One of the best yet under-advertised features of being an NYU student–or a member of its faculty and staff—is the free admission to New York City–area museums. Some of the highlights include the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the New York Historical Society.
Last week, Pratt Institute announced that its students, faculty, and staff can enjoy free admission to the following museums:
Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, plus one guest
Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
The Frick Collection
Guggenheim, up to 3 guests
Museum of Arts and Design
MoMA, students-only as of January 2019
New Museum
Whitney Museum of American Art, plus one guest
Admission is also extended to alumni at the following museums:
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Brooklyn Museum
Whitney Museum of American Art
As the weather gradually begins to warm, it’s really tempting to visit a few museums before cycling and softball occupy my free time come spring.
On July 29, 2006, at Southpaw, a now-defunct music venue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, my friend Adam invited me to see Rocket from the Tombs. He had met a girl at his sister’s birthday party a few weeks earlier. Named for a season of the year, she was a pretty girl with pale-skin, dark hair trimmed with bangs, and thick-framed black plastic glasses. He was interested in going to the show as I presumed he was trying to bone up on the kind of music she liked. Had he not jumped the queue, I probably would have talked to her first. Oh well: bros before… am I right?
Rocket from the Tombs was a short-lived Cleveland band that formed in the mid-1970s. Their sound, commonly referred to as “proto-punk,” was very heavy, loud and simple, especially compared to flair and multitrack ornamentation of album-oriented rock that populated FM radio during the same period. Though Rocket from the Tombs would only record a few songs, they would influence countless future punk bands and themselves split into two well-regarded bands of the 1980s: Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys.
I’m not sure if Adam and Autumn/Summer confused this band with Rocket from the Crypt, a 1990s San Diego band that enjoyed much greater financial and mainstream success than Rocket from the Tombs ever did, but joining him for this show was one of the best concert decisions I ever made. Having re-formed and despite looking more like jam band than a bunch of “punk,” they absolutely kicked ass and sounded like they had been playing together continuously with aplomb since 1975.
Last week, I wrote a post against calls to ban digital encryption and to deny admitting Syrian refugees in light of the terrorist attacks in Paris. In the same vein, ATTN produced an explainer video detailing the rigorous screening process that would-be refugees must endure before resettling in the United States.
The video, voiced by Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, evokes our collective sympathy to make the argument that admitting refugees to United States is not only safe for but also vital for the survival of thousands of people.
Some of the persusasive strategies include:
It explains that most of the Syrian refugees are women, children, and families, presumably to induce a more sympathetic response than if Syrian refugees were mostly men.
It illustrates the “rigourous screening process” with the metal detectors you see at an airport, except that there are three of them. This suggests that refugee screening process is at least trebly secure than an airport security checkpoint.
It demonstrates the refugee screening process with a woman named Reema and her children, who are seeking refugee status after fleeing Syria.
It visually contrasts Syria and the United States: the former is a site of ruins devasted by bombings, while the US consists of a suburban, single-family home.
It lists the five(!) federal government bureaus that must approve the refugee application.
It shows a timeline of when the United States has admitted refugees. Unacknowledged in the narration, however, is that the US admits refugees in years of international crises and that the number has been steadily declining since the latter-half of twentieth century.
The video explains the screening process through Reema and her children.
The presusasive strategies in this video would make an excellent example for students of political communication. It is illustrated with well-designed graphics and compelling narration. However, I should caution against anyone dismissing the video, as propaganda for example, on the basis of employing persuasive strategies listed above. Being presusaive does not make it false or misleading.
Instead, it important that it be persuasive because, as the video concludes, welcoming “men, women, and children who are refugees fleeing violence” is something we can and must do.
Countless people have posted “nice thoughts” to their social-networking feeds, including changing their profile pictures to something with the Eiffel Tower or the tricolore, or both.
But in the week since, two political threads have emerged that will be utterly ineffective and even counter productive for preventing a similar attack.
Allowing governments to circumvent encryption on smartphones and other communication platforms
In the last week, there has been no evidence to prove that the Paris attackers were in fact communicating with each other using encrypted smartphones or some other commercial. In fact, it looks like they communicating in the clear. But even if they were, calls for installing backdoors to devices will only weaken our collective security, not protect it. The long-standing collective wisdom is that if there’s a backdoor for “good guys” (i.e., the government) then it will be there for “bad guys” (i.e., malicious hackers), too. Moreover, as Richard Forno concluded, because “strong” encryption exists, forcing us to use “weak” encryption will do no good because “strong” encryption exists. We will have to learn to live with it. Forno writes:
We must recognize that strong mathematical equations (i.e., cryptography) are one of those things we can’t disinvent—and that the laws of math are, for the moment, not subject to the whims of man or his legal system.”
