stephen.nyc

Tag: History

  • UbuWeb Returns

    From the homepage of ubu.web:

    A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It’s now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.

    Next time you have an hour to yourself. Peruse these archives. Watch, listen, read and learn from others that came before us. The about page says it all:

    Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. 

  • 50 Years of Text Games

    50 Years of Text Games

    From Kevin Purdy writing for Ars Technica:

    Reed, a writer and game designer himself, picks one game for every year from 1971 through 2020. He adds an involving dive into the pre-1970s history of experiments, games, and brutally unforgiving code. Each decade also gets its own introduction, and there are summaries of 500 other text games included. Each of the game picks started out as a post on his Substack, though they have been revised and more deeply integrated with their historical context in the book.

    There are classics you might expect, like Adventure, MUD, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and Trade Wars. There are definition-stretching inclusions, like the original Choose Your Own Adventure book, The Cave of Time, and Dwarf Fortress. And there are probably at least 20 games most of us have never encountered.

    All modern games owe their successes to some of earliest text games. Classics have laid the foundations for concepts like world-building, multi-dimensional narratives that bend the mind and even multiplayer. Before that, table-top adventure games informed some of the concepts and ideas text games explored and evolved. Before that, well, let’s just say the ancient battle of light versus dark rages on still to this day.

    Check out Aaron Reed’s book, 50 Years of Text Games here at Kickstarter

  • The Best Toonami Promos, Voiced by Peter Cullen

    The Best Toonami Promos, Voiced by Peter Cullen

    Peter Cullen is a legendary voice actor. Notably, he’s voiced Optimus Prime of The Transformers since 1986. Some of his other voice acting credits include Gremlins, Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers, Winnie the Pooh and literally hundreds of others. My personal favorite are his epic narrations from the fabled Toonami Promos of the early 2000s. These promos would be used as bumpers between regular programming and often would promote special films to be featured during the Toonami programming block on Cartoon Network.

    The Big O promo easily sits at the top of my list. Not only is Big O one of the best animated series ever created, but this Toonami Promo is slammin’. The duet of Peter Cullen’s deep but stoic concentrated voiceover and the electronic flat beat-esque house background track gets me amped every time. These kinds of bumpers just don’t get cut like they used to. It’s an absolute banger of a promo:

    I would never advocate for piracy but if you’re curious what Toonami programming was like back then, visit here to get a sense for the nostalgic vibe of Toonami.

    I’m fairly sure Peter Cullen even voiced other Adult Swim promos as well. Surely there’s some Cullen VO just sitting in the Williams Street video archives. If you have access to these or know someone who does, please email me. Until then, here’s some other Cullen Toonami Promo gems I have saved:

    Gundam 0080 Toonami Promo

    Gundam Wing Endless Waltz Toonami Promo

    Outlaw Star Toonami Promo

    Rurouni Kenshin Toonami Promo

    Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone Toonami Promo

    Gundam Wing Epic Promo (Long Version) Toonami Promo

  • How 5 Bridges Transformed New York City

  • The first inmates to graduate from Yale

    The first inmates to graduate from Yale

    History was made this past summer. The first inmates to graduate from Yale x University of New Haven have earned their degrees while incarcerated at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution. Yale partnered with UNH in 2021 to give these inmates a path to two and four year degrees. It’s a transformative idea, and this program extends to the men’s and women’s federal prison in Danbury Connecticut.

  • Rodeo is Turning America’s Whitest Big City Black

    Tressie McMillan Cottom writing for The New York Times:

    In the historical scope, it makes sense why protracted conflict marred this city. It is less obvious what a Juneteenth celebration would mean for Portland. The city does not have Texas’ history with enslaved people. It does not have the cultural history of the American South. And it is not a central part of the Great Migration story of Black history.

    The Portland rodeo is a celebration trying to fasten Juneteenth’s specific story of freedom from slavery to universal themes of place, home and equality. Now that Juneteenth is a federal holiday, communities across the country are doing the same complicated dance. This nation still has not fully acknowledged its national debt to slavery. How can it find a unifying national message around Black freedom without acknowledging white accommodation of slavery? A rodeo is as good a way to explore those tensions as any other. Like a rider wrestling a bull beneath bright lights, reconciling national narratives is not a pastime for the faint of heart.

