A NBC television crew sets up outside of the RCA Pavilion at the New York City World’s Fair, 1939.
Last Tuesday, a bunch of people went to Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the site of the 1964 World’s Fair to tour the Phillip Johnson–designed New York State Pavilion. The Pavilion was open to the public to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair. As with any free event in New York City, there was an hours-long line, and two people I know that went didn’t even get inside despite waiting over four hours.
Although it is still standing, the New York State Pavilion is in dire need of attention. Restoring or repairing it could cost as much as $75 million, and demolishing it would still cost around $14 million. These huge sums however have not deterred many groups from trying to restore the structure, a rare example of Googie architecture in New York City.
Some of the efforts to preserve the Pavilion include:
Flashing back even further, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park was also home to the 1939’s World Fair, and on April 30, 1939, seventy-five years ago today, the 1939 World’s Fair opened to the public. This date, by the way, was also the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington.
A statue representing the Freedom of the Press stands opposite a statue of George Washington, inaugurated 150 years earlier as the first president of the United States. (AP Photo.)
Speaking of presidents, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the Fair, the first such exposition in his home state.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt opens the 1939 World’s Fair. (AP Photo/John Lindsay)
The theme of the 1939 World’s Fair was the “World of Tomorrow.” Many of the corporate exhibits, such as General Motor’s Futurama, anticipated the role that consumerism would play in revolutionizing culture. The highways that would reshape the American landscape a decade later, for example, were on display as models at the Futurama exhibit.
Highways of the future. “Futurama” exhibit. New York City World’s Fair. (New York Public Library, Digital ID: 1674383.)
Now We Add Sight to Sound
To media scholars, the 1939’s World Fair is synonymous with the introduction of television. Although they didn’t invent it, RCA introduced television to the American public and, in very simple terms, explained its purpose.
RCA President, David Sarnoff, at the RCA Pavilion, New York City World’s Fair, 1939. (New York Public Library, Digital ID: 1681003.)
David Sarnoff, the president of RCA, clearly defined how television would work:
Now we add sight to sound.
Regardless of what television could do, RCA’s presentation of television introduced it with a clear purpose. RCA would guide television as an extension of radio. It would offer similar programming to what Americans heard on the radio in the 1930s, but with the addition of pictures. In the next decade, television would in effect supplant radio as the dominant entertainment medium, but it would still offer mostly entertainment programming sponsored by advertisers.
Fifty years ago today, Dartmouth University professor John Kemeney and a student ran the first BASIC program.
While I am not quite so old to have been among the first users of BASIC, it was something I used as a child in the 1980s. It was the built-in programming language for my first computer, a Radio Shack TRS–80, and for my first Apple computer, an Apple IIc+.
In the second half of the 1970s, BASIC became the standard language for home users and hobbyist programmers. There wasn’t much packaged software, so people expected to write some of their own. Computer magazines published program listings for people to type in, then save to cassette tape.
To this day, BASIC remains the only programming language I ever learned, and it still frames my understanding of all computers and digital technology.
Almost six months ago, I sported a white wig to class. It was Halloween, and we were covering Andy Warhol, among other New York–based experimental filmmakers. When I wrote about my “costume” I said that Andy Warhol was an “was an artist who didn’t actually make any art.” To illustrate that point, I embedded a video of Warhol “painting” a portrait of Debbie Harry using a Commodore Amiga, a personal computer that was ahead of its time in graphics processing.
http://youtu.be/3oqUd8utr14
Aside from painting the Blondie lead singer and star, Warhol made many more images using the Amiga. Although not common, it’s not unusual for a technology company to supply artists with equipment to make art. For example, video artist Bill Viola received early video equipment from Sony in the 1970s as part of a residency with the Japanese electronics maker.
Commodore Amiga computer equipment used by Andy Warhol 1985-86, courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.
Because Warhol had created these works using an obsolete computer system and saved them on deterriorating storage media, his digital art was thought to be irretreivably lost. Over the last two years, a very determined and resourceful “team of new-media artists, computer experts, and museum professionals” rescued these works from their digital tomb, including this image of a Campbell Soup can.
The problem with a lot of digital art is that it requires the original equipment to retrieve it. The Commodore Amiga was state of the art in 1985, but it is almost forgotten today. Moreover, the media used to store those files are nearly thirty years old, and have become brittle with age. Even trying to read those disks with a fully functioning Amiga computer and disk drive set up could irreversibly damage those disks, making those files lost forever.
