• • • an aural noise • • •
word garnish: Between Bright Worlds features five unique collaborations between the poet, playwright and actor David Erdos and a collective of virtuoso global musicians. Aimed at developing the conjunction of poetry and music, each visionary inspired track on this new digital EP ‘lifts the lyric’ by experimenting in sound, style and texture.
• some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation •
Tracing the Funky Story of D.C. Go-Go, From Parties to Protest
It’s not every day that a library archive will make you want to boogie.
Go-go legend Chuck Brown performs with the Chuck Brown Band in 2011 at Ibiza, a now-shuttered D.C. nightclub. Embiggenable.
GO-GO IS THE RHYTHM OF Washington, D.C. This homegrown musical genre—funk-adjacent, featuring percussion, bass, and call-and-response between the lead singer and the audience—emerged from the city’s Black music scene in the 1970s. Though the late Chuck Brown’s “Bustin’ Loose,” now a D.C. anthem, hit #34 on the Billboard charts in 1979, go-go never really caught on nationally. But its history is an important part of the story of the city, says District of Columbia Public Library archivist Derek Gray, who has spent the last decade collecting the sights and sounds of the capital’s distinctive go-go scene.
In this unexpected archive, housed at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, a few blocks from the National Mall, you can find concert stubs, cassette tapes, scholarly works, and, among the most recent additions, more than 2,000 images of go-go performers and fans taken by photographer Chip Py.
Atlas Obscura talked to Gray about archiving a living musical genre—one of both celebration and protest—in the contested ground of the nation’s capital.
Members of all-woman go-go band Be’la Dona play at a 2010 New Year gala.
Why does D.C. need a go-go archive?
Go-go is now the official music of D.C. [as of 2020]. It has its roots here and they go very deep. We’re a public library and we’re called the People’s Archive, so it just makes sense this is something we would study. It might not be seen as a“traditional” topic for an archive, but it’s a way to document unrepresented and underrepresented communities in the city. There has been a negative stigma attached to go-go from the 1980s and 90s with D.C.’s problems with the crack cocaine epidemic. Some of the violence that took place in the city took place at go-go clubs. That’s another reason for doing this project—to present another narrative to counter that negativity. …
Xodhé, Mexico: Manantiales el Aguacate
Warm water springs inside an astounding canyon.
Access requires a 20 minute hike down the canyon. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
ON THE BOTTOM OF A dramatic canyon, a set of three stone-built pools gather warm spring water in a perfect location to retire from the urges of the world and enjoy a quiet time (while the children splash on the pool).
This incredible place is located in Xodhé, a community within the municipality of Cadereyta. Located between the limits of Querétaro and Hidalgo is this natural paradise a thermal spring in the middle of a semi-arid landscape.Getting to el Aguacate springs is not a walk in the park but the road and the landscapes make most of the experience in this case where the pools (although warm and relaxing) are not outstanding but make the perfect site to plug off and contemplate.If you are on the zone of Tequisquiapan, Ixmiquilpan, Tolangongo or Huichapan this full day outing is perfec for the adventurers. …
MEANWHILE in Los Angeles:
The Restaurant Host Is Suddenly at the Front of the Covid Wars
Forget the powerful maître d’ of old. Today’s hosts are mostly young, inexperienced women who have to enforce health rules and deal with the sometimes violent response.
Caroline Young says that since the pandemic began she has experienced so much harassment from customers that she recently quit her job as a host at Café Poêtes in Houston.
Caroline Young was thrilled to be hired two years ago as a host at Café Poêtes in Houston. She was pursuing an undergraduate degree in hospitality, so she thought the experience in fine dining would be invaluable. She wanted to be the first person to greet arriving diners.
Initially, she said, most guests seemed glad to see her. Since the pandemic, not so much.
“I have been screamed at. I have had fingers in my face. I have been called names. I have had something thrown at me,” she said. One customer hurled a water glass at her feet and stormed out after she repeatedly asked him to put on a mask. “I have never been yelled at like that before in my life, until I was asking people to simply put a piece of cloth over their face that I was wearing eight to 10 hours a day.”
Once upon a time, the host, or maître d’ in formal dining rooms, held a position of some prestige and power, as the public face of the restaurant and the arbiter of who got the most coveted tables. Today, the job is often entry-level, and saddled with the difficult tasks of asking customers to don masks, maintain social distancing or present proof of vaccination. Hosts have to judge whether diners have complied, and to deal with any blowback. …
Tucker Carlson Makes a Play for the Barbz
Nicki Minaj fans are defending her vaccine hesitancy, and the right is using it as a recruitment opportunity.