    […]

    Like every story about enslavement and the American West, you cannot talk about Juneteenth in Portland without talking about land. “Ivan very intentionally had the rodeo here at the Expo Center,” Oregon State Senator Lew Frederick said. The Expo Center is near Vanport, a formerly Black working-class enclave built around the shipping industry in the 1940s. A massive storm, followed by flooding, wiped Vanport off the map in 1948. Frederick says there remains a notion among Black Portlanders that the flooding was a convenient excuse for displacing the city’s thriving Black enclave.

    Having the rodeo near Vanport is a way of saying that this is an event for you, for us. And that we remember. For State Senator Frederick, Juneteenth is not only about commemorating news of freedom for Galveston’s enslaved people. It is also about remembering in places where a lot of effort has been made to forget. “That’s what Juneteenth is managing, to tell the history that we have not been told. So it can be told in an Oregonian way.”

    Black Cowboys have been around since long before the cattle-driving era, but sadly pop culture has diminished their myth and legend. These folks deserve every right to commemorate Juneteenth and reclaim their much deserved piece of Western Heritage. Bringing people together to acknowledging and reconcile history over song, pageantry and bucking horses sounds like a superb idea. I know where I wanna be next Juneteenth. I’ll see y’all in Portland.

  • Susan Kare’s sketchbooks

    Susan Kare’s sketchbooks

    From Jenny Brewer of It’s Nice That:

    Susan designed the icons for the Macintosh’s graphical user interface. At the time, the notion of a GUI was revolutionary: just a few years prior to the Mac’s release, people could only interface with a computer through arcane commands written in code. By providing an image-based way to execute computer commands, the Macintosh made computers more intuitive and less intimidating. 
     
    As part of the original Mac team, Kare created some of the first digital fonts, the UI for MacPaint and some of the most persistent icons in computing such as the trash can/bin, the save disk and the smiling Mac. Kare added to the UI an element of friendliness and emotion. The icons that she designed were playful and simple enough to be recognisable to users around the world. 

    I am particularly taken by this image from Kare’s sketchbooks. A beautiful icon. Strikingly simple, yet infinitely complex. An icon that gave birth to thousands if not millions more since.

  • Ryuichi Sakamoto has died

    Ryuichi Sakamoto has died

    Truly devastating. Ryuichi Sakamoto dies at 71. Cancer claims another great. One of the greatest pioneers of electronic music. An early adopter, a vanguard of just so much. His influence alone was revolutionary and profound. He was deeply beloved, and considered to be the father of J-pop and other synth-pop influences.

    From Pitchfork:

    “While undergoing treatment for cancer discovered in June 2020, Sakamoto continued to create works in his home studio whenever his health would allow,” Sakamoto’s management, Commmons, wrote in its statement. “He lived with music until the very end. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to his fans and all those who have supported his activities, as well as the medical professionals in Japan and the U.S. who did everything in their power to cure him. In accordance with Sakamoto’s strong wishes, the funeral service was held among his close family members.”

    The man knew how to create magic out of thin air. I mean just listen to this stuff:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJEZFTbxm4o

    Unbearably tragic to think about him being gone.

  • Martin Luther King Jr. Day

    Martin Luther King Jr. Day

    Seeing Apple’s homepage, spurred me to share the same quote:

    This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.

    — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

    Read Stride Toward Freedom for free here

  • A trove of Levi’s 201s discovered at Castle Dome

    A trove of Levi’s 201s discovered at Castle Dome

    It’s not everyday you discover century old jeans in a mine shaft!

    Allen Armstrong, CEO and founder of the Castle Dome museum, mine and ghost town where Schlichting made his find, had previously explored the same shaft but missed the trove of jeans, coming within 20 feet of it. He did, however, find a pair of Levi’s 201s—a lower-priced version of the classic 501s, created around 1890 with cheaper buttons and a linen label rather than leather—on his first rappel to the shaft two decades ago.

