baby’s phalloclitoris is large enough that, scaled up, it’ll be big enough to accomplish this task, the doctor assigns a male sex to the baby. Otherwise — defining maleness by the presence of a penis and femaleness by the absence of a penis — the doctor assigns the baby as female. Nowadays, of course, especially for people who can afford it, this ascertainment gets made before birth using modern imaging technology (that is, using imaging technology to enhance the same old heteronormative criterion). In either case, this is absolutely subjective — less than a few decades ago, it was completely routine for 46,XY newborns (most of who would presumably grow up to assert themselves as male) to have genital reconstruction performed on them soon after birth to turn their “abnormally small” penises and scrota into a vulva. This is no longer routine, but still happens. The reasons have to do with a bag of social assumptions most of us are inculcated with involving the ideas that everyone is heterosexual — or if not, at least that not being heterosexual is undesirable — that everyone is sexual, and that the correct way for two people to interact sexually is missionary-position, penis-in-vagina intercourse. That’s why I call it sociological sex and not biological sex. If we went by biology and not sociology, we wouldn’t assign infants a sex until they were old enough to affirm one for themselves, since the only reliable indicator of one’s sex is the brain, and the only way to determine someone’s innate, subconscious sex is to ask them what it is.

Gender expression (not just for trans people). I want to take a couple of steps back and point out that what I’ve outlined is a version of the medical model of transsexuality. It’s still not the version that gatekeepers such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health like to purvey, but regardless, some trans and genderqueer people reject the idea of medicalizing transness at all. I don’t, however, see the existence of such people as evidence for “unnatural”ness either. Regardless of what you’re doing or not doing with your body, there’s nothing unnatural about modifying your body, appearance, and behavior to communicate who you are and how you’d like to be treated. It’s possible to view gender as a language, and language is one of the most basic things about being human. Using symbols to convey meanings is natural.

I recommend Talia Bettcher’s article “Evil Deceivers and Make Believers”[2] in which she outlines “the natural attitude about gender” — which probably most or all of us have been taught, and many people have rarely questioned — and how it’s used to frame trans people as either deceptive or deluded. I think her argument relates directly to the real meaning of “unnatural” when used as a slur against trans people. If you can suggest that trans people are somehow “fake”, you can suggest that cis people are better than trans people, and thus justified in devaluing and dehumanizing trans people. People often rely on scientific terms they don’t understand, like “chromosome”, to lend false legitimacy to the idea that trans women are somehow less female than cis women or trans men are somehow less male than cis men, but one shouldn’t be fooled by the bogus biological science — it’s social science all the way down. As Bettcher shows, ultimately, the socially inculcated assumption is that outward appearance is an advertisement for what genitals one has. This is a convention I was never asked to consent to participating in, and if I’d been asked, I would have said no — but in any case, there’s no particular scientific or biological reason to assume that everyone is obeying this convention.

I’ve used the phrase “trans people” a couple of times in this answer, but I’ve argued myself that it’s a misleading phrase. It’s really trans women who face the bulk of the scrutiny from the dominant culture about being natural enough. This shouldn’t be too surprising, since it’s essentially the same scrutiny that cis women in sexist society are subject to. Cis women are expected to go to a great deal of effort to make themselves physically attractive (makeup, clothes, shoes, shaving, exercising, hairstyles, cosmetic surgery…) while simultaneously constructing a simulacrum of “natural”ness (that actually resembles nature very little — especially for women who aren’t white, thin and able-bodied, since the normative ideal of femininity in Western culture requires being all three). Trans women face all the same scrutiny, plus a double bind: if they do too much to conform to compulsory femininity, they’re accused of being “artificial” or “unnatural”; if they don’t put in this effort, they’re accused of really being men. They can’t win. Naturalness is a lie, an artifice, a construct made by somebody trying to sell you something.

Gender roles. Moreover, men (and other women) have also hurled the “unnatural” brickbat at cis women who wanted to work outside the home, decline to have children, love other women, go to school, or do science or engineering. That in itself should be a hint that there’s a problem with judging any women, cis or trans, by how “natural” or “unnatural” they are.

I also recommend Natalie Reed’s article “Bilaterally Gynandromorphic Chickens, And Why I’m Not ‘Scientifically’ Male” in case you need further convincing on why there’s nothing “biologically” or “scientifically” female about cis women that isn’t also true about some people who aren’t cis women, and likewise with cis men. “Sex Is Also a Social Construct” is useful as well. In this post, I haven’t even mentioned the dichotomy between sex and gender, which I believe is spurious and unhelpful. If you’ve been taught “sex is between the legs, gender is between the ears”, throw that in the garbage if you want to be a good trans ally. I won’t recommend any general resources specifically about how to be a trans ally, since many of them start with good intentions but end up doing just the opposite; however, familiarity with the articles in the “Trans*” section of the Freenode Feminists’ list of educational resources would be a good start.

Conclusion. I hope this gives you at least two tools with which to confront some language in the future: first, directly attacking the social hierarchies implicit in calling a particular group of people “unnatural” (whether it’s trans people, queer people, disabled people, mixed-race people, or so on); and second, calling attention to the bogus and oversimplified assumptions about science that underlie calling trans people “unnatural” or biologically a sex that they aren’t.