Forcing companies to install backdoors for the “good guys” (i.e., most every smartphone user) will make the “bad guys” (i.e., terrorists or other covert criminals) to use something else that’s actually secure. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have our data easily compromised by whatever backdoor the government has mandated.
Blocking Syrian political refugees from seeking asylum
At last count, about half of the US state governors, almost all of them Republicans, have said they would not allow Syrian refugees from settling in their states. And yesterday, the mostly Republican and brain-dead House voted to impose screening measures for asylum seekers. The thinking is that closing our borders to Syria will isolate us from a potential group of terrorists. But as has been clear after last Friday, these attacks were staged by disaffected European nationals, not Syrian immigrants to France or Belgium.
Denying Syrian refugees a safe harbor will not keep us any safer from potential terrorists and will only strengthen terrorist recruiting efforts. Zack Beauchamp argues that it is not only wrong to deny refugees asylum in the US, it actually helps ISIS:
if refugees do make it out, ISIS wants them to be treated badly — the more the West treats them with suspicion and fear, the more it supports ISIS’s narrative of a West that is hostile to Muslims and bolsters ISIS’s efforts to recruit from migrant communities in Europe.
In other words, publicly decrying Syrian refugees might win some points with the isolated, reactionary, and xenophobic crowd that make up the Republican primary voting base these days, but it also stirs up the isolated, reactionary, and disenfranchised crowd that agitate potential terrorists. Instead of creating a firewall to isolate a foreign threat, it will only foster home-grown terrorists willing to attack their own countries.
As a fan of summer and of movies, you would think that I would be a huge fan of outdoor movies. I am not. Usually, the films screened at these events are crowd-pleasing hits that I have either seen already or could easily watch on a cable TV network or a streaming service. And because this is New York, it’s usually a struggle to secure space for you and your picnic blanket.
The one outdoor summer screening series that was an exception to this was the one at Socrates Sculpture Park. The series catered to Queens’s status as the most diverse borough of New York City.1 Not only did they screen a variety of international movies, some curated by Film Forum, they paired local eateries serving the native cuisine of the film’s country. Except for that one time they inexplicably paired German würsts with a Russian film, less than seventy years after the conclusion of World War II.
If you want to see the series at Socrates, you’re too late. It wrapped on Wednesday.
The Japan Society is hosting its annual festival of new Japanese films. Japan Cuts starts this Thursday, July 9, and runs through Sunday, July 19. Much like the New York Film Festival, this festival devotes a program commemorates experimental filmmaking.
Mono No Aware x [+] (Plus) celebrates the work of two filmmaking organizations: New York’s Mono No Aware and Tokyo’s [+]. The program of films screens on Sunday, July 12, beginning at 8:45 PM, at the Japan Society.
Almost all of the films in the program will be screened in New York for the first time, and many of them will be screening publicly for the first time anywhere.
Here’s the complete list of films:
Title
Filmmaker
Year, Time, Format
Synopsis
Premiere
Mono No Aware Direct Filmmaking/Animation Workshop Films
Various
2015. Approx. 8 min. 16mm.
Various 16mm works from the participants of Mono No Aware’s Direct Filmmaking/Animation Workshop held at Japan Society on June 21.
World Premiere
RELAY
Steve Cossman
2014. 11 min. Super 8mm to HDV
A moving-image document of the visual environment created by artist Ei Wada that emphasizes his grassroots approach to instrument making and reflects his concepts about performance as art.
New York Premiere
Koropokkuru
Akiko Maruyama
2015. 5 min. 16mm.
A moving portrayal of an ineffable force that can be humanlike or embody itself within displayed objects. Inspired by concepts from the Koropokkuru folktale within Japanese Ainu culture and The Invisible Man.
World Premiere
Louis Armstrong Obon
Joel Schlemowitz
2015. 14 min. Super 8mm and HD to HDV.
A portrait of Japanese jazz musicians Yoshio and Keiko Toyama as seen through their annual summer pilgrimage to the grave of Louis Armstrong in Flushing, Queens.
World Premiere
EMBLEM
Rei Hayama
2012. 16 min. 16mm to HDCAM.
Video footage for the research of Japanese endangered species of raptors is turned into a decorative fiction film through the conversion process between video and film.
New York Premiere
Stella Nova
Ted Wiggin
2015. 4 min. 16mm.
Red blue green, circle square triangle, dog star man. The life and death of a star.
World Premiere
Emaki/Light
Takashi Makino & Takashi Ishida
2011. 16 min. 35mm & 16mm to HDCAM.
Drawing on film by Takashi Ishida; edit and telecine by Takashi Makino; music by Takashi Ishida & Takashi Makino.
US Premiere
sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars
Tomonari Nishikawa
2014. 2 min. 35mm.