Nicki Minaj appears to be taking a break from Twitter. The rapper, who has more than 22 million followers on the platform and is known for spending nearly every day joking and bickering with them, has been uncharacteristically silent for the past week. The last entry in her feed is from September 15—a retweet of a fan’s post reading, in part, “When will people learn NICKI MINAJ is NOT going to be backed into any damn corner?”
It all started two days earlier, the evening of the Met Gala, when she tweeted that she wasn’t vaccinated against COVID-19 and wouldn’t attend the event. “If I get vaccinated it won’t [be] for the Met,” she wrote. “It’ll be once I feel I’ve done enough research.” In a confusing series of follow-up tweets, she said she recommended that people get a vaccine if they have to for work. And, well … she said her cousin in Trinidad had a friend who became impotent after getting a vaccine. “His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding,” she elaborated. (Minaj later claimed that she skipped the Met Gala not because of her vaccine status, but because she had to care for her infant son—though many people have speculated that her absence was really related to her and her husband’s current legal troubles.)
This was the first time that a celebrity expressed a weird and clearly wrong medical opinion. Just kidding! Just kidding! Just kidding! But the cousin’s friend’s allegedly swollen testicles immediately became a meme and a late-night bit; Anthony Fauci took the time to debunk the claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause impotence, and even Trinidad and Tobago’s government was compelled to weigh in and say that it had no records of anyone coming forward with such a vaccine side effect. Minaj suddenly found herself a new main character in the ongoing vaccine wars, and began accusing the media of lying about her. After Tucker Carlson applauded her on Fox News, she shared part of the segment with a bull’s-eye emoji, then shouted down Twitter critics for calling him a “white supremacist.”
At the same time, Minaj’s mostly young, very online fans—known as the Barbz, after her alter ego Harajuku Barbie—found themselves called to defend her. While fandom is not about idolizing a celebrity to the point of believing everything they say, “Who do you stan?” is a question of identity and worldview. A Nicki Minaj stan who believes in science and the benefit of vaccines is now obligated to find a way to acknowledge or embrace Minaj’s vaccine hesitancy. On Twitter, it was possible to watch fans experience these personal, internal conflicts. And some political actors on the right seemed to see the unfolding events as something more: an opportunity for them to steer the force of stan culture. …
Man Honestly Thought Breakdown Would Be More Obvious To People https://t.co/IzBtq0k451 pic.twitter.com/UzwgYYxsJZ
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 26, 2021
UNRELATED: A Murderer Was Caught With A Body Because His License Plate Was Missing
If you remove the license plates from your car, that’s probably because you’re a criminal and don’t want to be tracked. It’s a brilliant move … except for the small fact that driving around with no plates might be the very thing that gets the police looking at you.
On June 28, 1993, at about 3am, officers outside Manhattan spotted a pickup truck with no plates. On the bumper was just a sticker with the message “sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me”—probably a harmless sex joke that meant nothing.
The state troopers tried to pull the truck over, but it kept on going. They chased it for 20 minutes at low speeds, a chase that only ended when the truck smacked into an electrical pole that just so happened to be right in front of a courthouse.
The driver, one Joel Rifkin, was uninjured by the crash, so the next order of business was to search the vehicle. In the truck’s bed, under a tarp, was a body. It was not someone who had died recently. The corpse had decayed so much that the officers were unable to specify the victim’s skin color in their report. …
ACLU Stresses That It Legal To Film Garbage Men In All 50 States If You Really Need To https://t.co/TNHLPEG6kX pic.twitter.com/0VIeD4BBth
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 25, 2021
UNRELATED: 4 Ways America Fails Hard At Understanding History
Pretty much since the beginning of the USA, conservative political movements have claimed that they’re the inheritors of some idealized image of the past to give legitimacy to social grievances: whether they’re Trump or Reagan, they want to make America great again—the implication being that they’re reclaiming a greatness that is now lost. My counterargument is that this is indicative of a medical condition known as assbrains.
In an era when comment sections about historical films explode into racist tirades at the mere possibility that Black people may have actually existed before 1971’s Shaft, it’s worth taking the time to ask ourselves why the modern American right loves to bring up their own hagiographic version of history. Here are some common examples, and why those examples are all indicative of terminal assbrains.