[1] Thanks to Valerie Aurora for this phrasing.

[2] Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 22, no.3 (Summer 2007), 43-65.

It’s a new year. Out with the old, in with the new. I’ve been running this column since 2011 and I’ve interviewed feminists all around the world, young and old, famous and unknown. Before we dive into another year of awe-inspiring feminist profiles, let’s recap some of the gems from 2012, just in case you missed any. The people I’ve interviewed inspire me immeasurably and the wisdom they’ve shared remind me just how vibrant the feminist movement still is. We’ve faced some serious setbacks, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean we’re not still out here fighting for justice.

On that note, make sure you continue sending me suggestions for people to interview. Remember, they can be anyone you think is doing great work to advance gender equality or social justice. If you know any organizers, students, relatives, friends, writers, artists (you get the idea) that you’d like to see me profile, tweet me at @annafeminista or leave it in comments in any of the interview posts.

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five 2012 round up.

Kerry Washington Actress/activist

“In order for us to honor each other’s humanity, it’s important to see the full range of who we are. I’ve never had a career where I’ve said I won’t play a prostitute or I won’t play a thief or I won’t play a slave or I won’t play a maid, because for me there’s nothing wrong with playing those people. People who have a history of being a slave, a prostitute, a maid, a drug addict–those people are human beings too. We all deserve to have our stories told.”

Dregs One Rapper, activist and case worker

“I feel like there’s a lot of training around women’s rights for women, but for men, as boys, even me personally, we’re trained to try and dominate women. There’s the double standard of you sleep with hella women, you’re a player. You sleep with hella dudes, you’re a ho. The way I was trained was just like: “Man, we gon’ get a bottle, get these bitches drunk,” that’s what it was all about. You get clowned on for being a virgin and stuff like that. There needs to be more education for men to see what gender discrimination does, what it’s effects are, and why it’s wrong. Men who are conscious of that have the responsibility to pass that on to other men around them.”

Michael Kaufman Author and founder of the white ribbon campaign

“We want to show that feminism is important and good for men… The wholesale engagement of men as fathers is a world historic change in our lifetime and that’s because of the women’s movement. Feminism is a positive challenge transforming the lives of men.”

Favi Vocalist, artist and activist

“Everything I do is guided by the belief that all cultural production and art is political; anything aesthetic has a political context. Drake singing, “Money over everything,” to me, that’s a political statement. Capitalism is so normalized that we think about any statement [endorsing] materialism as apolitical, when it’s not. It’s representing a certain set of ideals and has been force fed to us as a part of colonialism.”

Rocky Rivera Pt. I & Pt. II Rapper and journalist

“I do feel at this day and age even in the past 3 years there’s been a lot of young Filipinas that have come up and started rapping, but they have yet to touch on the things that we all go through. I don’t consider one Asian emcee to be a success story for all of us. I don’t like to tokenize who we are and what we go through.”

Hari Kondabolu & Janine Brito Comedians and writers for FX’s Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell

HK: “There are folks who talk about headlines, politics and figures, but when your politics is essential to who you are as a person, there is no separation. That’s always the frustrating thing when we talk about our points of view as people of color, as minorities. Whenever we talk about who we are, it gets niched. As if our point of view is not a mainstream point of view, as if we only speak for a small percentage of people.”

JB: “I especially like going on stage as an androgynous woman and saying, ‘Straight guys, I’m not for you in this way and I don’t give a shit what you think.’ I feel like they need to get taken down a notch and society accommodates them in every way possible with regard to advertising and using sexuality in advertising. I just like to remind them: I don’t care what you think.”

Darcy Burner Democratic candidate, House of Representatives, 2012

“There are a lot of people that believe that men are entitled to have power over women. I fundamentally disagree. I am of the radical belief that women are actually full human beings.”

Mary González: Texas state representative and first out pansexual legislator

“I felt it was an important time to raise awareness that just because you identify as LGBT, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re lesbian. It can mean a variety of different things. First, I was saying I’m pansexual, which most people haven’t heard before, especially in Texas. Second, I identified as pansexual because there are more than two genders. People get scared when you say that. And not only are there more than two genders, but I am attracted and have loved people who have identified within a third gender space.”

Rose Aguilar Radio host, author and volunteer with the Op-Ed Project

“I’ve been in radio now for 17 years. Seeing women second guess themselves on a regular basis is really frustrating to me. The media is still so male dominated. When you look at the guests on TV or the op-ed pages, they’re dominated by men. If you call an executive director of an organization, nine times out of ten that person is a man. If we were not consciously going past the author, or the person who did the report and went down to the ground, our show would be male dominated.”

Barbara Carrellas Author, sex educator, sex/life coach, motivational speaker and theater artist

“I felt that women were being shoved into boxes by politicians, churches, big pharma, the media, etc. If you do not fit neatly into one of their boxes, they tell you that you need to be saved, fixed, changed or reformed. There is no one-size-fits-all way to be sexual. We are each in the process of our own personal ongoing, lifelong, sexual evolution.”

