Interesting! I would add that all of this really only happens in hindsight? Like, for music, if you look at the first wave punk bands as well as the proto-punk bands, there just isn’t a lot of musical coherence there. That really only comes later with the rise of HC punk, and with the social panic around punk. It becomes a coherent genre only once it’s already coalesced. I mean, the first band to use the term “punk” (that I can find anyway) to describe their music was suicide, which most people classify as a post-punk or snyth punk band. But they advertised their early shows as “punk music”… prior to that, it was Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs applying it willy-nilly to whatever they liked…
5 Likes
That seems to be the way it works. Superhero movies are another good example.
6 Likes
Indeed! Of course, the problem with that is that it naturalizes stuff and makes it seem inevitable, rather than a historical process that we can study and understand… And people often seem incredibly incurious about it, too. Like, there is time, money, power, invested in the production of culture, and what makes it into the mainstream (and what does not) I think matters greatly. We know that having diversity on the screen, in music, in literature, etc is (generally speaking) a net good for society, as it relates to diversity and equity. If we understand how some people’s stories, music, thinking came to be centered, and others get marginalized, we can understand better how power works in society…
7 Likes
5 Likes
Where to put this…
Full title: In their plaintive call for a return to the office, CEOs reveal how little they are needed
12 Likes
Interesting story on discovering high lead levels in Bangladesh tumeric and how the government dealt with the issue once identified
Lead in spices is a huge issue worldwide and, as usual, the poorer the country the worse it is
9 Likes
Story about a famous photo of awesome people. You might cry.
(gift link)
4 Likes
Archive link:
I only ever saw this out of context and thought it maybe was from some commercial or other. Get off the couch and do something with your friends beyond the usual routine stuff.
8 Likes
…
But with the outbreak of the second world war, things changed. The Caldwell labor camp was soon repurposed to house detained Japanese Americans and to satisfy the US military’s thirst for sugar.In March 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102, which ultimately removed Japanese Americans from their homes on the west coast to concentration camps. Just weeks before, the secretary of agriculture, Claude R Wickard, had demanded that the US produce an unprecedented number of sugar beets to provide fodder for explosives.
This unprecedented demand for sugar caused panic among growers nationwide who anticipated historic labor shortages. To guarantee production and profits, the military, state governments and growers all envisioned newly incarcerated Japanese Americans as an “available” labor force. They created the Seasonal Leave Program (SLP), which took Japanese Americans away from larger camps like Minidoka in western Idaho, which housed an estimated 9,000 people, and shipped them to smaller labor camps like Caldwell to plant and harvest sugar beets.
…
…
Beet work wasn’t only painful – it was also racialized. Fred Cummings, a Colorado sugar beet farmer and executive, pulled no punches about just who should do beet work when he addressed a congressional hearing on immigration in 1926: “… there is not a white man of any intelligence in our country who will work an acre of beets … I do not want to see a condition arise again when white men who are reared and educated in our schools have got to bend their backs and skin their fingers to pull those little beets.” As he saw it, lawmakers really had only one choice in the face of potential white racial degradation: to “let us have the only class of laborers who will do the work”, a class that consisted of Asian, Mexican and Indigenous farmhands.
…
ETA:
6 Likes
2 Likes
4 Likes
This was excellent, thanks! A great and thoughtful analysis of race and goth!
Their music is great, too!
1 Like
As always, Andrewism makes some thoughtful arguments about how we move forward and transform the world in way that’s inclusive and environmentally sound…
2 Likes
Halfway through listening to it during chores. Excellent analysis/truth-telling, thanks for sharing!
1 Like
There honestly needs to be much more of this kind of analysis around punk/postpunk subcultures. Far too often, they’re framed as heroric narratives about plucky kids thumbing their nose at “the man.” See, for example Kevin Mattson’s weak historical take on punk, which very much sidesteps any questions on race/gender, and infact, merely reinforces the narrative that the heroes of these counter-cultural stories are always white men… I wanted to like this book, but it just ended up frustrating me no end for that. The review I linked to talked about how he just rejects bands like Blondie out of hand (which came off as just flat misogyny and ignoring the important contributions that they made to the early punk scene in NYC). And he gets a dig in at Madonna, calling her a “pseudo-rebel” and shitting all over the Danceteria scene (which, club kids there were far more diverse and inclusive than could be found at the later iteration of CBGBs in the 80s).
1 Like
3 Likes
5 Likes
It’s a feel good, hopeful story. Something i suspect a lot of us need in these times.
8 Likes
4 Likes
From his newsletter: “what it was like to report on the pandemic, to live through it, to be broken by it, to recover from it.”
2 Likes
