Monday, August 31, 2020
Roscoe Holcomb
Roscoe Holcomb, (born Roscoe Halcomb September 5, 1912 – died February 1, 1981) was an American singer, banjo player, and guitarist from Daisy, Kentucky. A prominent figure in Appalachian folk music, Holcomb was the inspiration for the term "high, lonesome sound," coined by folklorist and friend John Cohen. The "high lonesome sound" term is now used to describe bluegrass singing, although Holcomb was not, strictly speaking, a bluegrass performer.
Performance Style
Holcomb's repertoire included old-time music, hymns, traditional music and blues ballads. In addition to playing the banjo and guitar, he was a competent harmonica and fiddle player, and sang many of his most memorable songs a cappella. Holcomb stated
”Up till then the blues were only inside me; Blind Lemon was the first to 'let out' the blues."
Holcomb sang in a nasal style informed by the Old Regular Baptist vocal tradition. Bob Dylan, a fan of Holcomb, described his singing as possessing "an untamed sense of control."He was also admired by the Stanley Brothers.
Life and career
A coal miner, construction laborer and farmer for much of his life,[5] Holcomb was not recorded until 1958, after which his career as a professional musician was bolstered by the folk revival in the 1960s. Holcomb gave his last live performance in 1978.
Due to what he described as injuries he sustained during his long career as a laborer, Holcomb was eventually unable to work for more than short periods, and his later income came primarily from his music.
Suffering from asthma and emphysema as a result of working in coal mines, he died in a nursing home in 1981, at the age of 68.
Holcomb is buried at the Arch Halcomb Cemetery in Leatherwood, Kentucky. His tombstone bears his given name of Halcomb rather than Holcomb.
Hamish Henderson Gramci's observations of folklore
Gramsci's observations on folklore were of particular to interest to Hamish Henderson. Though they only constitute around importano d five c of the vast Quaderni del Carcere (Prison Notebooks), they can be Pages account for a large part of the foundations of Henderson's coe seen to of folk-culture, and to represent crucial assertions that were reified throughout his long investment in Scottish folksong revivalism, Henderson celebrated folksong as a 'process'. The transmiss ere to be nception of folk songs, and the inferred qualities of those songs that are able to survive, to adapt and to disseminate among people was, for Henderson, the basis of the political potential of folk-cultures 'underground' quality. In an early article, asserting the status of a given example of 'contaminated' song as a folk song, Henderson explains that it warrants the categorisation 'because the people have taken it, possessed themselves of it, gloried in it, recreated it, loved it. That is the only test worth a docken'. Gramsci sets out a definition of 'popular song' on similar terms:
...those written neither by the people nor for the people, but which the people adopt because they conform to their way of thinking and feeling... since what distinguishes a popular song within the context of a nation and its culture is neither its artistic aspect nor its historical origin, but the way in which it conceives the world and life, in contrast with official society. of folklore. The most distinctive quality of Gramsci's understanding might be called the 'traditional' conception: propposes for the term, an is the expansive definition that he su 'de of what consequently, the broad range of applications it gains outside.
One can say that until now folklore has been studied as a 'picturesque' element... Folklore should instead be tent a. s a 'conception of the world and life implicit to a official tober in the in determinate strata of society and in opposition... conceptions of the world that have succeeded one an historical process.
Gordon Childe The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995) Mon 21 Oct 1957 Page 1.
From 1927 to 1946 he worked as the Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, and then from 1947 to 1957 as the director of the Institute of Archaeology, London. During this period he oversaw the excavation of archaeological sites in Scotland and Northern Ireland, focusing on the society of Neolithic Orkney by excavating the settlement of Skara Brae and the chambered tombs of Maeshowe and Quoyness. In these decades he published prolifically, producing excavation reports, journal articles, and books.
With Stuart Piggott and Grahame Clark he co-founded The Prehistoric Society in 1934, becoming its first president. Remaining a committed socialist, he embraced Marxism, and—rejecting culture-historical approaches—used Marxist ideas as an interpretative framework for archaeological data. He became a sympathiser with the Soviet Union and visited the country on several occasions, although he grew sceptical of Soviet foreign policy following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
His beliefs resulted in him being legally barred from entering the United States, despite receiving repeated invitations to lecture there. Upon retirement, he returned to Australia's Blue Mountains, where he committed suicide.