Emily Heller Comedian

“I think the biggest PR problem feminists have is that people don’t really know what feminism is. They don’t realize that feminism just means ‘people who believe in equality.’ They think it’s ‘radical castrating humorless bitches who don’t want anyone to have any fun.’ And they think, ‘Well, I don’t agree with those people, so I must not be a feminist.’”

Melissa McEwan Founder and editor-in-chief, Shakesville

“I don’t have a clear, singular moment of coming to feminism, but I do remember the precise moment I decided I was not going to hate myself for being fat. I was in high school, and I saw my mother, who is an in-betweenie—and who, by the way, is incredibly physically fit and a beautiful woman—reach for the peanut butter in the kitchen cabinet, a spoonful of which is one of her favorite treats. Instead of eating the spoonful of peanut butter she wanted, she put the jar back then slapped herself in the face…It was a scary thing for me to see.”

“1. Pitch Perfect (Ori…
Various Artists”

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“Billboards are everywhere in New York City. They’re on subway trains and in stations, and on top of and inside taxis. But few, if any, have been anything like a series of anonymous billboards that have popped up on bus shelters in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. They’re not selling anything but a delcaration: that racism still exists. That’s also the name of the appropriately titled campaign. At least half a dozen billboard sites have sprung up around the neighborhood since August, with each month dedicated to highlighting racial disparities that impact black people in America. So far, the billboards have touched on topics ranging from the entertainment industry, education, fast food, smoking, policing, and black wealth. Each month’s billboard is also accompanied by an detailed post on Tumblr that provides background information, news articles, studies, charts, and statistics to back up each claim. A brief statement on the Tumblr page says, in part, that “RISE is a proejct designed to illuminate some of the ways in which racism operates in this country.” But who’s behind the project remains a mystery.”

- Series of Brooklyn Billboards Put Racial Inequity on Display - COLORLINES

One way or another, we’re all running away from Foucault. In this distressing online game, you can actually run away from Foucault with your fingertips, rather than by merely existing in society. It’s scary, all but impossible, and totally futile. Well, of course; that’s the whole point. But who, apart from some people I know back at my upstate New York small, progressive, liberal-arts college, would actually play it? Real life is punishment enough.

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Nova Colliander with her 'intergender' partner Vio Szabo.

Sweden has taken a long-overdue step to end the requirement that transgender people who wish to update their sex identification on legal documents undergo sex reassignment surgeries that require them to sacrifice their ability to have children. This is thanks to a court judgment that now applies to the whole country circumventing the sterilization law, which is set to be rewritten and removed from the books by July 1, 2013. Sixteen other countries in the European Union require transgender citizens to undergo the surgery, which many trans people do not want or require.

Last year, liberal and moderate members of Sweden’s Parliament were prepared to change the law, but were initially blocked by conservative political groups led by the Christian Democrat Party. Nova Colliander, a trans woman opposed to the sterilization requirements, expresses the pain of sacrificing her reproductive ability and her bitterness that it’s taken so long to change the policy [edited via Google Translate]:

COLLIANDER: It was an assault, a rape. The state gave an ultimatum I had to accept. The alternative was to die, which I felt so strongly. I do not know how many wills I wrote as a child… I am terribly disappointed that it took so terribly long.

Being transgender is considered embarrassing and unimportant in society. They would rather hide us, it’s hard to even talk about us. Therefore, it has taken time… It’s lucky that I can feel joy for others. Otherwise I would have been driven to madness by the bitterness.

Sweden has an infamous history of eugenic sterilization that took place between 1934 and 1976, with over 21,000 forcibly sterilized and another 6,000 coerced into a “voluntary” sterilization. A governmental inquiry into the misdeeds of the past ended in 2000 that paid out damages to the victims. Sex identity changes remained the last form of forced sterilization in the nation, but it remains unclear if the government will consider a new set of reparations.

Partizaning.org "Guerrilla" Moscow Metro Map


Placing the map in a Metro train carriage


New map in situ

Unofficial Map: Partizaning.org “Guerrilla” Moscow Metro Map

Last year, the Moscow Metro introduced a completely new official map, which featured 30-degree angles. Put simply, it went down like a lead balloon (link in Russian), forcing the authorities to hastily organise a competition for another brand new design.

However, some people decided they didn’t want to enter what’s essentially a no-spec design “contest” (there’s no payment for the winner, just thanks for a job well done) and set about designing their own map independently… and then covertly placing them on Metro carriages.

Reading the imperfect Google translation of their project website reveals their design goals: to bring the map back to a geographical grounding - showing the distance between stations better and how they relate to the physical landmarks of the city, especially the river. Connections to commuter rail are also shown, to better visualise usage of all transit in the greater Moscow area. All lines under construction have been excised from this map to bring greater clarity to the services currently offered.

Despite my own preference for diagrammatic system maps, I actually quite like this map. There’s some lovely work here, and the transparency effect applied to the route lines is quite beautiful. As seen by the last picture, it looks great in a real-world setting, and I’ve heard that the designers have enlarged the type size for better legibility since this first foray into the real world.

Our Rating: As much a political statement as it is a map, but undoubtedly good. Three-and-a-half-stars.

