When I was first thrust into teaching media classes covering subjects that I did not study in college or in graduate school, I had to quickly learn about industries, such as newspapers, magazines, and advertising. I suspect that every teacher has gone through this experience at one time or another. After all, nothing makes you a better student than to become a teacher. Although the finer points of these “new” media industries were fascinating, none rivaled radio as an exciting subject. It really seemed like magic and was reminiscent of what the Internet seemed to me when I first used it.
The Bowery Boys, who produce one of my favorite podcasts, released an episode on the origins of radio in New York City. They cover all of the major milestones in the development of radio, albeit from the perspective of New York City history. They cover Nicola Tesla’s early experiments in the late nineteenth century, the establishment of American Marconi, Lee deForest’s audion, the Titanic disaster, David Sarnoff, RCA, Edwin Armstrong, the early radio stations in New York, and the beginnings of the radio networks with flagship stations here in New York.
Focusing only on radio history in New York doesn’t leave out too much from the standard accounts on the development of radio. For better or worse, the history of radio is very New York City-centered. Only the major accomplishments of Heinrich Hertz, who first transmitted a radio signal in Germany, Reginald Fessenden, who first transmitted the human voice in Canada, and Frank Conrad, who started the first bonafide radio station in Pittsburgh, receive mention in the mainstream histories of radio. Curiously, New York also looms large in the history of newspapers (as the birthplace of the American penny press and yellow journalism), American advertising (Madison Avenue), and motion pictures (as the base of Thomas Edison and his Trust).
Download or subscribe to the podcast from their website.
One more thing: if the Bowery Boys, Greg and Tom, ever find this post, I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced “Goo-yell-moh.”
Earlier today in my History of Cinema III, I screened one of my favorite films from last spring’s version of the same class: Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror. I remember sensing that last year’s students enjoyed the spatial and temporal puzzle of the film. This year, I don’t think they enjoyed it as much.
The film is indeed challenging. It lacks any substantial screen time for the protagonist. Instead, we only hear a disembodied voice. However, we see Margarita Terekhova for the majority of the film. And, if I may spoil the film a bit, she plays the roles of the protagonist’s wife Natalya and mother Maroussia. This is a common strategy in the film, and it certainly was not done due to budgetary concerns.
There are many big themes in the film, including mortality, family, history, and even Russian society. The protagonist’s relationships with his mother and wife are perhaps the most important as they are both embodied by the same person in most of his memories. However, the two themes that struck me when I first saw the film and continue to inform my interpretation are memory and imagination. As the protagonist dies, he reflects on his life and the important people and events. As spectators, we see all of the events from his perspective. This is why we see actors playing multiple roles, as his association between them is so close that his subjective consciousness can’t distinguish them.
We also see how certain motifs recur throughout the film, such as the 1935 fire, the departure of his father, the red-headed girl he adored when he was a boy, and the Leonardo da Vinci monograph. All of these recur throughout the film in strategic places as he tries to make sense of his life. In each of them, he is able to explain them against his own memory of them and his grasping with what it means now that he’s approaching the end of his life. We can see his concern with legacy when he considers his son in nearly all of his memories, as he remembers himself through his son’s body.
The students either seem confused, bored, or underwhelmed by this representation. It’s also possible that I oversold the film, when I compared it to Persona. I screened the Bergman film earlier this semester, and it was a hit.
Softball season got off to a bad start. The Robots and the Ball Busters each played two games, and we each lost both games. Colloquially put, our bats fell asleep, like the umpire from the earlier game at Central Park’s Great Lawn ball fields.
Robots vs. Soft Spot and Robots vs. Balls Deep
My defending champion Robots lost a heartbreaker against a rejuvenated Soft Spot team on Saturday in McCarren Park. We dropped the first game 8-7 in eleven innings. We then lost the second game to Balls Deep by a much more embarrassing score. I pitched both games and by the middle of the second game, I must have ran out of gas because I just couldn’t get my pitches to not find the middle of the plate. We also couldn’t score.
