From a festival that helps artists trade work for healthcare to a regional micro-currency, Kingston is trying to build an inclusive and self-sufficient local ecosystem
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Why Don't We Eat Swans?
We’re not so squeamish about chicken, turkey, pigeon, or goose, but these long-necked beauties have long been off-limits.
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
We're Constantly Plagued by Thoughts We Don't Even Know We Have, Study Reveals
If we told you not to think about a red apple, would an image of a red apple immediately pop into your mind? We're less adept at controlling our thoughts than we might think, according to new research.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
William Mortensen United States 1897 - 1965
William Mortensen was a real black sheep among the American photographers between two World Wars. He was famous for his dark and grotesque photographs. He wanted to create art, not just to shoot what was in front of him, so he imitated the pictorial paintings from the romanticism period. Although it was quite gothic and scary, his work was very popular at the time, getting him critical acclaim and publications in magazines such as Vanity Fair. Sex and violence were popular and intriguing, both on film and in pictures.
Monday, October 28, 2019
Book Review
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Most likely it
is impossible for a white person to fully know what it feels like to
be black. That does not mean that white people should make no effort
to understand what it feels like to be black. As we move further into
the future, it may even be necessary for that attempt to be made no
matter how incomplete that knowledge may be in the end. For a good
number of reasons, specifically pertaining to the experience of
African-American people in the 20th century, Ralph
Ellison’s novel Invisible Man could
be one of the best places for white people to start such an
undertaking.
Ellison’s
novel takes us through the life of a young black man from the South.
The unnamed
narrator
tells his story in the first-person, going from hist brief stint at
an unnamed all-black college, based on Tuskeegee University, to his
young adult life in Harlem and membership in The Brotherhood, a
representation of the
Communist Party of America. The narrator goes through life carrying a
briefcase into which he puts different items as he goes along; he
collects papers from college, a grotesque and broken bank shaped like
an African-American boy in the worst of Americana-type,
depictions, documents
and pamphlets from The Brotherhood, a paper doll of an
African-American man that dances when its string is pulled, and other
various things. Each item represents a major turning point in the
narrator’s development as an individual. The broken bank is
something he puts into the briefcase when he begins to be financially
self-sufficient and the doll is emblematic of when he realizes he is
being used like a puppet by The Brotherhood. As terrible as some of
these symbolic items are, he carries them with him in the briefcase
because they represent realizations that act as steps along the way
to self-development. The briefcase gets carried
all the way to the end of the novel. In this sense, Invisible
Man is a bildungsroman, a novel
about a young man in search of himself.
This
novel is also a picaresque story; the individual characters the
narrator encounters provide clues as to what stage of growth he is at
and where he is going. His encounter with the white trustee of the
college, Mr. Norton, reveals to
him a lot about relations between white and black people. The school
director, Dr. Bledsoe, reveals how the university is being used to
keep African-Americans
in their place below the white people who run society. Jack, the
leader of The Brotherhood, shows him how white activists use
African-American people as tools in their own political machinations;
not only does The Brotherhood
use the Harlem community as a political tool but it is done in a way
that damages that part of society as a whole.
Ras the Exhorter, the violent and clownish black nationalist, reveals
the potentially self-destructive dead end of racist politics in the
Harlem community. There are so many others. Through his encounter
with each character, we see how the narrator grows and changes and we
also see a different facet of American society, some of which are not
pleasant to look at even though they need to be seen. Like Stephen
Daedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait Of the Artist As a Young
Man, we see how each social
institution the narrator encounters seems to be liberating at first
but later turns out to be just another prison cell in an inescapable
labyrinth of prison cells.
By
far, the strongest aspect of Invisible Man
is the raw honesty of the narrator. As readers we get access to all
his deepest thoughts, perceptions, and emotions. When
a narrative is written so that a
reader is allowed in to such
private psychological spaces, it is hard not to feel close to the
narrator. It is hard not to feel his hopes, his pain, his dreams, his
frustrations, his optimism, and his disappointments. It is the
possibility for such a deep level of intimacy between the reader and
the narrator that makes this such a compelling novel for people of
any race or ethnic background to see the situations and dilemmas the
novel presents us with. The bare reality of the narrator’s thoughts
are revealed so clearly that it is hard not to feel as if we have a
lot in common with him despite any of our differences. Any person who
has felt ignored, stereotyped, disillusioned, used, or treated
unfairly can find some way to relate. These are universal
characteristics of the human condition
that are made imminent in the story of a young African-American man
who wants to make the world better by making himself better.