(Source: Partizaning.org via @dars_dm)

Mad Norwegian Press have announced a new book in their range of essays about Doctor Who by its fans and focusses, as the title suggests, on how Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It.

Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It
Edited by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas
Released 4 Jun 2013 (pre-order)

In Queers Dig Time Lords, editors Sigrid Ellis (Chicks Dig Comics) and Michael Damian Thomas (Apex Magazine) bring together essays by award-winning writers to celebrate the phenomenon that is Doctor Who, in the tradition of the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords.

Tanya Huff (Blood Ties) wears bi-focals as she analyzes the Doctor’s fluid sexuality, former Doctor Who script editor Gary Russell explores the show’s effect on his teenage years, Paul Magrs (Hornets' Nest) defends and celebrates the series' camp qualities, and Melissa Scott (Trouble and Her Friends) describes Who’s impact on her greatest love and loss.

Other contributors include David Llewellyn (Night of the Humans), Rachel Swirsky (Through the Drowsy Dark), Hal Duncan (Ink: The Book of All Hours), Mary Anne Mohanraj (Bodies in Motion), and Jed Hartman (Strange Horizons).

Introduction by Doctor Who and Torchwood star John Barrowman, and Carole E Barrowman (Exodus Code). Cover art by Colleen Coover (Small Favors).

Their previous book in this vein, Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It, received a Hugo Award back in 2011, winning the Best Related Work category.

Related Articles: Chicks Dig Time Lords (9 Oct 2009); Hugo Awards (22 Aug 2011)

Doctor Who News

You know it when you feel it. You've just sat down at your breakfast table, or settled in at your favorite café. You're a few sips into your brew when, out of nowhere, the urge to download a brownload is becoming urgent. Just a few swigs of coffee and it can feel like you like you've mainlined a laxative — but why? More »

Over the holidays, after the shootings in Newtown, I was in a conversation on Facebook in which I reiterated my point from earlier in the year that in the United States, gun ownership and gun practices are culture, and as such, not likely to be quickly or predictably responsive to legislation or policy in any direction. I don’t say this to characterize guns (or anything else that falls into the big domain of “culture”, e.g., distinctive everyday practices and forms of consciousness) as something which should not be subject to official, governmental or institutional action, nor as something we cannot change. But as I said last summer, purposeful changes to culture towards a clearly imagined end are very difficult to accomplish.

In the course of that conversation, a colleague and I moved towards one of the comparisons I had in mind in making this caution, namely, the composite, complicated set of ideas and practices in much of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa that get somewhat misleadingly lumped together as “witchcraft”, “sorcery” or similar terms. Scholars studying Africa take great pains, for good reason, to offer nuanced, contextual accounts of witchcraft practice and discourse that among other things, argue that the label itself derives from European colonial ideology and racialized ideas about “primitive societies”–a history which shapes contemporary understandings both inside and outside of Africa. However troubled the history of the label, there’s still a living, contemporary domain of African practices and beliefs that needs a name, and it’s a domain that’s entangled with the history of European imaginings of Africa and Africans. So for the moment, with many cautions, sorcery or witchcraft it is.

At least in southern Africa, I think folks reach for a single word not because it’s all the same thing, but because there’s some connected “deep” ideas that express themselves in a wide variety of ways and contexts. In fact, not only is each manifestation of those ideas different, you can actually see the deeper thinking mobilized by antagonists in various struggles, pulling in different directions. Witchcraft is a way to talk about why things happen in the world, in particular (but not exclusively) why bad things happen. As I’ve come to understand it, there’s two particularly key propositions: that most of what happens to individual people, whatever changes their situation or status, stems from their social relations (both direct personal relationships and generalized sociality) and that such events or changes are worked or brought about through invisible spiritual means, whether that means personified or animate spirits or more abstract and generalized spiritual force.

So if I become ill or suffer misfortune (on one hand) or experience a striking positive change in my individual circumstances (on the other), the interpretation that refers back to witchcraft or sorcery assumes that either change is a consequence of my social relations, transmitted into my life through the mobilization of invisible, indirect spiritual power. This sounds very abstract, and it is, which explains to some extent why these views are so adaptable to varying circumstances. They’re assumptions that can’t be easily shaken or discarded even by people who don’t believe in any of the specifics. It’s extraordinarily difficult to comprehensively dissent from background ideas or interpretations that most people you know share in some measure. It is, on the other hand, very possible to shape these ideas to fit a wide variety of aspirations and circumstances. The underlying concepts can allow people to come together for community healing, or to create a powerful social consensus against the misdeeds of the few. “Witchcraft” lets people describe and condemn exploitation and tyranny, but it also can mystify and empower exploitation and tyranny. It can give malicious family members and community malcontents new languages and possibilities for hurting others, or serve as a way to imagine and explore one of the deepest puzzles of human existence: why bad things happen to good people. Invoking sorcery can be a way to stifle initiative and creativity, or a way to complain about stagnation and suffering.

——–

In 1993, a man named Gian Luigi Ferri entered an office building in San Francisco, went to the 34th floor offices of the law firm Pettit & Martin and went on a shooting rampage, killing eight people and wounding six before committing suicide. It’s never been clear exactly why he chose the firm as his target. Materials he left behind were mostly incoherent, but he blamed law firms in general for the failure of his businesses.