Ball Busters vs. Jackals
On Sunday in Central Park, the Balls Busters, who finished in first place last season (but lost in the first round of the playoffs), lost the first game, 1-0, to the Jackals. We regrouped and put some runs on the scoreboard, but still fell short, 5-4, in the second game. I pitched both these games too, and I thought my arm was going to fall off, but it turns out all that cycling I did in the last few months have given me a lot more flexibility than I usually have in April. I wasn’t as sore as I would have thought. Thanks unseasonably warm April!
Three one-run losses in two days suck, but I suspect that both teams were very rusty.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of BBEdit.
Unless you’re a veteran Mac enthusiast or a developer of one kind or another, chances are good that you’ve never used it. However, it remains one of the best software applications I’ve ever used. If Microsoft Word is bloatware for the laser printer era, then BBEdit became and remains the best, most efficient tool for the web: from code to content.
When I was in college, one of my first tech jobs was working at UCSB Extension. Although my job was desktop support, I ended up fixing a lot of web pages. It was 1996, and the World Wide Web was the place to be. My boss at the time was a young, bespectacled go-getter named Matt Groener. Probably half of what I know about computing came from him. (And given how much computing has changed since 1996, it really shows how much he taught me.)
As I was learning HTML in 1995, I had used SimpleText to edit my HTML documents. Why not? It saved plain text files, and it came free with my Mac. Almost immediately after seeing my working with SimpleText, Matt introduced me to BBEdit for composing web pages. Using it was an absolute revelation. It color coded syntax so it was easy to distinguish between text and markup. It indented text properly, which was key to nesting markup, such as lists and subheadings. It had the best search and replace I can ever imagine, and it even made Grep seem a little less scary.
The absolute best feature of BBEdit was “Save to FTP Server.” More than a dozen years before the era of the cloud, BBEdit actually allowed you to directly edit your HTML file from the server. Before this feature, my process was cumbersome and consisted of at least nine steps to make a simple change:
- Edit file
- Save file on your local disk
- Open FTP client
- Upload file to the correct place on the server
- Confirm to replace your file
- Wait for upload to finish
- Open web browser
- Refresh web browser page
- Is there a typo? Then repeat the process all over again.
BBEdit eliminated all this. Saving an HTML file to a web server was as easy as saving it to your hard disk. It didn’t matter if the web server was in a closet a few yards away or part of a server farm on different continent.
Since then, I have probably used BBEdit for some purpose at least once a week. I’ve written loads of HTML and CSS, edited PHP and Javascript, and batch edited loads of class rosters and countless text files exported from Excel. And naturally, I wrote this blog post using BBEdit (in Markdown).
Thanks and many happy returns.
(Via MacWorld and Mother Jones.)
I recently received a pair of brand new pair of Skechers causal slip-ons as a gift, but I can’t wear them. They taper at the front of the shoe, and shoes like these caused an ingrown toenail that required surgery in early April. It’s nothing against these particular shoes. I just have an extraordinarily wide foot.
Because someone else, who has presumably has normal feet, might want these, I have listed them for sale on eBay.
Bid responsibly.
This evening Brooklyn’s Light Industry screened a rare Cuban film, Sara Gomez’s De Cierta Manera [One Way or Another] (1974). I had seen this film back as an undergraduate at UCSB, in Donna Cunnigham’s Film History: 1960 – Present class, well over a decade ago. Earlier this semester, I had wanted to screen this film for my own film history class, but a couple of factors made that difficult. First, I could only find a worn out VHS copy, which it lacked the image sharpness that I so vividly associate with seeing first this film. Second, I had booked two films for the day: this and the celebrated Memories of Underdevelopment. There simply wouldn’t have been time to screen both. I gave students the opportunity to see the film tonight for extra credit. One student took me up on the offer.
One Way or Another blends documentary footage with a narrative sequences. This was one of the most common stylistic qualities of post-Revolutionary Cuban cinema. Filmmakers utilized this strategy to locate the personal impact of the Revolution on ordinary Cubans. As the title suggests, the Revolution was going to change everyone’s lives…one way or another.
In this particular film, we see the social challenges of the Revolution through two institutions: organized labor and the schools. In the opening sequence of the film, we see a tribunal for Humberto. We learn later in the film that he is being judged for loafing, as this scene is repeated. Loafing in Revolutionary Cuba has consequences since it threatens productivity and also solidarity.
