Lawrence Ferlinghetti Dead at 101

The Beat poet and founder of City Lights bookstore and imprint inspired artists from Bob Dylan to Cyndi Lauper

Read the full article on Rolling Stone

 

Bernie Sanders Interview Punks At the Mall

 

Bernie Sanders, mayor of Burlington, interviews punks at a local mall

(1988)

Rochester, New York Midtown Plaza 1963

documentary/propaganda film about Rochester, New York

(1963)

 

Bookwars

documentary film about book sellers on the streets of New York

directed by Jason Rosette (2000)

 

Book Review

I, Robot

by Isaac Asimov

     Isaac Asmov had a good idea of where the relationship between humans and technology was heading back in the 1950s. This is clearly demonstrated in his book I, Robot. Halfway in between a short stories collection and a novel, it is a book that uses recurring characters to portray the evolutionary trajectory of robots and the people who work with them to build a more highly advanced society.

Each story represents a step in the progression of robots in their development. These stories are framed as reminiscences of a robot psychologist named Susan Collins as told while being interviewed by a researcher. Dr. Collins herself is the main character in several of the stories.

It is fitting that a book about the development of technology would begin with the theme of childhood and so this is what I, Robot does. The first story is about a child and her relationship to a rather unsophisticated robot. Being a sentimental type of a story, this book would have gone downhill quickly if Asimov had not taken it up to another level. The engineering team of Donovan and Powell are introduced at this point. The stories “Runaround” and “Catch that Rabbit” are the types of problem solving stories that were common in the Golden Age of science-fiction. The team are faced with a dilemma and they have to use their scientific reasoning skills to solve their problem. Both stories confront the issue of robot irrationality; their robots are intelligent enough to work independently according to programming commands but sometimes the programming causes contradictions that cause the robots to stop working effectively.

“Reason” is also a story where Donovan and Powell face a potentially deadly dilemma; one robot has put his reasoning faculties to work and, like early human beings, arrived at religion as an answer for his own existence. The robot’s new religion bears an uncanny resemblance to Islam. No doubt, this was a joke on Asimov’s part. The two engineers try to use rationality and empirical science to prove to the robot that his religion is the product of faulty reasoning but the robot’s primitive mind is unable to draw the right conclusions. At this point the robots become a reference point to the humans that create them so that Asimov can make statements about human nature.

In the remaining stories, Dr. Susan Collins takes over as the main character. Some of her stories continue on with the problem solving structure that Asimov utilized so masterfully. By this stage, the robots have begun taking on some distinctly human characteristics. One robot learns how to lie for the sake of not hurting the feelings of the scientists at the corporation that created him. In another story, one robot becomes dangerous when he feels humiliated and envious, In “Escape” a fully self-conscious robot designs a perfect space ship and plays a practical joke on the engineering duo of Donovan and Powell by sending them off into outer space without explaining to them what is going on. These stories are not just about artificial intelligence though; they make statements about human nature and the limitations of the human mind. Dr. Collins is in constant conflict with her colleagues who think she is psychologically disordered. These same colleagues are unable to solve problems because their own emotions and shortsightedness interfere with their reasoning abilities.

This book ends with the stories “Evidence” and “The Evitable Conflict”. The former story is about a robot who becomes so human-like that it is impossible to tell the difference between man and machine. He runs for public office and gets confronted by a sleazy politician who wants to expose his secrets in order to win the election. The latter story is about how artificial intelligence has grown to become so powerful and so perfect that it runs the world as a smoothly functioning cybernetic utopia. The robots have become so perfect that they have found a way to identify agitated humans and remove them before they begin to introduce too much disruptive noise into the system. This is not a nightmare scenario though, as the robots have made the world function so perfectly that people feel no need to rebel against anything. Isaac Asimov’s take on a technopoly could be criticized for being overly optimistic. Maybe he could have taken a tip from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and come to the conclusion that conflict is a necessary part of human societies because without it we stagnate and never make any progress or even find meaning in the lives we live.

This cybernetically efficient conclusion is the logical outcome of a book of this sort. Asimov’s sentences are as smooth and polished as the components of a brand-new engine. He wrote stories that are clear, compact, complete and easy to read without lacking depth or complexity. There are no rough edges or frayed corners and even the descriptions of the messiness of human emotions is direct and without any unnecessary details. Maybe I, Robot is a little too polished. Its perfection is an imperfection at times.