At the time of the shooting, my father was the managing partner of the Los Angeles branch of Pettit & Martin. (The firm dissolved in 1995, which many outsiders attributed to the impact of the murders, but as I recall it, the firm had underlying financial and managerial issues that had little to do with the shooting.) I remember speaking with him not long after the killings. His emotions, understandably, were unusually raw and vivid. Though he was prone to verbal displays of temper, he was normally quite precise and controlled about how and when he allowed that to show in his professional and public life, and he was never physically intimidating either at home or work. On the other hand, as a former Marine, he was quite proud of his physical health and strength, and believed that if he were physically threatened he would be able and willing to defend himself without hestitation. As an adult, I once saw him unblinkingly and calmly stare down a man who was menacing the two of us with a knife, leading the other man to apologetically back away. As far as I know, he didn’t keep a gun in our house, though he was comfortable with and knowledgeable about guns. He had gone hunting with his father as a boy but told me a number of times that he had no taste for hunting as an adult.

What I remember as we talked about the shooting in San Francisco is that he believed, ardently and sincerely, that if he had been in the San Francisco offices that day he would have found a way to stop the gunman. He would have tackled him or disarmed him or found a weapon. I don’t think this was empty chest-thumping on his part: he was serious and sincere and very willing to concede that maybe he would have died in the attempt. But he maintained that he would have tried.

My father was speaking the language of American witchcraft. And in saying this, I do not for one minute mock or dismiss him or his counterfactual imagining of that horrible day. Gian Luigi Ferri was one kind of American sorcerer, and my father was another. The two deep cultural ideas that we hold to that manifest around guns and gun control alike–and around many other things besides guns–are as follows: 1) that individual action focused by will, determination and clarity of intent can always directly produce specific outcomes and equally that individuals who fail to act when confronted by circumstances (including the actions of other individuals) are culpable for whatever happens next and 2) that there are single-variable abstract social forces that are responsible for seemingly recurrent events and that the proper establishing structure, rule or policy can cancel out the impact of that variable, if only we can figure out which one is the right one.

I’ll come back to #2 in a bit, because as I’ve put it here, it may not sound like a generalized American belief, but instead just the institutionalized faith of social scientists and policy-makers. #1 is probably easier for most Americans to recognize. Some of that is a generic liberal, Enlightenment idea about the sovereign individual, but the idea has a peculiar emotional and cultural intensity in the United States, a historical rootedness in a wide variety of distinctively American experiences and mythologies: the gunfighter in the West, the evangelical who saves both self and community, the engineer who finds a way to keep failure from being an option, the deification of the Founding Fathers as extraordinary individuals, Thoreau’s call to disobedience. It goes on and on. It’s a deep and abiding idea that expresses itself in otherwise antagonistic ideologies or very different local cultures across the country. That each of us can act as independent individuals, of our own accord, with deliberate intent, and change what would have been. Or in failing to act, be held responsible for what actually did happen. That idea can come to rest on very different moments and practices–or on fetish objects of various kinds.

Including guns. This is what it means to engage “gun culture”, and why that is such a difficult thing to do. Because there are other men (and women) like my father who believe as he did that if they were present at a moment of violence or trauma, they would find a way to stop it. For many of them, a gun provides that assurance. And while you can say that it probably would not turn out that way, or that there is just as much possibility of an intervention making things even worse, this is just going deeper into the weeds. Because it’s not just the people imagining that they would save everyone who are the issue, but the killers, who are just as affected by a faith in individual action, often after a life in which they’ve been comprehensively denied any other way to believe in the consequentiality of their personal agency.

Maybe it’s possible to surgically remove guns from this latticework. But maybe it’s the bigger weave that’s the issue. Look at all the ways we acknowledge, encourage or make affordances for this deeper belief about ourselves, about why and how things happen in the world, and you begin to see a different challenge. There’s a reason why contemporary Africans who would just as soon defect from anything resembling witchcraft discourse find it hard to do. If I wanted to offer a different view about why anything, everything happens in the world, to explain that causation and consequence flow from accidents, from unmanageable interactions, from partial or dispersed forms of personhood and subjectivity, from systems and institutions, or many other similar formulations, I would be up against not just gun owners but gun control advocates, in general. Up against most Americans in their most intimate experiences and understandings of daily life and self-conception. Indeed, up against myself. Not only am I as much affected as anyone else, like many Americans (and others around the world), I rather like this way of understanding causality and consequence. I like it both intellectually and romantically, as an ideal and a structure of feeling. Even as I know that it is in some sense defective as an actual explanation and as an aspiration, and that it generates and sustains many practices that I dislike or oppose.