We also see the social impact of the Revolution in the schools. A few delinquent students, who are unaccustomed to formal education, complicate the educational mission of the Revolution. Moreover, their parents are also uneducated and ill-equipped to supervise their children’s education. Without education, the Revolution cannot adequately lift children out of poverty.
Like most Cuban films of the time, there was a mix of personal narratives in the film, which were fictional. As the film documents the tribunal and the challenges of the labor union, we see it through the character of Mario. Mario accuses Humberto of loafing at the hearing. When the tribunal scene is repeated towards the end of the film, we don’t understand why Mario testifies against Humberto, as we see that they are friends throughout the film. However, we learn in the moments following the second instance of the tribunal that Mario struggled with the decision to “rat out” his friend but ultimately decided to do so for the sake of the Revolution. Mario’s internal conflict makes for a more nuanced view of the Revolution. While Humberto’s decision to loaf, by staying with a young woman, hurt worker productivity and solidarity, it required Mario to betray his friend.
Throughout the film, Mario courts Yolanda, a young, educated and independent school teacher. It is through her character that we see the challenges in the schools. Her education gave her the opportunity to teach children, but she is constantly frustrated by the inability of her students to learn and behave appropriately in the classroom. (Believe me, I can appreciate her frustration.) In perhaps one of the most touching moments, she admits her frustration when she describes the cycle of a young girl going through school until the sixth grade, who then marries and has her own daughter who will go to the same school for her own sixth-grade education. Her soliloquy is punctuated by a scene of young black girls in short white dresses dancing provocatively in the village. This image contrasts with Yolanda’s own dress and gestures that, by comparison, characterize her as a schoolmarm.
The most direct consequence of the Revolution in this film is the urban redevelopment projects, which were common not only in post-Revolutionary Cuba but throughout Latin America and even some cities in the United States. A recurring image is the razing of the slums, which were being replaced by shiny, modern housing units. The wrecking ball that demolishes the old blighted housing reminds us of the immediate change that the Revolution brings. However, it is the rapid pace of change that the film takes most issue. It is clear that some Cubans were unprepared for the Revolution. This is despite the seemingly good intentions of the Revolution’s architects, who were curiously never represented in the film.
After foolishly riding through Central Park yesterday, to go from the east side to West 72nd St., and encountering a bunch of inexperienced cyclists and park dwellers, these ten essential cycling tips for experienced cyclists could prove useful as the warming weather brings more people into the park.
(Via New York Cycle Club.)
F-Secure posted step-by-step instructions to locate and remove the Mac Flashback trojan with a few Terminal commands. I did so, and my machine came was clean.
There can be as many as a half-million Macs infected by this Trojan, then the sense of urgency seems justified.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
After wearing Nike cleats and Converse low-tops for the last couple of years, I ended up in a podiatrist’s office to have an ingrown toenail partially removed this week.
Lesson learned.
The students in my History of Cinema III class at Queens College took their midterm exam last week, and as I did last spring, I am publishing the aggregate results here.
I was very impressed with the way students performed on this test. Fifty-seven percent of students scored a B or better, and nearly a third of the entire class of seventy-one students scored an A.
The mean score for the test looked a bit low for my liking but it was consistent with a large lecture class. Students averaged a 74.25, a “solid” C. The median score was a little better at 81. I’d tell you who got that score, but that’s not allowed.
There was a significant difference this year. Three students scored 100% on the exam, which did not happen last year. Also, there were a lot of students who scored either 98% or 99% on their exams, too. That made me very happy!
Students were given two hours to complete their exam, and it appears that many of them finished in less than an hour. The average of the best three scores, 0:58:40, was very close to the average time of 0:57:38 that the 71 persons who took this exam.
The letter grade distributions skewed heavily towards the top and bottom grades. Almost a third of the class scored an A, but a troubling high portion of the class, 14%, failed the exam. On the bright side, 57% of the class scored an A or a B. Clearly, there were some students who did very well.
And finally, I have an obsession with recording how students perform against their time.
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p>The only metric I didn’t use was attendance since I haven’t been coding the sign-in sheets yet.