So
the narrator’s big epiphany, that he is invisible, is stated at the
beginning and the end. He is not physically invisible but rather his
true nature as an individual human being is because people are
incapable or unwilling to see who he really is. Again, he makes a
statement about being African-American in American society but this
feeling of not being seen for who you are is something that many
people of any background can relate to. That
is why Invisible Man is
such an excellent starting point for anybody who wants to attempt to
understand the African-American experience. The novel demands that
you see who and what he is. It forces you to see him as a complex and
worthwhile human being as long as you make the effort to read it.
Ralph
Ellison’s novel does not end on a happy note. The epiphany that
results from the narrator’s search is an existential crisis, not
a resolution; it is brought
on by a long series of
disappointments, each being worse than the previous one and climaxing
in a riot. But it does not
end on a bad note either. While the narrator loses faith in The
Brotherhood, he does not lose faith in brotherhood itself. He does
not take the path of Ras the Destroyer and instead believes that
diversity and difference is beautiful and desirable despite all the
painful trials he went through in his pursuit. The thread of hope is
still there to be grasped. It is tiny and so small it may be
difficult
to comprehend but do not forget that it is there.
Invisible
Man is not without its flaws.
The pacing is uneven and some passages are muddled and confusing.
However, there are so many powerful passages throughout that those
mistakes
seem like minor problems that can easily be overlooked without
significantly diminishing
the novel’s impact. While this is a cornerstone in the canon of
African-American literature, it is possible to consider that it even
transcends that status and should be considered one of the greatest
American novels of the modern era.
Ellison,
Ralph. Invisible Man. Vintage
Books, New York: 1972.
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Saturday, October 26, 2019
The Weird World of ‘Haunted’ eBay: ‘Purchase With Caution’
An artist's obsession with listings for the cursed, doomed, and otherwise unexplained.
The Syndicate and Murder Inc.: Organized Crime and the Long Arm Of the Unlawful
Organized
crime has always been a part of American society. Over
time, criminal gangs and mafias became more secretive,
more regimented,
and more powerful. By the 1920s, gangs began teaming up with one
another and this process coalesced in the 1930s with the foundation
of the National Crime Syndicate and their henchmen Murder Inc.
As
immigrant groups came to America in search of a better life, the
nativist-minded citizens
were openly hostile to them and often refused to give them work. A
small number of those immigrant groups turned to crime as a fast and
easy way to make money and progress on the social ladder. The Irish,
the Chinese, and the Russians all had their own little mafias. Over
time, the crooks, thugs, and extortionists realized they had plenty
to gain from protecting each other in urban tribal bands. Criminal
gangs grew to protect themselves
from the police and each other. One of the ethnic groups knowing for
breeding criminal gangs was the Jewish people but in terms of
notoriety and fame, the Italians, particularly southern Italians and
Sicilians, far outshone all the others. Those
Sicilians were called the Mafia and the term has since been used to
describe any group of disreputable people ever since.
The
Mafia worked primarily out of New York City and the surrounding
areas, though their shadowy presence was known to be all over
America. By the 1920s, several families of the Mafia were doing
business and becoming a more potent social force. That is when the
Jewish gangsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel formed their own mob
and took on the “Moustache Petes”, the old guard of organized
crime bosses so-called because of the long, drooping moustaches many
of them wore.
The Castellamarese War had begun. The bosses were all gunned down and
their gangs taken over by the Young Turks as they were called. Lansky
and Siegel next pitched the idea for a gangster oriented corporation
to mob bosses all across the country and the National Crime Syndicate
was born. Often referred to as The Syndicate, other prominent bosses
like Lucky Luciano and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter joined. Unlike the
Mafia who only worked with Sicilians, The Syndicate was more
a politically correct, multi-ethnic
operation
and
a transnational cartel. The crime families would no longer fight each
other but instead combined their lurid talents and skills to fight
the police, the
law, and the
government.
The
Syndicate acted as the governing council of the organized crime
underworld. They needed a team of soldiers to carry out their orders
while they called the shots and sat back to collect their money.
Lucky Luciano put together Murder Inc. for that purpose.
Based
out of a dismal little candy shop in Brooklyn, owned by Rosie
“Midnight Rose” Gold, Murder Inc. were an elite, street-level
squad of hitmen who carried out orders passed down to them from their
superiors.
Abe “Kid Twist” Reles gave
commands. The suave and fashionable Harry “Pittsburgh Phil”
Strauss had as much of a passion for expensive clothes as he did for
homicide; he became the most prolific killer with a possible 500
corpses to his credit. Murder Inc. got involved in all manners of
crime, being proficient at gambling, drug trafficking, bootlegging,
prostitution, extortion, and labor union racketeering. Most
significantly though, their specialty was murder. The professional
thugs were paid a monthly salary and then given a fee for each
contract to kill. The victims were mostly men who had stepped on the
Syndicate’s toes or posed an existential threat to their
organization.