This is where idea #2 kicks in. The one problem with a pervasive belief that what happens to us is the consequence of our individual actions (or failure to act) is when we see in our larger national or global culture that some of what we attribute to the willful actions of individuals seems to be recurrent, patterned, widespread. This is a common problem for every deeply vested local or particular cultural vision of selfhood and society. Witchcraft discourse in southern Africa talks about both individual acts of sorcery and about the question of whether (or where) sorcery is systematic or generalized and how to relate the two. What I’d argue is that Americans work out this distinction by believing that recurrent or patterned actions are the result of the relationship between a single social variable expressed as individual actions and a single particular political design that permits or encourages that expression. That sounds modern and bureaucratic but its American roots lie in constitutionalism, in the proposition that concretely correct social designs or covenants can express–or suppress–any given will to act. That respect for religious freedom, for example, can arise from William Penn setting that as an initial condition of his colony rather than, as Peter Silver and other historians point out, an emergent result of many social interactions that did not have religious freedom as an objective, including settler mobilization against Native Americans. This can be a secular vision or a religious one, or both and neither. The Devil can serve as as an explanation just as well as guns or video games or lack of mental health care or media attention.

We believe that we can fix problems that we describe and perceive as singular issues. We tinker endlessly with machinery that seeks to identify the single establishing rule, the single malformed covenant, the single enabling policy that expresses or stifles individual action. That produces killers who mass murder children or produces saviors who would protect them. How quick we are to rush to our snipe hunts, running through dark woods. We’re told, often, that we break apart conjoined, messy problems temporarily, so that experts can study and understand, so that policy can be made, but that somehow we will reassemble it all at some point.

That point never comes because just as with our faith in our individual action, a successful reassemblage hits us hard in our deeper cultural understandings of why bad and good things happen. We don’t have a good language for intentional social or political action to achieve progress that bows to a messier, more partial, more complex-systems understanding of the world and all the things in it. We may have an intellectual vocabulary for that, but not yet (maybe not ever) a deeply felt, emotional experience of it. I feel sometimes as if I’m groping for that new sense of self and society, trying to get it to take root in myself, but just for myself, I have to figure out how to speak it and imagine it in a way that doesn’t sound like fatalism or resignation, and in a language that has everyday resonance. (Which this essay certainly does not.)

So we go on thinking that when the moment comes, we’ll do the right thing, and that in between, we’ll someday find the law, the policy, the rule, the Constitutional amendment that will keep individuals from doing some particular wrong thing, that will push some abstract force or some Satanic provocation under the national rug once and for all. Just as witch-finding and healing, condemnation and consensus, never somehow seem to prevent or check either the personalized force of sorcery or its pervasive spirit.

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rachelfershleiser:

How to use a Tumblr Bookmarklet:

All you amazing Tumblr bloggers who don’t use the Bookmarklet are blowing my mind right now. The Bookmarklet changed my life—it is the reason I sustain an active online presence when I used to write two blog posts and give up. It changes blogging from an extra task to find time for into a way to draw value from the byproducts of what I do anyway—read about culture online.

1) Go to http://www.tumblr.com/goodies.

2) Drag the “Share on Tumblr” button up to your toolbar.

3) Click it whenever you want to blog something!

4) Text that is highlighted will automatically be quoted! Photos will automatically be captured in the photo tab! Youtube pages will be ready to go on the video tab, no embed code required! Most importantly, credit will already be linked to the source! You can also add your response, analysis, commentary, etc.

5) Share more great stuff in way less time, and live happily ever after!

Whew, I feel better!

Love,
Rachel

Wise words from Rachel Fershleiser, who does literary and nonprofit outreach for Tumblr.

You learned it in preschool, and now it’s back in a more grown-up way. From cars to kids’ clothes to cold hard cash, sharing is caring more than ever before. The sharing economy builds and leverages social bonds, creates a more democratic marketplace, reduces the sheer amount of stuff we need to buy, and creates more resilient communities in the process. It’s the bastard child of market disruption that began on the web decades ago (Napster, anyone?), but it’s a child with a conscience.

The kind of “collaborative consumption” we see in services like Zipcar and Airbnb has the potential to revolutionize the way we live our lives. But it’s not all bartered canning equipment and blissful couchsurfing, folks — the sharing economy is a serious moneymaker for individuals and companies who “share” their stuff for a price. Investors, who prefer the wonktastic phrase “underused asset utilization” to “sharing economy,” say the market amounts to $100 billion to $500 billion worldwide, and it’s growing fast.

Here’s a breakdown of the various sharing philosophies, a few of the reasons that sharing is blowing up right now, and some ways that you can get in on the action. Just drag your pointer over the pictures for more info.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Living

Isa lies at the end of a highway, the terminus of a newly paved road laying across parched scrub land of Northern Nigeria. Geographically, it lies not far from the border of Niger, and exudes some of that qualities of border towns: the squinting stares of merchants, the turned heads as we pass by, the looks with questioning if not accusatory eyes. Soon we’re rounded up by the local police, and quickly find ourselves in the audience of the King. where we explain our mission.

The next morning, Ibrahim, the vice official comes to greet us – they’ve lodged us in a simple unoccupied house – and to deliver us to the King’s mansion. As he explains, the King has “gathered a few of his musicians to play for us.” He leads us down the long main avenue of town. It is a market day, and the street teems with anticipation. We struggle to keep up with Ibrahim, but with a hurried stride he surges ahead of us. Orbiting around us swirl an accumulation of tiny children who dance in our wake until we have assembled our own procession.