In his day, Isaac Asimov had a clear understanding of the direction artificial intelligence was going in and he used his imagination to examine where it would end up. Along the way he raises important points about human society and whether we can even comprehend the technology we create. The fact that computer programmers don’t entirely understand how algorithms work after their software has been wound up and set to go just shows us that Asimov had some kind of prescient insight that a lot of other writers never had. Even if today’s robots and AI don’t look and act exactly the way Asimov predicted, this book still forces its readers, in a sane and healthy way, to question what our relationship to technology really is. These questions are still relevant today.

Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. Fawcett Crest, New York: 1968.  

 

Book Review

Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism

by Elaine S. Hochman

     At the end of World War I, during the heady days of the Weimar Republic, a new art movement was born. It was called Bauhaus and its founding member was Walter Gropius. Elaine S. Hochman, in her book Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism, gives an historical account of this seminal avant-garde school. She says, however, little about the art they produced and instead orients the narrative to the internal and external political problems that they faced.

Long before the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder got coined to describe the aftereffects of combat, Walter Gropius felt traumatized after fighting for Germany in the trenches of World War I. He nearly got killed several times but he turned out to be one cat that never used up all his nine lives. After his tour of duty ended, he thought there must be more to life than war and set out to found a new art movement. He went to the conservative but cultured city of Weimar and took over an already-existing school and renamed it Bauhaus. The approach was less theoretical and more practical in its method of artists experimenting in a workshop setting to bring out their inner states of emotion. In the beginning, Expressionism, Constructivism, and De Stijl were the main inspirations. Though the school did not teach classes in architecture at first, Gropius believed that all art forms signify and culminate in that discipline since its public display made art available to all people. Bauhaus was all about the transformation of society by making art available to every ordinary man or woman on the street. The school attracted some prominent avant-garde artists like Luwig Kircher, Vassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Mies van der Rohe, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who all came to be employed as teachers.

The Weimar Republic was an experiment in liberal democracy and it got off to a turbulent start. The centrist political parties had a difficult time holding the government together while communists, anarchists, and right-wing extremists fought in the streets. The Bauhaus was publicly funded and government battles were fought over what to do with the socialist utopian art institute. Meanwhile, internal strife involving different factions of the faculty and the students made internal management a dilemma as well. Eventually the city of Weimar told them to leave. Hochman’s account of Weimar politics is not always clear; a conscientious reader might want to look up some information about what was going on at that time in Germany to make the book a little less muddled.

In another region of Germany, the city of Dessau invited Gropius to open Bauhaus there. Dessau was a run-down place with high unemployment and rising rates of poverty. The mayor wanted to rebuild it and thought an up-and-coming art school would attract the attention and funding that they desired. It was there that architecture became a prominent part of the Bauhaus curriculum. The school came up with a plan to design student and worker dormitories that were cheap, easy to assemble, aesthetically pleasing, and functional. But the apartments turned out to be awkwardly designed spaces for living and the local population did not take kindly to the special treatment they thought the Bauhaus associates were getting. The political and managerial strife started up again and Walter Gropius was forced to step down. When the Nazis came to power, they closed the school permanently.

Bauhaus artists found a new life in America. They had a major influence in design and architecture. Ironically, their socialist ideals of making mass produced household goods and cheap, functional architecture found fertile ground in the capitalist system of the U.S.A. Anytime you see the smooth cladding of a skyscraper, a factory manufactured suburban house, or the products in a branch of IKEA or Bed Bath and Beyond, you are witnessing the long term effects of Bauhaus.

Hochman’s book gives a detailed account of what went on with Bauhaus. It is primarily a book about politics and educational management. Unfortunately, there is very little she says about any of the art that Bauhaus produced. For such an influential art movement, she does not give it adequate attention, and actually almost no description, of what the art of Bauhaus looked like. She provides no analysis of the architectural style they became famous for nor does she say much about the household consumer goods they also brought into the marketplace. Her thesis is that the activities of Bauhaus reflect the events and attitudes of the Weimar Republic but that should be revised since the book is more about how Bauhaus was thrown back and forth, sometimes violently, by the different political teams of that era without any regard for the practices, intentions, or theories of the Bauhaus artists themselves.

For what it is, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism gives a detailed account of what happened with this avant-garde art movement, even if it is a dry read. It is, however, not a good introductory text. With so little attention given to their art, it is something that will appeal more to people who are familiar with Bauhaus and the Weimar Republic already.