100 ft of 35mm negative film was buried under fallen leaves about 15 miles away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station from the sunset of June 24, 2014 to sunrise the following day.
DUB HOUSE Experience in Material No.52
Kei Shichiri & Ryoji Suzuki
2012. 16 min. 35mm.
Strict but exquisite evocation links two artistic disciplines and two visions of light and darkness. Architecture and film meet in the cinema.
Last year marked the fiftieth and seventy-fifth anniversaries, respectively, of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. I wrote about these two fairs with regards to the 1939 introduction of television by RCA and the 1964 New York State Pavilion, designed by celebrated modern architect Phillip Johnson.
Starting today, June 29, the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College is hosting a photographic exhibit on the “ignored” and “ridiculed” architecture of the World’s Fairs. The exhibition, Persuasive Images: Architecture of the 1939–40 & 1964–65 New York World’s Fairs, will run until July 27, and there’s an opening reception on July 9, two weeks after the exhibit opens.
Persuasive Images: Architecture of the 1939–40 & 1964–65 New York World’s Fairs
Teaching this past semester has been a bit different than it has been recently because I’ve been teaching two non-intro classes: New Media and Media Criticism. Although New Media is technically called “Introduction to New Media,” I’ve always run it like an undergraduate seminar with a lot close readings. The same goes for Media Criticism, where the students and I criticize criticisms of media.
One of the results of doing so many close readings this semester—especially ones that I have not read since being an undergraduate, if at all—is that I’ve become self-reflexive about some academic practices and rituals.
For example:
Why does seemingly every essay start with a premise that the author immediately challenges? I prefer the illustrative case study.
Why must we literally turn a page before we get to the author’s central method for challenging that premise? My advisor indoctrinated me that a reader should know your topic and approach before turning a page.
Why does seemingly every argument take a twist or turn about 60-70% through the text? What’s wrong with sticking what you outlined in the methodology?
One of the stranger practices in academia, especially among film scholars, is to say…
I’m not sure I’ve seen that film all the way through.
Allow me to decode that. That’s academese for…
I haven’t bothered to watch that film, and I’m too ashamed to admit it. Also, I can’t have a conversation with you about it because I must have missed the part of the film you’re describing.
Why not just admit that you haven’t seen it?
It’s a clever trick, and I’m guilty of having used that once or twice. In fact, I kind of did that when, back in November, I announced that filmmaker and scholar Laura Mulvey was coming to Pratt. I said that I had wished I had scheduled her film, Riddles of the Sphinx, for my experimental film class, but didn’t because it was “too long” for our class. Truth be told, I didn’t schedule it because I never bothered to watch it “the whole way through,” which is to say not at all. But, in my defense, no film we screened in class was longer than ninety minutes, and I was not going to speed up this film.
To atone for my scholarly and pedagogical sins, I’ll be heading to Pratt on Tuesday, March 10, for the screening of Riddles of the Sphinx, with introduction and Q&A by scholar-in-residence/filmmaker Laura Mulvey. You should go, too.
Today, November 15, Sex and Broadcasting, a documentary about freeform radio station, WFMU, premieres as part of the DOCNYC film festival. The documentary profiles this extraordinary radio station, located in Jersey City, New Jersey, and also streaming worldwide on Internet, and its struggles to stay afloat in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
I would call it a unique project except that twofriends of mine were working on a documentary about KCSB-FM, the Santa Barbara, California radio station where I volunteered, hosted a few radio shows, and even worked as the general manager back in the go-go nineties. Without the slightest bit of exaggeration, KCSB has a lot with making me who I am today.
The documentary project stalled out a few years ago, but on a hard drive somewhere, there exists footage of a lengthy interview I gave as part of that project. I should probably see if I can get that footage just to have it.
In addition to his famous Drum Buddy, Quintron (or Quintronics, as he’s calling his electronic-gizmo manufacturing outfit) has built an audio synthesizer that responds to the weather. You can hear it in action, day and night, courtesy of the Internet.
The Weather Warlock is the name of the machine and also the improvised lineup of musicians that play as a drone band to accompany the Weather Warlock synthesizer. As part of Quintron and Miss Pussycat’s tour, Weather Warlock (the band) will be playing Weather Warlock (the synthesizer) at four special shows in Chicago, Ann Arbor, Brooklyn, and Miami.
The Brooklyn demonstration of the Weather Warlock will be at Secret Project Robot in Bushwick, Brooklyn on Friday, November 28. The show will take place at sunset, which I understand is supposed to happen at for 4:31 PM EST, and will feature some very special jammers, including Nels Cline, Sean Lennon, and, not surprisingly, Quintron.
Skip Black Friday, and go see and hear this unique contraption in action!
Weather Warlock (November 28) and Quinton and Miss Pussycat (November 29)