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Jack Stauber gets his signature degraded tape recording sounds and visuals using analog gear and then digitizing the results, which explains why the VHS look is a million times better than the obviously phony VHS filter that comes prepackaged with Adobe that shows up all over youtube nowadays, almost a weird rewriting of history as many younger people’s internal visualization of a VHS recording will be based off a cheap emulation rather than the actual thing. 

I realize this is a silly and hyper specific thing to care about, but it’s something I only recently learned that meant a lot to me and seemingly helped me understand part of what gives Jack’s work the aura of authenticity associated with the less polished look. It wasn’t manufactured, it was created that way, and little details like that stick out as important to me. You might not notice it immediately, but if you were able to remove the degradation from the tapes and if you had recorded these same songs in a professional studios with producers or recorded those same animations in 4k quality, much of the life and warmth and feeling of inherent longing for a time you weren’t even a part of would be stripped away, and those emotions getting evoked is a massive part of why Jack’s material works for me.  

In a larger context, it’s interesting to me how what are considered defects of any given medium at the time, are in hindsight the most charming and valuable thing about it. The needle drop, the hiss of a record, rolling the tape back before returning it, scratched dvds with wildly interactive menus, there is a magic to the tech we create that gets lost in translation, until suddenly it doesn’t. Suddenly you’re listening to a Mac Demarco record for the first time and noticing a strange quality to the sound, then you do a bit of research and discover it’s all in the analog gear he used instead of a digital audio workspace. All of this is not intended to be nostalgia porn, I’m not saying any medium is better than another, and to some degree it’s difficult not to be cynical about an aura of authenticity when it’s deliberately emulated rather than organically lived in, but at the end of the day what matters the most is the effect on the viewer or listener or reader, and that tangible emotional effect is what I’m talking about. 

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Wilting flower of emotions 🥀

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In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon.

[…]

Steel engaged guides from the local Klamath peoples, who had occupied the area for countless generations. During their work together, Steel noted that they never once looked at the lake itself, instead ‘making all sorts of mysterious signs and staring directly at the ground’ – a sign that the Klamath regarded Crater Lake as a powerful place where a great cataclysm once happened and might happen again. For, as Klamath stories tell, buried deep beneath the lake waters is the spirit of Llao, a demon who lived within the volcano that once towered above Crater Lake. In a past age, Llao terrorised the Klamath by showering them with hot rocks and shaking the ground on which they lived. This continued until Llao was confronted by the benevolent spirit Skell who pulled the volcano down on the demon and created Crater Lake above.

What sounded to Steel like myth is more than just a story. It is a memory of an eruption that caused a volcano to collapse and form a giant caldera that, as many do, filled with freshwater. The eruption occurred 7,700 years ago, but the Klamath had preserved its story and even sustained associated protocols, such as not looking directly at the lake. Though they did not read nor write when Steel worked with them in the late 19th century, the Klamath people knew a story about an event that had occurred more than 7 millenniaearlier, a story carried across perhaps 300 generations by word of mouth.

Many literate people today believe this kind of thing is impossible or, at best, an anomaly, because they evaluate the abilities of oral (or ‘pre-literate’) societies by the yardsticks of literate ones, where information seems far more readily accessible to anyone who seeks it. And, in doing so, they undervalue the ability of these oral societies to store, organise and communicate equivalent amounts of information. I have called this ‘the tyranny of literacy’: the idea that literacy encourages its exponents to subordinate the understandings of others who appear less ‘fortunate’. But accounts like Steel’s are beginning to help break apart this idea: oral traditions, rather than being subordinate, are capable of transmitting just as much useful information as the technologies of reading and writing.

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“Art Is. . ., 1983, a joyful performance in Harlem’s African-American Day Parade, September 1983, was, from the point of view of the work’s connection with its audience, O’Grady’s most immediately successful piece. It’s impetus had been to answer the challenge of a non-artist acquaintance that “avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with Black people.” O’Grady’s response was to put avant-garde art into the largest Black space she could think of, the million-plus viewers of the parade, to prove her friend wrong. It was a risk, since there was no guarantee the move would actually work. As a Black Boston Brahman cum Greenwich Village bohemian, with roots in West Indian carnival, for O’Grady the Harlem marching-band parade was alien territory. But the performance was undertaken in a spirit of elation which carried over on the day. Unlike the disappointment she’d felt with Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and The Black and White Show, this piece was to be about art, not about the art world. . . rather than an invasion, it was more a crashing of the party.

Although she had received a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to do the piece, she decided not to broadcast it to the art world. She wanted to it to be a pure gesture, she told friends, in the style of Duchamps (whose work she had been teaching at SVA for several years). But this may also have been insulation against further frustration, a way to strengthen the sense of freedom.

The 9 x 15 ft. antique-styled gold frame mounted on the gold-skirted float moved slowly up Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, framing everything it passed as art, and the 15 young actors and dancers dressed in white framed viewers with empty gold picture frames to shouts of “Frame me, make me art!” and “That’s right, that’s what art is, WE’re the art!” O’Grady’s decision was affirmed.“

Rest In Power, Lorraine O’Grady

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Where do they fall

an incomplete taxonomy of christmas music

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A few years ago a roommate abruptly decided to move out to live with her boyfriend, and I ended up spending half a year sharing an apartment with someone I had never met before: an Egyptian girl with very limited English.

She was confused by my appearance and asked me “boy or girl?” It took me a while to understand what she was saying, but eventually she got the point across, and I told her that I was a girl. She seemed unsatisfied, and I explained that I was transgender. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t know the word.

We ended communicating by typing our respective sentences into Google Translate. Unfortunately, whatever the Arabic word for “transgender” is, it wasn’t a word she knew either. Eventually I ended up typing in “I used to be a boy but it made me unhappy so I decided to be a girl.” She stared at it for a moment then asked “You are happy now?” I said yes, and she smiled and looked thoughtful.

A couple hours later she came up to me and said “You and me, we are sisters,” and gave me a hug. “You say you are girl, you are girl.”

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That's great man

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Have You Chosen to Be? - Submitted by SeesawSiya

#fec1e2 #f497d0 #c4a8f5 #9184c9 #67558f #a1b3ff

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So many people keep claiming there’s nothing old in the US when there’s man-made massive earth mounds that are over 8,000 years old. Big earth mounds that were likely made by a bunch of people carrying dirt in baskets. Some of them were burial sites, some were platforms for houses or other things.

This is really impressive! This is really cool! These are ancient structures, some made before the great pyramids, maintained and used for thousands of years! Made by ancient people with frickin baskets! Mound building civilizations! I love them and they deserve more recognition!

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A really funny tumblr thing is people using "as someone with a special interest in x" as their like source of legitimacy on something.

it's being used as shorthand for "as someone who has done a lot of research on the topic" but it's funny because ppl have such a hard time realising they're capable of being wrong about their special interests and they're not just magically more able to aquire correct information than everyone else.

your special interest is great but let's see some Primary sources!

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frutiger-esque pink-green rooms

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I am the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to Galactaron.