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Oparin outlined a way he thought that basic organic chemicals might have formed into microscopic localized systems, from which primitive living things could have developed. He cited work done by de Jong and Sidney W. Fox on coacervates and research by others, including himself, into organic chemicals which, in solution, might spontaneously form droplets and layers. Oparin suggested that different types of coacervates could have formed in the Earth's primordial ocean and been subject to a selection process that led, eventually, to life.
While Oparin himself was unable to conduct experiments to test any of these ideas, later researchers tried. In 1953, Stanley Miller attempted an experiment to investigate whether chemical self-organization could have been possible on pre-historic Earth. The Miller–Urey experiment introduced heat (to provide reflux) and electrical energy (sparks, to simulate lightning) into a mixture of several simple components that would be present in a reducing atmosphere. Within a fairly short period of time a variety of familiar organic compounds, such as amino acids, were synthesised. The compounds that formed were somewhat more complex than the molecules present at the beginning of the experiment.
Thursday, August 27, 2020
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
A panoramic view of the normally quiet coastal town of Gibara in Eastern Cuba
The small town of Gibara plays host to this popular film festival that, for one week each April, transforms this mostly ignored northern coastal town into the buzzing cultural nerve centre of Cuba. Apart from film and documentary screenings, the festival involves live music, theatre performances, art exhibitions, and debates on film-making and post-production.
Focus of the festival
Formerly known as the Gibara Low-Budget Film Festival, the event was recently renamed to be more inclusive and to not discriminate between independent and commercial, main-stream and avant-garde, first and third world film catergories. The emphasis of the festival is to remain as an alternative to larger international film festivals, and to ignore labels and focus on recognising and celebrating the creativity, artistry, and technical excellence of filmmakers, actors, and technicians around the world.
The Humberto Solas Award
Festival International del Cine Pobre de Humberto Solas
Importance is still given, however, to the special low-budget category of films, with a specific and prestigious prize awarded in the name of Cuba's most revered filmmaker, Humberto Solas, who made most of his films on very limited budgets, to the winner of this category. The fact that the festival is still held in Gibara, and not in a main city in Cuba, also maintains the notion of supporting the alternative instead of simply following the main-stream.
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival
We will start accepting film submissions online
for the next edition YIDFF 2021 on November 1st, 2020.
Sunday, August 23, 2020
Scientists hope they have found a drug to stop all neurodegenerative brain diseases, including dementia.
Scientists hope they have found a drug to stop all neurodegenerative brain diseases, including dementia.
In 2013, a UK Medical Research Council team stopped brain cells dying in an animal for the first time, creating headline news around the world.
But the compound used was unsuitable for people, as it caused organ damage.
Now two drugs have been found that should have the same protective effect on the brain and are already safely used in people.
"It's really exciting," said Prof Giovanna Mallucci, from the MRC Toxicology Unit in Leicester.
She wants to start human clinical trials on dementia patients soon and expects to know whether the drugs work within two to three years.
Why might they work?
The novel approach is focused on the natural defence mechanisms built into brain cells.
When a virus hijacks a brain cell it leads to a build-up of viral proteins.
Cells respond by shutting down nearly all protein production in order to halt the virus's spread.
Many neurodegenerative diseases involve the production of faulty proteins that activate the same defences, but with more severe consequences.
The brain cells shut down production for so long that they eventually starve themselves to death.
This process, repeated in neurons throughout the brain, can destroy movement, memory or even kill, depending on the disease.
It is thought to take place in many forms of neurodegeneration, so safely disrupting it could treat a wide range of diseases.
In the initial study, the researchers used a compound that prevented the defence mechanism kicking in.
It halted the progress of prion disease in mice - the first time any neurodegenerative disease had been halted in any animal.
Further studies showed the approach could halt a range of degenerative diseases.
The findings were described as a "turning point" for the field even though the compound was toxic to the pancreas.
Terry Irving The Fatal Lure of Politics
Renowned Australian-born archaeologist and prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957) had a lifelong fascination with socialist politics. In his early life he was active in the Australian labour movement and wrote How Labour Governs (1923), the world’s first study of parliamentary socialism. However, he decided to pursue a life of scholarship to ‘escape the fatal lure’ of politics and Australian labour’s ‘politicalism’ – his term for its misguided emphasis on parliamentary representation.