Hochman, Elaine S. Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism. Fromm International, New York: 1997.

 

Larry Flynt, ‘Hustler’ Founder and First Amendment Activist, Dead at 78

His famed legal battles — which he took to the Supreme Court — are memorialized in the 1996 film ‘The People Versus Larry Flynt’

Read the full article on Rolling Stone

 

The Brotherhood

 

The Brotherhood

documentary film about the Universal Brotherhood

Holy Ghost People

 

Holy Ghost People

documentary film about snake handling Christians

directed by Peter Adair (1967)

Book Review

Mannix, Dan. Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower. Ballantine Books, New York: 1964. Dan Mannix’s Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower has got to be one the greatest books chronicling carnival sideshow life. The narrator, named Slim in this account, starts as a young college student whose interest in the occult leads him to visit a traveling carnival. When watching a performance, a fire eater accidentally sets himself on fire. Slim volunteers to learn the trade and replace the injured man. What follows is the story of the carnival and the lives of its performers.

Slim is possessed of an insatiable curiosity for those he travels with. He recounts the details of their life stories and reasons for choosing to live as transients. The sideshow is run by Krinko, an Indian fakir also known as The Human Pincushion. He sticks pins through his flesh, eats glass, and climbs a ladder made of swords. There is also a fat lady, a tattooed man, a cowboy performer from New York City and his fourteen year old girlfriend, and the Ostrich, a Viennese man who can swallow just about anything and regurgitate it. This is lowbrow entertainment at its best.

Slim’s mentor is an old trickster with a long beard named the Impossible Possible who runs a gambling booth that is set up to suck as much money out of the marks as possible. The Impossible Possible has worked in all aspects of carny life and has lots of stories to tell. He is a bit of a psychologist too, explaining to Slim that being a conman means feeling a bit of sympathy for the people he rips off. He also complains about people who try to cheat on the carnival games, explaining with a straight face that he dislikes dishonest people while his whole livelihood revolves around tricking everybody to make money. But this is an insight into carny ethics. There is a definite line between the carnies and their marks and that line delineates loyalty to their own tribe. Everybody on the other side is fair game and the carnies take sides with each other whenever there is a conflict with the outsiders, no matter what the dispute is about.

Slim himself is an unusual character. He is taller than everybody and tries to learn all the stunts that they perform. He starts as a fire eater then moves on to sword swallowing and swallowing neon lightstoo. Other tricks that he attempts are less successful, especially the mentalist mind-reading performances which are too easy for the audience to see through. But his quest to master all aspects of carny life are what give this book is structure. By learning all the tricks of the trade we learn how each stunt is done. While some are fraudulent, others are actually not deceptive and incredibly dangerous as well.

What really give this book its charm is not just the way in which Slim’s education unfolds; as he encounters all the different transients he has each one tell their own story and philosophy on life. All of them love being traveling performers because it gives them a chance to live the way they want to. They are proud of their outsider status and share a supportive community for the misfits of American society. America has always been a country of mass conformity but along the way it has also produced some of the most fascinating counter-cultures in the history of humanity. This book is yet another testament to how liberating it can be to live outside the margins of the dull, gray mainstream full of lifeless people sluggishly shuffling along because they can’t think of anything better to do with themselves.

Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower is a first-rate account of a vanishing aspect of American culture. With its vivid portrayal of the traveling life, it is sometimes light and sometimes dark. It is sometimes sordid, sleazy and even violent but it is never sensational or sentimental. Dan Mannix simply wrote, with honesty, about what he encountered while working with the carnival. There probably is no other book about the carny lifestyle that is this complete.

Mannix, Dan. Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower. Ballantine Books, New York: 1964.

 

When the Frequency for Tuning Instruments Became a Grand Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theories are like blockbuster Hollywood movies. Instead of the painful, confusing tedium of historical detail that meets us when we try to understand the world, they offer spectacle, clear dichotomies of good and evil, the promise of redemptive resolution. If only, say, we could rid ourselves of scurrilous figures behind the scenes, we could get back to the garden and make everything great. Or, if only we could change the frequency of standard musical pitch from 440 Hz to 432 Hz, we could throw off the yoke of Nazi mind control, experience pure meditative bliss, open our root chakras, and…. Wait… what? 

Read the full article on Open Culture