The
most famous of Murder Inc.’s hits was the killing of Syndicate
executive Dutch Schultz. The
U.S. attorney Thomas Dewey began paying close attention to the
Syndicate and had begun preparations for taking them down. Dutch
Schultz proposed to the Syndicate that they assassinate the lawyer to
end the investigations. But they unanimously decided not to carry out
the plan out of fear that the hit would only bring closer legal
scrutiny to their conspiracies. Schultz, however, decided to act on
his own. He hired some street-level criminals for the
surveillance
of Dewey’s habits. The bosses learned of the plot to kill Dewey so
they cornered Dutch Schultz in the bathroom of the Palace Chop House
in Newark, New Jersey. When the police arrived, Schultz and three of
his men were lying on
the floor
in expanding pools of blood.
While
Murder Inc. were responsible for
a long list of crimes, some were more eccentric than others. One
night in 1939, Puggy Feinstein was taken for a ride by Kid Twist
Reles, Buggsy
Goldetsin, and Pittsburgh Phil. Feinstein had been running a gambling
operation and the Syndicate boss Vincent “The Executioner”
Mangano had put the squeeze on him, demanding a 21 percent cut of the
profits or else. Puggy Feinstein refused so Albert Anastasia
contacted Kid Twist Reles and commanded him to rub Feinstein out. On
the evening of the hit, the four men arrived at Kid Twist’s
mother-in-law’s house. As she prepared for bed, he asked her for a
clothesline and an ice pick. He told her to sleep well as she entered
her bedroom and closed the door. Kid Twist went into the living room,
turned up the radio to hide any incriminating noises
and
had Goldestein and Pittsburgh Phil bring the victim in. They
proceeded to strangle him with the clothesline while Pittsburgh Phil
poked holes all over his body with the ice pick. They cleaned up the
mess, ate a snack, then put the dead body in the trunk of the car.
They took Feinstein’s corpse to an empty lot and cremated it.
During the struggle, Feinstein had bitten
Goldstein’s
arm.
The teeth marks were used as corroborating evidence during the trial.
Earlier
in 1937, a more typical hit job happened when the gangster Walter
Sage was taken care of forever. Murder Inc. members Jacob Drucker and
Irving Cohen picked up Sage and told him they were taking him out for
some fun in the resorts of the Catskills. Sage was not aware that
they were being tailed by another car with Abraham Levine and
Pittsburgh Phil. They pulled off onto a forest road and forced Sage
into the front seat of the car that pulled up behind. Sage, knowing
he was in trouble, tried to grab the steering wheel so Drucker took
out his ice pick and tried to stab him but the ice pick went into
Cohen’s arm instead. The car crashed into a tree, so the four men
forced Sage to march down the road to Swan
Lake. They used ice picks to poke him so
full
of holes that
he resembled a wedge of Swiss cheese in tomato sauce.
Then
they
tied his body to the frame of a slot machine which they threw into
the water. Whether the slot machine was meant to be symbolic or
functional was irrelevant; the body floated to the surface soon
after. Meanwhile Cohen, thinking
Drucker’s jab in the arm with the ice pick was deliberate
feared
he was about to be the next to die due to a recent dispute with a
Syndicate boss, ran off and disappeared. Gangsters later spotted him
on the movie screen; Irving Cohen had escaped to Hollywood and got a
job doing bit parts in the movies and
otherwise living a tame life.
They thought it was funny seeing him wearing a police uniform, cast
in the role of a cop with one line in a crime film.
But
fortune is a whore that loves you one minute and leaves you tne next.
After some petty disputes with a Syndicate boss, Kid Twist Reles
realized he had seen a few too many crimes for his own good. There
might have been those who thought of him as a liability to the
cartel, rather than an asset. Kid Twist began to fear for his life.
He decided to turn state’s evidence and handed himself over to the
police. In the ensuing trials, he would act as a corroborating
witness to murder. The trials lasted for a couple years and Kid
Twist, along with a few others, took the stand to testify in a last
ditch attempt to survive
into middle age.