In Britain, with the publication of The Dawn of European Civilization (1925), Childe began a career that would establish him as preeminent in his field and one of the most distinguished scholars of the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, he aimed to ‘democratise archaeology’ and involve people in its practice. What Happened in History (1942), his most popular book, sold 300,000 copies in its first 15 years.
Politics continued to lure Childe, and for forty years he was spied upon by the security services of Britain and Australia. He supported Russia’s ‘grand and hopeful experiment’ and opposed the rise of fascism. His Australian background reinforced his hatred of colonialism and imperialism. Politics was also implicated in his death. There is a direct line between Childe’s early radicalism and his final – and fatal – political act in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
The Fatal Lure of Politics is a new and radically different biography about the central place of socialist politics in Childe’s life, and his contribution to the theory of history that this politics entailed.
About the Author
Terry Irving, radical historian and educational radical, is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His books include Radical Sydney (with Rowan Cahill), Childe and Australia (edited with Peter Gathercole and Gregory Melleuish), Class Structure in Australian History (with Raewyn Connell), and The Southern Tree of Liberty. He was editor of Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History and a founder of the Free University.
Thursday, August 20, 2020
E.M.Forster The Machine Stops
The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted, but is unpopular and rarely necessary. Communication is made via a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine with which people conduct their only activity: the sharing of ideas and what passes for knowledge.
The two main characters, Vashti and Kuno, live on opposite sides of the world. Vashti is content with her life, which, like most inhabitants of the world, she spends producing and endlessly discussing secondhand 'ideas'. Her son Kuno, however, is a sensualist and a rebel. He persuades a reluctant Vashti to endure the journey (and the resultant unwelcome personal interaction) to his room. There, he tells her of his disenchantment with the sanitised, mechanical world.
He confides to her that he has visited the surface of the Earth without permission and that he saw other humans living outside the world of the Machine. However, the Machine recaptures him, and he is threatened with 'Homelessness': expulsion from the underground environment and presumed death. Vashti, however, dismisses her son's concerns as dangerous madness and returns to her part of the world.
As time passes, and Vashti continues the routine of her daily life, there are two important developments. First, the life-support apparatus required to visit the outer world is abolished. Most welcome this development, as they are sceptical and fearful of first-hand experience and of those who desire it. Secondly, "Technopoly", a kind of religion, is re-established, in which the Machine is the object of worship. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own.
Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as 'unmechanical' and threatened with Homelessness. The Mending Apparatus – the system charged with repairing defects that appear in the Machine proper – has also failed by this time, but concerns about this are dismissed in the context of the supposed omnipotence of the Machine itself.
During this time, Kuno is transferred to a room near Vashti's. He comes to believe that the Machine is breaking down, and tells her cryptically "The Machine stops." Vashti continues with her life, but eventually defects begin to appear in the Machine. At first, humans accept the deteriorations as the whim of the Machine, to which they are now wholly subservient, but the situation continues to deteriorate, as the knowledge of how to repair the Machine has been lost.
Finally, the Machine collapses, bringing 'civilization' down with it. Kuno comes to Vashti's ruined room. Before they perish, they realise that humanity and its connection to the natural world are what truly matter, and that it will fall to the surface-dwellers who still exist to rebuild the human race and to prevent the mistake of the Machine from being repeated.
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Tik Tok
TAIPEI, Taiwan — In China, WeChat does more than any app rightfully should. People use it to talk, shop, share photos, pay bills, get their news and send money.
With much of the Chinese internet locked behind a wall of filters and censors, the country’s everything app is also one of the few digital bridges connecting China to the rest of the world. It is the way exchange students talk to their families, immigrants keep up with relatives and much of the Chinese diaspora swaps memes, gossip and videos.
Now, that bridge is threatening to crumble.
Late Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order that could pull China’s most important app from Apple and Google stores across the world and prevent American companies from doing business with its parent company, Tencent. Light on details, the decree could prove cosmetic, crushing or something in between.
If enforced strongly when it takes effect in 45 days, the order will take dead aim at China’s single most groundbreaking internet product, which 1.2 billion people use every month. An effective ban on the app in the United States would cut short millions of conversations between investors, business partners, family members and friends. The threat alone will likely start a new chapter in the deepening standoff between China and the United States over the future of technology.
Taken together with Thursday’s twin order against the Chinese-owned video app TikTok, the move against WeChat marks a shift in the American approach to the Great Firewall, which for years has kept companies like Facebook and Google from operating in China. Restricting WeChat and TikTok could be the first steps in an eye-for-an-eye reprisal.