It was not known in advance whether any of Warhol’s imagery existed on the floppy disks-nearly all of which were system and application diskettes onto which, the team later discovered, Warhol had saved his own data. Reviewing the disks’ directory listings, the team’s initial excitement on seeing promising filenames like “campbells.pic” and “marilyn1.pic” quickly turned to dismay, when it emerged that the files were stored in a completely unknown file format, unrecognized by any utility. Soon afterwards, however, the [Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer] Club’s forensics experts had reverse-engineered the unfamiliar format, unveiling 28 never-before-seen digital images that were judged to be in Warhol’s style by the [Andy Warhol Museum] experts. At least eleven of these images featured Warhol’s signature.
Warhol is an important artist, and it’s great to see a preservation effort succeed in recovering his digital art. But for every successful recovery of a high-profile artists, I wonder how many more artists‘ works are lost to digital rot.
Nick Zedd, a seminal figure in a New York filmmaking movement he called “The Cinema of Transgression,” will be in Brooklyn’s Fire Proof Gallery for the opening of The Return of the End of New York: Paintings by Nick Zedd with works by John O’Grodnick. The opening reception is at the Brooklyn Fire Proof Gallery on Friday, April 25, 6:00 to 9:00 PM, and the show continues for one day only on April 26, noon to 6:00 PM, with a screening to start at 7:00 PM.
If you’re a film scholar and want to teach your students the films of Nick Zedd, please send them to this event because you might not be able to screen his films in class without someone asking for money. In 2012, Zedd, or someone claiming to be him, wrote me to ask that I pay him for screening some of his films in a class I taught in 2006.
Dear Sir,
I was flattered to see that my films were included in your course New York Independents.
I was wondering if I might be monetarily compensated for the screening of my work to the students.
Best Wishes,
Nick Zedd
This remains the only time a filmmaker ever asked me to pay for screening his or her films in class. That’s probaly because instructors are allowed to screen audiovisual works in face-to-face classroom teaching without securing public performance rights, and copyright holders asking for payment is a futile exercise.
But because his request was so courteous, I might go to the show this weekend after all.
Sign up for one of my favorite organized bike rides, Glen’s annual Ride to Montauk. This is the ride that is famous for its pie at the Water Mill rest stop.
Admittedly, this is not a cheap ride. Registration starts around $150, but it is very well organized, and it’s one of the few rides that usually doesn’t run out of food. And they also don’t run out of beer!
As I’ve done in the past, I’ll be helping with marking the route in exchange for a free registration, and as I did last year, I’ll be aiming to ride the entire 150-mile course, from one end of Long Island to the other.
Late to the party yet again, I finally watched the first two episodes of the new Mike Judge–helmed comedy series, Silicon Valley. If you haven’t yet traded for someone’s HBO Go credentials, you can watch the first episode, temporarily, of course, on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvkmsI54ss4
The series traffics in some of the most well-worn stereotypes of software engineers and Internet entrepreneurs that are familiar to even the most casual observers of the tech-business world. The series centers on three budding software engineers living in an incubator started by a veteran of the Valley. Played by T.J. Miller, Erlich cashed in on his start-up years ago. Housing these engineers is his way of giving back, but not without taking a ten-percent stake in any product they develop while in residence.
The first two episodes of the series portray some of the more ludicrous aspects of Silicon Valley. As I watched it, I kept thinking of Evgeny Morozov’s latest book, To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. Morozov argues that the titans of tech are guilty of two hubristic sins. Solutionism is the relentless need to solve problems, including those than might not even need solving, and to strive for perfection. The second, Internet Centrism, is the fervent belief that the Internet and digital technologies are the tools to solve every problem. As I am yet to finish the book, it appears that these two function as rhetorical justifications for creating new digital industries that enrich those developing these solutions. In short, it’s about getting paid.
We see the vapid speeches given at a TED Talk where audiences listen in awe of rhetorically flashy speeches on changing the world without much substance. We see an anti-intellectual venture capitalist who, like Peter Thiel, advocates that young people take $100,000 of his money to drop out of college to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas.[1] We learn that an algorithm, properly deployed, can do something as mundane as search through a compressed data stream or something as important as curing cancer, the ultimate human miracle. We also see how spiritual advisors coddle super-rich CEOs are hell-bent on disrupting everything and are out to change the world, provided they make a ton of money doing so. Real money, too, not Bitcoin.
Read the book and watch the series for two contemporary and poignant critiques of an industry that is inflated in just about every sense of the word.