4. “Greco-Roman Culture Was A Bastion Of Traditional Masculinity!”
Right-wing weirdos absolutely love ancient Greece and Rome. Laconophilia has been a hallmark of right-wing militaristic cultures pretty much forever, from Hitler’s Third Reich terminology to the British Empire’s penchant for Latin and incest to Mussolini naming fascism after a Roman symbol of authority. (Sadly, fascism is not named after the fascinus, a magical flying penis fashionable Romans wore around as necklaces.)
In the case of Greece you would think that a proto-democracy wherein a bunch of dudes in towels sat around, sipped wine, and bickered about philosophy would be kind of a turn-off to the cellphones-on-belt-holsters crowd, but alas, Greco-Roman iconography is more popular than ever. Maybe you’ve seen some variation of this dumb crap plastered on the back of your local coal-rollin’ monstrosity that never seems to actually haul things:
Nice color scheme (A-TACS AU with IR) for the Spartan Molon Labe. "Come and take them"…
On https://t.co/RVZ6TjjNsV
Backed with Velcro© Brand fasteners (both sides hook and loop supplied).#irpatches #infraredpatches #tactical_freaky #moralepatches #milsim #lasercutpatches pic.twitter.com/TVbeecxTza
— tacticalfreaky (@tacticalfreaky) September 23, 2021
On
This says “Molon Labe,” which means (probably inaccurately) “come and take them,” attributed by Plutarch to Leonidas I in response to Xerxes I telling him to have his armies lay down his arms. It’s a common shibboleth among NRA types, a way for them to recognize their own in case the Big Dog t-shirts and wraparound sunglasses weren’t enough. It’s weird that they chose the Spartans as the mascots for defiant-against-nothing gun-nuttery, since at the time of the battle of Thermopylae Plutarch recorded Spartans as finding bows to be a “womanish” weapon. I can’t help but wonder what a Spartan would say about a weapon that allows a man to kill his enemy while expending less energy than it takes to lick spanakopita grease from a pudgy, nail-bitten finger.
The particular repurposing of the ancient Spartans as mascots for gun lunatics is hilarious, but it’s far from the only way ancient Greco-Roman imagery keeps cropping up in fashy circles. It’s used as a sort of visual shorthand for “traditional” masculinity, whatever the absolute hell that even means besides projecting our own insecurities onto the past. And, to some extent, I get the impetus here! It’s extremely cool that a bunch of beefy boys conquered most of the known world and formed one of the greatest fighting forces in the history of the planet. But the fact they’re used as a synecdoche for a very particular idea of what it means to be a man is … well, let’s use an example from 300, a film and comic book that I actually very much enjoy despite it being ahistorical propaganda written by Frank Miller. …
God Announces Plans To Shift Majority Of Resources Tied Up In Humanity Project To Birds, Rocks https://t.co/DbkaD3gaIK pic.twitter.com/7Vd0UB9Fdt
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 25, 2021
The Paradox of Time Travel May Have Been Solved by an Undergrad
If we can’t change our past, what does that say about our futures?
Raise your hand if you’ve ever wondered what your life’s purpose is. Yeah, me too. Humans have wondered for millennia. Probably since the moment we gazed at the stars and felt connected to something bigger than us. The debate about fate has similarly philosophized throughout time.
Stories of heroic champions destined to conquer evil villains, and tales about soulmates or one true love have danced across nearly every culture in one way or another.
On the other hand, some fight this premise. The idea of fate means there’s no free will, and if we have no free will, then why do anything at all? Incidentally, this debate also falls within the realm of time travel. More specifically, the paradoxes surrounding time travel.
Issues with time travel
While we create shows, movies, and books focused on traveling through time, most people tend to agree that it’s impossible — whether for biological or philosophical reasons.
The most common objection revolves around inconsistencies like the “grandfather paradox.” This says that if you traveled back in time to kill your grandfather when he was young, doing so would mean you’d never be born. If you were never born, you wouldn’t be able to travel through time to kill your grandfather. See the problem?
Thus, time travel isn’t possible. There are several other paradoxes too. Even ones as simple as, if time travel were possible, why haven’t we ever been visited by time travelers from the future?
These questions have stumped scientists, philosophers, and even science fiction writers for decades, but that hasn’t stopped them from hunting for answers. After all, we can’t hope to travel through time until we understand how Time works. Is it like space? A dimension we can move freely about in — or something else entirely? …
Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.