Court Musicians of Isa – Guns & Drums

Court Musicians of Isa – Horns

At the far end of the avenue lies the King’s Palace, a grand white structure with a heavy round wooden door. Suddenly, blasts of trumpet sound. We enter through the arch, where much of the town has gathered. The King has assembled not a few musicians, but all of the musicians across his domain in a carnival-esque confusion. The acrid smell of gunpowder burns the air as rifles are fired by dancers, amidst the seemingly unorganized staccato of drums, sending the two tethered horses into a frenzy. Old men yell indiscernible phrases into megaphones over the din. The display is foreign, yet uncannily familiar as some medieval trope, as court magicians in red and green patchwork trace blades across their bodies that leave no marks, dance on broken coke bottles, and swallow razor blades. In a coup de grace, the troupe of the kakakai assemble their instruments, these elongated and impossibly thin brass horns, which are pointed at the King’s house where he sits gazing from inside.

The King’s adviser calls us and asks if we’ve seen enough, at which point the festivities fold, the troupes come to pay their respects kneeling before his highness who sits on a plush green couch and hands out purple and pink Naira as befitting. We are then promptly arrested by the police who have been watching from afar – but that’s another story for another time.

The post king’s crossing appeared first on sahelsounds.

ictidomys:

Indigenous Cultures of the North Pacific circa 1880. By State of the Salmon.

Subterranean Veins of Europe

Here’s an interesting “map” of Europe’s subway systems that was originally featured in a weekly cultural supplement to Milan’s Corriere Della Sera newspaper. The map looks fantastic, and allows all sorts of comparisons between the underground rail systems of Europe, from cost of tickets (cleverly shown as a blue ring of differing thicknesses: the thicker the ring, the more expensive a ticket is), users per day, total length of each system and even a simple chronological ordering of each line opening for the larger systems. I especially like the length comparisons to other long things in Europe at the bottom right.

The English translations are somewhat imperfect (I’m presuming it read a lot better in the original Italian), but everything is pretty understandable, as a good infographic should be!

However, there is one major flaw with this graphic: the large circles around each city are labelled as “radius”, which leads me to expect that the circle shows the relative geographic size of each system. However, it actually uses the entire system length as the radius, which is almost entirely pointless and greatly exaggerates the relative size of the systems. For example, London’s “radius” is shown as a massive 402km (250 miles), when the actual maximum geographical radius is closer to 30km (18.5 miles). Paris’ incredibly dense Metro network (almost all contained within the Boulevard Périphérique) suddenly becomes a huge circle that gives little idea of the system’s tight spacing. It’s a strange design decision that distorts the data underlying the graphic badly, in my opinion.

(Source: accurat.it/Flickr)

What's in a cocktail name? There are straightforward drinks that tell you exactly what you'll be sipping—"cucumber martini" leaves little to the imagination. But then there are the cocktails with more conversation-worthy titles. At Lantern's Keep, who is the Wildest Redhead? And what is it that Any Major Dude Will Tell You at Vinegar Hill House? We decided to find out what inspired some of the cocktails currently being shaken and stirred around NYC. Click through the above slide show for the stories and recipes, told to us by the bartenders who created the drinks.

Cousin Scotty Fails His Driving Test

Created by: Brian Bartels at Chez Sardine "I have a cousin named Scotty. He's two years older than me. I was in the same grade as Paul, his little brother. We were smartasses. Scotty was very excited the day he went to take his driver's test to achieve a legitimate Wisconsin Driver's License. I'll never forget when he came back home. It was something I have come to understand as "schadenfreude." Scotty came back and the first thing we saw was his keys flying across the kitchen and crashing into the wall. He stormed up the upstairs steps with his fists clenched and all Paul and I wanted to do was tease him for failing. This is what our families did best. If I'm not mistaken, it took Scotty three attempts to get his driver's license. My brother Tim, too. And my niece. So I guess it runs in our family." Recipe: Johnny Drum Bourbon Carpano Antica Vermouth House Sake-Agave Syrup Angostura Bitters Stirred in a mixing glass, then strained over ice into an old-fashioned glass; garnish with wide orange peel.

I Hear Banjos (Encore)

Created by: Jason Mendenhall at The Wayland "I Hear Banjo's (Encore) is the third iteration of one of the original—and most popular—cocktails served at The Wayland. Deliverance is a great movie from the '70s about white-water rafting in the backwoods, and there's a guy picking a banjo throughout the movie. When I started to create the drink, the eerie sound of that banjo popped into my head. I Hear Banjos (Encore) has apple pie moonshine, rye, apple pie bitters, and cinnamon bark and applewood smoke—it tastes like a smoked apple pie and is reminiscent of being at a campfire in the woods." Recipe: 1-1/4oz apple pie moonshine (unaged corn whiskey cut with apple juice and infused with cinnamon) 1-1/4oz Old Overholt Rye 2 dashes spiced apple bitters Garnished with cinnamon bark and applewood smoke capped over the drink.