While TikTok may be the fad of the moment in the United States, WeChat is far more important in China. A digital bedrock of daily life, WeChat emerged as a tool for the Chinese authorities to impose social controls. Within China, the app is heavily censored and monitored by a newly empowered force of internet police.
payment system, and for a competitor, Alipay.Credit...Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
Outside China’s borders, the app has become a key conduit for the spread of Beijing’s propaganda. Chinese security forces have also regularly used WeChat to intimidate and silence members of the Chinese diaspora, including minority Uighurs seeking to raise awareness of harsh crackdowns in their homeland in western China.
“The downside of this executive order is that it’s addressing these concerns by taking steps that also make it harder to directly communicate with ordinary people in China,” said Sheena Greitens, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
“It puts this administration’s policy into conflict with another one of its stated goals: to maintain openness and friendly connections with the Chinese people,” she added.
While WeChat and its owner have long straddled the uncomfortable divides that separate China’s internet from the world, they have rarely come under such direct scrutiny from the United States.
Created as the copycat brainchild of a Tencent engineer, Allen Zhang, WeChat mostly failed to catch on in overseas markets, even as the company spent hundreds of millions in marketing dollars to compete with WhatsApp. The app’s reliance on other Chinese apps in the isolated Chinese internet ecosystem probably hurt its chances, even as its innovations transformed life within China.
Outside China, it has mainly been a tether for the Chinese diaspora to their homeland.
May Han, a Chinese-born American, moved to the United States with her family when she was 9. Lonely when she first arrived, Ms. Han was encouraged by her parents to use another Tencent chat service, QQ, to keep up with her elementary school friends in China. They also hoped it would help her remember Chinese.
Eventually she made the jump to WeChat, where she still whiles away her online days chatting with about 350 friends and relatives, many of them in China. Now an environmental science major at the University of California, San Diego, Ms. Han said WeChat had become the cultural glue that held together much of her Chinese community.
We Tested Instagram Reels, the TikTok Clone. What a Dud.
They’re Teens Biking Across a Turbulent Country. The Lessons Keep Coming.
Trying to Make It Big Online? Getting Signed Isn’t Everything
Representatives of Tencent, WeChat’s parent company, at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing in 2017. Credit...Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press
“If we can’t use WeChat, our connections to China will decrease or even vanish,” she said. “Most of us have got used to using WeChat, especially older generations. Changing an app is not easy for them; it means changing their lifestyle.”
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Michelle Obama Paints Stark Picture for America
In her speech, Michelle Obama also painted a stark picture of what voting might look like in November, as the Trump administration tries to enforce changes to the US Postal Service.
“We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can,” Obama said. “We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow-up to make sure they’re received. And then, make sure our friends and families do the same.
“We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.”Democratic officials and voting rights advocates have warned that the Trump administration’s actions could jeopardize voting by mail this November.
However, Obama is the first person to use a national speech to warn Americans about the drastic steps they may need to take to ensure their votes are counted.
Trump and US Postal Service
Soon after taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump seized on the US Postal Service as an emblem of the bloated bureaucracy. "A loser," he repeatedly labelled one of America's most beloved public institutions, according to aides who discussed the matter with him.
Allies coddled Trump by telling him the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 was widespread mail-in balloting fraud - a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence - and the President's postal outrage coarsened further.
Advisers would tell Donald Trump that the reason Hillary Clinton won the overall vote in the 2016 US election was because of the US Postal Service.
Advisers would tell Donald Trump that the reason Hillary Clinton won the overall vote in the 2016 US election was because of the US Postal Service.
Then Trump complained to senior White House advisers that Jeff Bezos - a presidential foe in part because he owns The Washington Post, whose news coverage the President thought was unfair and too tough on him - was "getting rich" because Amazon had been "ripping off" the Postal Service with a "sweetheart deal" to ship millions of its packages. They explained that this was untrue and that the Postal Service actually benefited from Amazon's business. But the President railed for months about what he described as a "scam".
And now Trump has fixated again on the Postal Service, this time trying to make it a tool in his election campaign by slowing mail service, blocking an emergency infusion of federal funds and challenging the integrity of mail-in balloting. The President acknowledged last week that his opposition was rooted in his desire to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail.