A few colorful moments took place. At one point Harry “Happy”
Maione lost his Italian temper and threw a glass of water at Kid
Twist’s head; while raving with fury, the police dragged Maione out
of the courtroom and he had to spend the rest of the trial restrained
in a cell. Pittsburgh Phil pleaded
insanity and tried to act crazy to stay out of trouble. When called
to the witness stand he spoke gibberish and tried to eat a briefcase
handle when he returned to his seat. The jury did not buy his plea,
especially because his insanity had a strange way of disappearing any
time he was not in court. At the end of it all, members from all
ranks of the Syndicate and Murder Inc. hierarchy were convicted of
racketeering related crimes. The majority of them were sent to live
in Sing Sing prison until their date of execution when they were
fried like eggs sunny-side-up in the electric chair.
Kid
Twist Reles got to live
for
a short time longer.
In 1941, police were holding him on the top floor of the Half Moon
Hotel in Coney Island as part of their witness protection program. As
the sun rose one morning, his dead body was discovered on the roof of
a smaller building beside the hotel. Instigators claimed that he had
gotten drunk and fallen out the window but some suspicions remained.
The body’s position and angle of descent suggested he had been
pushed and after searching his room, no alcohol was found but their
crude analysis determined there was a faint trace of some kind of
medicine in his stomach at the time of death. Did he really fall? Did
he commit suicide? Or possibly he stumbled while trying to escape?
Maybe a crooked policeman took a bribe to push him out
the window.
Murder
Inc. and The Syndicate dissolved and in 1957, Albert Anastasia called
a meeting in the Appalachian Mountains of New York to delegate
the remains of The Syndicate’s business holdings to all the mob
bosses who, thereafter, would operate on their own.
Reference
Turkus,
Burtun B. and Feder, Sid. Murder
Inc.: The Story Of the Syndicate. Da
Capo Press, New York: 2003.
Friday, October 25, 2019
A THINNING OF THE VEIL: SAMHAIN AND THE PAGAN ROOTS OF HALLOWEEN
Halloween is a time to celebrate the spooky, the scary, and the frightening. A reason for kids to don masks and demand candy from neighbors, and an excuse for some adults to dress in outlandish, sexy, or terrifying guises that would not be socially acceptable the rest of the year. A night for monsters to wander and for ghosts to appear. Whether an innocent day of fun, or a night full of fear, Halloween is for the darker side. But long before the trick or treating, the haunted houses and the ghost stories, there was another day. Before the cross came to the shores of Ireland, the pagan people prayed to their own gods, and feared their own spirits. Before Halloween, the pagans had Samhain. The pagan holiday from the old world, like the ghosts of Halloween, did not die, but lives on and rises again and again in even our most modern traditions.
Thursday, October 24, 2019
Franco's remains to finally leave Spain's Valley of the Fallen
Dictator’s tomb to be opened and coffin taken to cemetery near Madrid on Thursday
How liberalism became "the god that failed" in Eastern Europe
After communism fell, the promises of western liberalism to transform central and eastern Europe were never fully realised – and now we are seeing the backlash.
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
How Goya’s “Third of May” Forever Changed the Way We Look at War
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Monday, October 21, 2019
World’s loudest bird flirts by screaming in your face
Researchers aren’t sure how these birds maintain this deafening mating ritual without damaging their hearing.
Strange New Virus Could Represent 'Entirely New System of Viral Evolution'
By sifting through pig faeces, scientists in Japan have discovered a new type of virus that could challenge the already complicated notions of how we categorise what viruses are, and what they can do.
Read the full article on Science Alert here
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Saturday, October 19, 2019
Friday, October 18, 2019
New York Is Killing Me: Albert Ayler’s Life and Death in the Jazz Capital
The saxophone great, whose music exploded with free energy and nakedly emotional spirituality, had a tangled relationship with his adopted hometown.
This is the video CNN will play when the world ends
Thirty-four years ago, at the launch of Ted Turner's Cable News Network, the founder made a grandiose and specific promise about his newly created round-the-clock operation. "Barring satellite problems, we won't be signing off until the world ends," Turner declared. And in anticipation, he prepared a final video segment for the apocalypse
Thursday, October 17, 2019
City Council Votes To Close New York's Notorious Rikers Island Jail Complex
he City Council of New York voted 36-13 Thursday to approve a plan to close the city's notorious jail complex on Rikers Island by 2026 in favor of four smaller jails spread out across the city.
Book Review
Ways of Seeing by John Berger
The novelist
and artist John Berger published Ways of Seeing as
a supplement to a BBC documentary series about art history in 1972.
It is a slim volume. Its ideas are weak, unoriginal, and poorly
reasoned. It Is certainly a good book to ignore.