Splashy headlines have long overshadowed inconvenient truths about biology and economics. Now, extensive new research suggests the industry may be on a billion-dollar crash course with reality.
Paul wood didn’t buy it.
For years, the former pharmaceutical industry executive watched from the sidelines as biotech startups raked in venture capital, making bold pronouncements about the future of meat. He was fascinated by their central contention: the idea that one day, soon, humans will no longer need to raise livestock to enjoy animal protein. We’ll be able to grow meat in giant, stainless-steel bioreactors—and enough of it to feed the world. These advancements in technology, the pitch went, would fundamentally change the way human societies interact with the planet, making the care, slaughter, and processing of billions of farm animals the relic of a barbaric past.
It’s a digital-era narrative we’ve come to accept, even expect: Powerful new tools will allow companies to rethink everything, untethering us from systems we’d previously taken for granted. Countless news articles have suggested that a paradigm shift driven by cultured meat is inevitable, even imminent. But Wood wasn’t convinced. For him, the idea of growing animal protein was old news, no matter how science-fictional it sounded. Drug companies have used a similar process for decades, a fact Wood knew because he’d overseen that work himself.
For four years, Wood, who has a PhD in immunology, served as the executive director of global discovery for Pfizer Animal Health. (His division was later spun off into Zoetis, today the largest animal health company in the world.) One of his responsibilities was to oversee production of vaccines, which can involve infecting living cells with weakened virus strains and inducing those cells to multiply inside large bioreactors. In addition to yielding large quantities of vaccine-grade viruses, this approach also creates significant amounts of animal cell slurry, similar to the product next-generation protein startups want to process further into meat. Wood knew the process to be extremely technical, resource-intensive, and expensive. He didn’t understand how costly biomanufacturing techniques could ever be used to produce cheap, abundant human food.
In March of this year, he hoped he’d finally get his answer. That month, the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that represents the alternative protein industry, published a techno-economic analysis (TEA) that projected the future costs of producing a kilogram of cell-cultured meat. Prepared independently for GFI by the research consulting firm CE Delft, and using proprietary data provided under NDA by 15 private companies, the document showed how addressing a series of technical and economic barriers could lower the production price from over $10,000 per pound today to about $2.50 per pound over the next nine years—an astonishing 4,000-fold reduction. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: “The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will.”
Ed. Prepare to spend a while.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Bill recaps the top issues of the week, including outrage over the treatment of migrants at the Texas border and good news for Biden in the Arizona election audit.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
New Rule: We need to unite as one nation, who come together and sing one anthem. It doesn’t have to be the one we currently use, but it has to be just one.
Here they are, all the nominees for this year’s Pandemmy Awards! Vote now at PandemmyAwards.com.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
まるさんのしっぽを有効活用してみた！ I used Maru’s tail effectively!
FINALLY . . .
Democrat-Blue Highways Through Red America: A Road-Trip Game
I wondered: Where could I drive for a whole day (or two) without passing through a single precinct won by Donald Trump in 2020?
Embiggenable. Explore at home.
I’ve always liked maps. As a little kid I loved gas-station state maps and giant atlases, then United States Geological Survey topographical maps and Michelin maps of Europe (and Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth) when I discovered those. As an adult I always look at maps in antique shops and flea markets, and love plotting Google maps. I was excited to learn earlier this month about the four-color map theorem — that by using four different colors, a mapmaker can create a map containing an unlimited number of regions with no adjacent regions in the same color.
I’m also interested in politics, so in this golden age of digital infographics I’ve spent a lot of time geeking out over the New York Times’ super-granular interactive “Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election” (as I had their 2016 version), which shows the Republican and Democratic presidential vote count in each of America’s many tens of thousands of precincts.
The New York Times’ interactive “Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election”
I’ve looked up the neighborhoods where I was raised and lived as an adult, neighborhoods where my relatives and friends live, neighborhoods and towns I’ve read about in the news— and sometimes places I happen to be driving through.
Of course, because 83% of Americans are clustered in the 3% of America that’s urbanized, and Democrats are overwhelmingly clustered in and around cities, every plain blue-versus-red electoral map of the United States is overwhelmingly red.
Which is why, when he was president, Donald Trump and his minions and supporters compulsively posted and handed out copies of those maps to pretend he’d won by a landslide. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Ed., etc. I didn’t have time to do this today.