    To authenticate the Levi’s, Armstrong turned to Levi Strauss & Co. historian Tracey Panek, who drove out from California. “She carried [the jeans] around for two hours like they were a little kid in her arms,” says Armstrong.

  • Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll 

    Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll 

    […] At the same time, his use of double images and the search for hidden images which characterise his Surrealist experimentation are persistent aspects of his work during the 1940s, when Dalí moved to the United States, where he lived between 1940 and 1948. The dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 shocked Dalí, who depicted the bombings in many of his landscapes from that year, including Idilio atómico y uránico melancólico (Atomic and Uranic Melancholic Idyll, 1945). In this work, Dalí uses his characteristic figurative style inhabited by soft shapes, represented within a black image whose hollows illuminate another reality outside that which is identified by the aeroplane, explosion and bombs. Beginning in the late 1940s, Dalí’s work moves into a new mystical/nuclear phase, in which he makes a number of works that depict the disintegration of the atom in paintings with religious subject matter.

    Read More at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

  • The Scanimate, The Last Analog Motion Graphics Machine

    The Scanimate, The Last Analog Motion Graphics Machine

    Easily one of the coolest machines you’ll ever lay your eyes upon. All of those iconic VHS production company intro graphics and spiffy effects from the eighties? You can thank the Scanimate for that. The last engineer taking care taking care of one of these machines is Dave Sieg, a thankless hero.

    The short Viceland video is fantastic, but if you really want to sink your teeth into the history of this machine and motion graphics check out this documentary. From the description on Vimeo:

    In this short documentary, Nick Campbell of Greyscalegorilla talks to Roy Weinstock, one of the original Scanimate animators, and Dave Sieg, the engineer who has kept it running all these years.

  • Chinese tourists are allegedly being recruited to spy on the US

    Chinese tourists are allegedly being recruited to spy on the US

    The people of China are vacationing more than ever before. A while back I came across a story where Chinese tourists swarmed a tiny village in Austria. Who could blame them, UNESCO World Heritage Sites are breathtaking places to visit.

    In 2018, there were 2.9 million Chinese travelers to the United States. Each year, that number has been in decline. But China’s boom isn’t slowing down. In 2010, we knew it was just warming up. As travelers from the People’s Republic of China ebbs and flows, there’s been some espionage lurking underneath.

    This story centers around a Chinese tourist, Qingshan Li. He was visiting the US under a tourist visa in San Diego, California. Li was allegedly caught attempting to purchase military munitions under suspicious circumstances. Justin Rohrlich at Quartz reports:

    One of the items Li was allegedly after, a Harris Falcon III AN/PRC 152A radio, is designated as a defense article on the United States Munitions List, and subject to international arms trafficking regulations. This means the Falcon III, which provides US troops in the field with National Security Agency-certified encrypted communications, cannot leave the country without a special license issued by the State Department.

    Li had agreed to pay AB a total of 50,000 renminbi, or roughly $7,200, for the radio. He knew AB was already under investigation for export-related crimes and believed AB “was attempting to get rid of the radio in light of AB’s entanglement with law enforcement,” according to court filings.

    What’s old is now new again. This isn’t the first, nor the last time we’ll be seeing foreign actors participating in freelance espionage while vacationing abroad. Popular tourism spots such as Tallinn, Estonia’s capital used to be hotbeds for KGB activity during the Cold War.

    While the he largest immediate threat to the US is cyber-security and Russia’s election interferences — we can expect to see more of this tried-and-true method of “freelancing spying” from other countries, not just China.

  • A mystery settled — Homo erectus remains are confirmed to be youngest link to the past

    A mystery settled — Homo erectus remains are confirmed to be youngest link to the past

    A century has passed since the legendary skull fragment was unearthed. Recently, archaeologists confirmed our youngest ancestor. The bones Unearthed back in 1931 have been confirmed to be the youngest Homo erectus remains ever found. It could be the last tangible (or measurable) youngest connection to our human ancestors. These remains aren’t to be confused with Java Man, which was also unearthed on the Indonesian island of Java (Java Man was excavated back in 1892).