The moves by the Trump administration to disrupt a constitutionally mandated government service during the coronavirus pandemic - under the argument that it will boost operational efficiencies - represent the culmination of Trump's grievance-fuelled crusade against the Postal Service that dates to the start of his presidency. Many of his complaints have centred on the post office's chronic financial problems.
Monday, August 17, 2020
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
Bruce Blair A leading expert on nuclear command and control, he focused especially on the risks of accidental nuclear war implicit in the “hair-trigger” postures of US and Soviet ballistic missiles. During his final 15 years, he led a campaign for the phased and verifiable elimination of all nuclear weapons. He died on July 19 at the age of 72 as a result of a severe stroke.
With Blair’s death, the nuclear-disarmament movement has lost one of its most learned, creative and persistent leaders. The challenges of nuclear disarmament and, in the interim, reducing the danger of nuclear war, remain. Sadly, we must now carry on without Blair’s extraordinary focus, leadership, and innovative institution building. Those of us who have had the privilege of working with him will continue to be inspired by his quiet but dogged and comprehensive commitment to the mission.
Minuteman launch control officer. After graduating from the University of Illinois with a degree in communications, Blair served in the US Air Force from 1970 to 1974. He spent one year at Strategic Command’s headquarters in Nebraska as a support officer for the “Looking Glass” airborne command post. During the Cold War, one of these aircraft was in the air at all times and could launch the 1,000 US Minuteman missiles scattered over the northern Great Plains in case some of their launch-control facilities failed or were destroyed.
From 1972 to 1974, he served at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana as a launch control officer for a group of 50 Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missiles. His underground launch-control center also served as an alternate command post for the full wing of 200 missiles. Each Minuteman II, housed in a reinforced-concrete underground “silo,” carried a single nuclear warhead with roughly 80 times the power of the Hiroshima warhead.
Mandela At Sydney Opera House 1990
In his first year of freedom, Nelson Mandela visited Australia to say thanks for opposing apartheid.
Released from prison in May 1990, Mandela was still four years from becoming South Africa’s first black president. From the Sydney Opera House steps on October 24, the anti-apartheid leader addressed a crowd of 40,000,
The air of inspiration. The mixture of awe and celebration in those around me, and the choir’s rendition of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica ("God Bless Africa").
Mandela was initially so moved by the choir’s performance that he did not begin speaking. But he was soon praising the effect of sanctions in putting pressure on South Africa’s apartheid regime, which had segregated and racially discriminated against that nation’s black majority for decades.
“I can recall how we prisoners of apartheid whispered to each other about your very healthy and militant actions, about your disavowal of an all-white Springbok team from a country where your black brothers and sisters toiled under apartheid rule,” Mandela said.
Sunday, August 16, 2020
Walter Benjamin
Abstract This essay is primarily concerned with Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the newspaper as a media space with reference to privatization of urban space, industrialization of public communication, and mediazation of public space in nineteenth-century Paris. I seek to show how the information industry brought about the fundamental changes in literary practice, intellectual activity, and the formation of a new social subject. I also demonstrate how Benjamin’s rich illustration of the complex dynamics of media space in the nineteenth century largely avoids the shortcomings of oversimplification embedded in the analysis of the bourgeois public sphere. In doing so, I argue Benjamin’s critical analysis that the newspaper provides a systematic framework by which to examine the intersection between the media space and the urban experience in a digital age.
Keywords
Mediaspace.Phantasmagoria.Urbanspace.Spectacle.Storytelling. Information . Newspaper . Communication . Mediated public sphere
The Phantasmagoria of Urban Space
Between late 1928 and early 1929, Walter Benjamin wrote a short piece for radio, “The Ring of Saturn or Some Remarks on Iron Construction”.1 In this essay, Benjamin gives a description of the work of the French caricaturist and illustrator Grandville (the pseudonym of Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérad). Here, Benjamin provides a detailed description of one of the vignettes, Le pont des planètes, in which Grandville illustrates the adventures of a fantastic little hobgoblin who is trying to find his way around outer space.
The Great Wall in the present day is almost completely the work of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1664 CE) who added the distinctive watchtowers and expanded the length and width of the wall. The now-famous national monument fell into decay following the Ming Dynasty, when the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 CE) took power and expanded the border of China northwards, making the wall obsolete. Restoration and preservation efforts only seriously began in the 1980's CE, and the wall was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 CE.
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