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Evegeny Morozov, To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, New York: Public Affairs, 2013, 129. ↩
I’ve been complaining about the cold since Thanksgiving Day, when I took a Turkey Day bike ride to Piermont to turbocharge my metabolism. (It didn’t work, by the way.) That was a long time ago, which means that this has been the longest winter ever.
Since I started bike riding again in March, we’ve had some respite from the cold with some days warming up to 50°, 60°, and even 70°. This past weekend was no exception as it was almost hot outside. However, any hint of warm weather gave way to a cold snap that dropped rain, ice, and then snow on us Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, there was a thin but visible layer of snow on parked cars. Watching drivers scraping snow and ice off their windshields seemed unimaginable on Sunday, when the temperature hovered around 70°, and I got my first sunburn of the year.
By Wednesday morning, after the snowfall had stopped, the morning air was cold but not bitter enough to stop me from riding to work. That was too bad because riding over the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan was nearly impossible: the bike-and-pedestrian path was covered in slush.
I ended up walking across the bridge because my tires are as thin and slick as they come, and I didn’t dare to slip and slide en route to 9:00 AM class, especially when I had my MacBook Pro in my backpack. That computer has been through enough, as have we all over this winter.
Yes, folks, it’s Tax Day in America. Some taxpayers might have received refunds and are spending them on vacation homes, boats, or funding some silly Internet start-up. Some, like me, have put off until today to pay the government treasuries in Washington and Albany. Either way, unless you filed for an extension, the tax year known as 2013 is over. Congratulations, you made it!
Now that the tax year is finished, let’s reflect on what we’re going to do with all that money.
To get in the Tax Day spirit, the White House set up a web widget to show you how your money is spent. Enter some of your tax data and the tool will show you where your Social security, Medicare, and income taxes go.
Take a minute to fill it out. I’ll wait right here until you’re done.
I bet you most of your income tax money goes to war. How did I know? Lucky guess…
In my case, defense and health care each get about $1,700 of my taxes. However, only $112 of it went to elementary, secondary and vocation education, and a little more than $75 went to science, space, and technology programs. For whatever reason, a negative amount of my federal tax money, $-1.35, went to financial aid for college students. This must be my share of any tax credits or deductions that I’ve been milking for almost of my entire adult life, which is why I get it back.
This breakdown seemed especially poignant after finding a U-Matic tape of an independent news-documentary television series from the 1990s, titled The ’90s. In trying to identify the tape, I searched the web for the series and came across an especially timely segment about persons who refuse to pay taxes that fund war. The segment has been digitized and available on YouTube.
One person in the segment says that half of tax revenue goes to war. Do you think they would feel differently if I told them it was only a quarter? Probably not.
On Monday morning, I bought the season pass for the final season of Mad Men on iTunes, and I noticed the price was $35, based on fourteen episodes, not seven for this year and seven for next. Apple figured it out and even included an explanatory note: “Mad Men, The Final Season is expected to include 14 episodes (actual number of episodes may vary).”
The price is a little steep because of the upfront cost of buying fourteen episodes. It’s not as nice as getting the early adopter credit of buying the first eight episodes and getting the back eight free. However, come next year, I’ll be relieved to find seven episodes appearing each week in my queue, ready to stream.
With the Paschal moon hanging above us, thus signaling the beginning of Passover, the US tax filing deadline also hangs above us.
Like I’ve done for the last few years, I procrastinated until the last minute to file because I regularly have to send checks to both the federal and state governments. One of the many inequities of the American tax system is that someone who cobbles together a living from multiple sources usually has to pay when he or she files. When I start collecting a stack of W2s and the occasional 1099 in February, I start dreading preparing my tax return because I know I’m writing some big checks in April.
The Bostonian’s Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring & Feathering, 1774. Image via New York Historical Society, Image # 27307.
In years past, I usually either do my taxes on paper by hand or send them to an accountant. This year, I was short on time and money so I resorted to tax software.
Based on the recommendation from The Wirecutter’s Kevin Purdy, I went with the horribly named FreeTaxUSA. When I told one friend what I used to prepare my taxes, she joking asked, “Do they also offer check cashing and pay-day loans?”
Purdy’s article recommended three software packages: TurboTax for most everyone, TaxACT for people with more time and more complex situations, and FreeTaxUSA for experienced tax filers. Since I started working multiple jobs, I have learned as much as I can to optimize my tax situation, and I really didn’t need to answer questions about specific “life events.” I simply needed to report a bunch of numbers and calculate the allowable deductions. This was also very cheap: $13 for filing both a federal and state return, regardless of income.
Try it if this sounds like your approach to preparing your income tax returns.