Wildest Redhead

Created by: Meaghan Dorman at Lantern's Keep "I came across a drink called a Wild Redhead in Stan Jones' Barguidewhile perusing for drink inspirations. As a redhead, I was totally disappointed by the brilliant name and boring mix (equal parts lemon juice and Cherry Heering). A few weeks later when I was working on making an original Scotch cocktail for the opening list at Lantern's Keep I revisited the Wild Redhead and decided to update it to the Wildest Redhead—more complex and a whole lot boozier. This drink is available at both Lantern's Keep and Raines Law Room." Recipe: 1.5oz blended Scotch .75oz fresh lemon juice .5oz honey syrup (3:1 honey to hot water) .25oz all-spice dram .25oz Cherry Heering Add first 4 ingredients together in cocktail shaker and shake with ice. Pour over one big rock (preferably) in a double old-fashioned glass. Drizzle Cherry Heering over ice (creates a red fade effect).

The John Lee Hooker

Created by: Greg Seider at Summit Bar "Walking to work I was listening to the song ["One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" by John Lee Hooker]. And I thought, How can I possibly combine all those ingredients in the same cocktail and make it taste damn good? So you must the beer glass with Peat Monster scotch. Mix Buffalo Trace bourbon, cinnamon agave, fresh lemon juice, sarsaparilla bitters. Shake it up. Strain it over Ice and top with [Lagunitas] Hop Stoopid Double IPA beer. Boom... Boom Boom. Boom." Recipe: 2oz buffalo trace 1oz Vietnamese cinnamon agave .5oz lemon juice 2 dashes sarsaparilla bitters 1 dash orange bitters Shake all ingredients in shaker. Strain into Scotch misted pilsner glass over ice. Top with IPA. Orange twist.

Laurel & Hardy

Created by: Tristan Willey, Bar Manager and Head Bartender at Booker and Dax “When creating this recipe, which relies heavily on very precise measurements to keep it balanced, we needed a way to describe the unique pours. When we added the Fernet Branca, we needed just a hair more than a quarter ounce so we called the measurement a 'fat' quarter. When measuring out the Luxardo Maraschino, we needed a hair under a half ounce so we called it a ‘skinny’ half. Since the measurements were funny and referenced skinny and fat as a duo, we named the drink the Laurel & Hardy after the comedic duo.” Recipe: 8 drops of Bittermens Xocolatl Mole Bitters 2 barspoons of Benedictine Fat 1/4oz Fernet Branca Skinny 1/2oz Luxardo Maraschino 3/4oz Louis Royer Cognac 1.25oz Rittenhouse Rye Whiskey Stir, strain, and serve in a coupe, no garnish.

Any Major Dude Will Tell You

Created by: Garret Smith at Vinegar Hill House "The name comes from a Steely Dan song about keeping faith and losing worry in the midst of a hard time, and we hope this cocktail might help someone toward that light just like the song, which kind of tells it all." Recipe: 2 and 1/4oz Laird's Bonded Applejack 2/3oz lemon juice 1/2oz honey syrup 1/4oz Saint Elizabeth's Allspice Dram

Behind God's Back

Created by: Jason Littrell at Death & Company "'Behind God's Back' is a phrase that implies something either secret, or something that happens on the other side of the island." Recipe: .25oz orgeat .25oz cinnamon syrup .25oz cane syrup .5oz pineapple juice .75oz lime juice 2oz Chairman's Reserve St. Lucian Rum. Swizzle ingredients in crushed ice, top with Angostura and Peychaud's bitters, and garnish with fresh mint.

I'll Have Another

Created by: Caitlin Doonan, Manager at Má Pêche “This cocktail is inspired by a mint julep, the drink closely associated with the Kentucky Derby. The name of the drink is the name of the winning horse in 2012. It also works well as a cocktail name because the drink is light and refreshing, and it's very easy to ‘have another.'" Recipe: .5oz Cynar .75oz Demerara Syrup (it's simple syrup made with demerara sugar) 2oz Rittenhouse Rye Dash of Fee Brothers mint bitters 4-8 mint leaves Stir, strain, and serve on crushed ice in a double old-fashioned glass. Garnish with mint leaves.

Doctor Johann

Created by: Chad Walsh at The Dutch "I was working on a drink with Blanco Tequila, different orange liqueurs (we occasionally sub in Mandarine Napoleon or Royal Combier, but the Shrubb's spiciness is perfect), and a ton of Angostura, which is such a delicious and often misunderstood product. It was foamy at first, and then it was a long drink (over crushed ice and topped with soda), but it wasn't until this version that I felt like it was expressing the essence of Angostura in the way I had been hoping for all along. It's named after the guy who invented Angostura, who was the surgeon general of Simón de Bolívar's army. The cocktail has more Ango in it (8 dashes) than I've ever put in a drink." Recipe: 1oz Partida Blanco 1oz Rhum Clement Creole Shrub 1/2oz lime juice 8 dashes Angostura bitters 2 dashes Regan's Orange Bitters

This week I’m recording a new album with an incredible team including musicians David Friend, Emily Manzo, and Arooj Aftab. Think pianos. But before we get to that, I decided to give away a dozen of my mixtapes for free.

Yes.

The incoming year is all about radical optimism and revolutionary love. OK? OK! Let’s get it.

EPIPHANY SCHOOL: 9+ hours of DJ Rupture mixes from 2001-now. You know what to do.