Not
one single chapter carries much intellectual weight. A prime example
of Berger’s weak reasoning is in the section on the portrayal of
nude women in art. Berger’s claim is that women in Renaissance
paintings
appear without clothing for the purpose of being enjoyed by
aristocratic male viewers. As if that needed to be explained. The
owner of each painting, presumably a male though
it is hard to imagine that no women ever saw this stuff,
owns the nude woman depicted the same way he owns property. Her
nudity symbolizes his dominance and superiority over her. Her
missing pubic hair symbolizes her lack of will in making sexual
choices. While these claims
may be true, Berger does not offer any explanation as to why we
should accept his interpretation. John Berger says it is true so we
must accept it as truth, case closed. By
logical extension, this is like saying you own Jimi Hendrix’s
corpse because you bought one of his records. Owning a painting of a
woman is not equivalent to owning a woman. The painters hired women
to model for them which entails the reality that those women could
accept or reject the offer of hiring themselves out as models; this
means they made choices. The painters themselves did not keep women
chained up in dungeons. And Berger never takes up the idea that those
women may actually have wanted and chosen to be portrayed in such
ways. He does not cite one instance of a Renaissance woman saying
anything whatsoever about her role as a painter’s model. So where
does Berger get this idea from? He never tells. He also never cites
any examples of what that time’s painters or aristocratic art
patrons thought about these depictions of nude women either. Yet
Berger claims to know exactly what they thought. Even worse, he
writes as if all upper-class European men thought
identical thoughts about women and he writes as though all women have
identical thoughts about how women in paintings are portrayed. Common
sense would tell you that opinions vary from person to person so
overgeneralizing about whole populations of people who died long
before he was born is absurd.
Even if we accept his claim, which does appear to be plausible,
why should be so concerned anyways? If the images are symbolic
depictions, we do not have to automatically accept the content of the
symbol as being legitimate. Each person can agree or disagree with
the merits of what is symbolized as they choose. The
ability and intent of the viewer to choose interpretations is never
addressed either.
John
Berger’s stance as a male art critic in this matter is questionable
too. He interprets these paintings on behalf of women without
acknowledging whether or not he even consulted with women on the
matter. How does he claim to be a representative and spokesperson for
women? Isn’t he denying women a voice in this issue by claiming to
be the arbiter of correct interpretations on
their behalf? Isn’t that a
form of male domination that he would otherwise decry? After
all, he complains about women not having their own voice in
Renaissance art so doesn’t this make him guilty of the same crime?
The
chapter on oil painting is no better. Rich Europeans buy paintings of
objects
because owning paintings of objects is the same as owning, or at
least desiring to own, the object itself. Buying
and owning a painting of a farm is the same as owning a farm. But
how does ho know this? Research into how art owners of the time
thought about ownership and art is nonexistent in Berger’s
monologue. Why is this even
raised as a problem? Are we supposed to accept at face value that
purchasing and owning property is inherently wrong? Berger was a
communist sympathizer so his answer would be “yes, owning property
is inherently wrong”. But why should this idea be accepted? Just
because he says so? If property is so terrible than why did John
Berger sell his own paintings? Why did he have his books published by
large corporate publishing firms to be sold as objects in a
capitalist marketplace? Why did he choose to live in England instead
of moving to the Soviet Union which was still communist in the 1970s?
In the USSR, he would not have had the freedom to paint what he
wanted to and he would not be allowed to publish books that criticize
the political
or economic system so maybe John Berger was being just a little bit
of a hypocrite by hating the system he depended on for
his own intellectual freedom.
The
final chapter is about the direct connection between oil painting and
advertising. He does provide some insight into the psychology of
advertising which makes the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable and
incomplete. Advertising provokes the consumer to desire products that
make them feel part of an elite, like the Renaissance era aristocracy
who owned the most property. No doubt, that appears to be more or
less true. But again, so what? Why is it wrong to want to buy things?
There do not appear to be
many people in the world who do not want to have any possessions at
all. But John Berger never examines the other side of the argument.
His accusatory tone is manipulative and authoritarian; he wants to
lay a heavy guilt trip on his audience and in the end, guilt trips
are all about controlling people. Just read what Nietzsche and
Foucault had to say about the Christian church’s use of guilt as a
method of coercion and domination.
Ways of
Seeing presents us with sparsely
worded text with weak reasoning and tiny black and white pictures
meant to exemplify what he says. The claims lack intellectual rigor
and the pictures are so difficult to see that this whole book comes
off as a poorly executed work of juvenile nonsense. It is best to
pass this one over. Its
proper place is in the recycling bin.
Berger,
John. Ways of Seeing. The
British Broadcasting Corporation, London: 1985.
Booze and cursing are at the center of a new yoga rage
Yoga is about finding your center. There's a new trend to track down tranquility, but it’s a more alternative twist to the usually peaceful exercise.
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)