    It’s a remarkable confirmation considering it almost didn’t even happen. Isaac Schultz at Atlas Obscura reports:

    “When you think about it, out of the 25,000 some fossils on the site, only 14 were a Homo erectus,” says Russel Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and lead author of the study, published recently in the journal Nature. “They lucked out. Had they not found the skull, they may not have put such time into it.”

    A skull fragment of H. erectus found nearly a century ago in Java. Source: Macquarie University
  • How New York’s Bagel Boys fought and beat a mafia takeover

    How New York’s Bagel Boys fought and beat a mafia takeover

    Pictured above is a bagel from Murrary’s Bagels. Easily my favorite place to grab a bagel in New York City. But, I love that The Times previously referred to a bagel as “an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis,” in a 1960’s article concerning the topic. But, the real meat of this story has to do with mafia and the bagel producing Union Local 338. Jason Turbow at GrubStreet writes:

    Except that Willner’s weren’t the only mobbed-up bagels in town. In 1964, a shop called Bagel Boys had opened in the center of Jewish New York, on King’s Highway in Brooklyn. Among its principals was Thomas Eboli, otherwise known as Tommy Ryan, a capo in the Genovese crime family and a direct counter to Dio. Eboli was so powerful, in fact, that when Vito Genovese died a few years later, Eboli reigned for a time as the family boss. […]

    Ultimately, the union handled the Mafia the same way that it handled nearly all extreme issues with management: full public confrontation. Nearly as soon as Bagel Boys opened its doors, Local 338 members showed up en masse to picket, distributing leaflets headlined, “PLEASE DON’T BUY,” with warnings that nonunion bagels “jeopardize the hard won standards of labor and inspection which the New York City public now enjoy.” Their most effective tactic in such situations was handing out free product in quantities sufficient to devastate business.

    Ultimately, the strategy to confront the mafia in public worked. But the showdown was far from over. This entire story is rich in vivid detail. The rise of kitchen machinery, preservatives, and dough delivery networks — the battle for New York City’s penchant for bagel seemed insatiable. The spoils of war will go to the victor surely? Such a wild ground war between the familiar Jewish union bagel makers and the mafia is ripe for a movie if you ask me. This confectionary war was waged for nearly half-century came to a close in 1971 according to the author. Read the entire story here at GrubStreet.

    But, there are other bagel battles to be fought across state lines, such as, what makes New York bagels so tasty? According to NPR, it’s likely due to the chemistry of New York’s tap water, and the steaming method which adds to the thin but chewy texture we’ve come to know and love. Whodathunk?

  • Influential contemporay abstract artist, John Baldessari has died at 88

    Influential contemporay abstract artist, John Baldessari has died at 88

    Jori Finkel at the New York Times writes:

    John Baldessari, the influential conceptual artist who helped transform Los Angeles into a global art capital through his witty image-making and decades of teaching there, died on Thursday at his home in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 88. […]

    Mr. Baldessari majored in art education at San Diego State College and earned a master’s degree in art there. In short order he took jobs teaching art in junior high school, community college and in an extension program before joining the faculty of University of California, San Diego. He spent one summer teaching teenagers at a camp for juvenile delinquents run by the California Youth Authority; he would joke that he had been hired only because of his size — an imposing 6 foot 7 inches.

    His artwork at the time, which he was just beginning to show in Los Angeles galleries, was moving in a more philosophical direction. In 1968, already distancing himself from painting, he reproduced a cover for Artforum magazine featuring a Frank Stella canvas, hiring a sign painter to add a caption below it: “This is not to be looked at.”

    Love that. Baldessari was a die-hard Duchamp fan. He leaned into that hilarious realm, art on the edge.

    He famously gave himself sharp inward critiques of his work and the artworld itself with his Cremation Project. Specifically, he cremated his traditional works, and later folded them into cookie dough at an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Destruction as a catharsis it seems, can be very important. While controversial, it was highly symbolic.

    Photo: Artiris

    Here’s a fantastic photo from the New Museum archive:

    John Baldessari chatting with Marcia Tucker (founder of the New Museum). Behind them is a work from one of my favorite photographers, Nic Nicosia. Source: Instagram (@newmuseum)