by Brooks Riley

by Mike O’Brien

(Disclaimer: I have spent the last month in a cabin in the woods, and during that time the media has caught wind of TwinsTheNewTrend and spilled ink about their appeal and significance. What I have written below may therefore be redundant. But it’s still got a hep beat you can bug out to, so follow along anyway.)

A few months ago, Abbas Raza posted a Youtube video to this site from the channel “TwinsTheNewTrend”. It consisted of the titular twins watching a video of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”, visible to the viewer in a picture-in-picture frame. This kind of “reaction video” is endemic on Youtube and other user-created-content platforms, and is usually the kind of thing I avoid. But a few things drew me in. First, I think (nay, know) that Dolly Parton is awesome and that this fact should be universally acknowledged. Second, the hosts are young Black men exhibiting cues of a hip-hop cultural world, not the typical audience for such music. The promise inherent in this set-up is that you, the viewer, are going to share an experience of discovery and novelty. That promise is fulfilled.

I said that I normally avoid “reaction videos” as a genre. It’s not that I’m particularly miserly with my screen time, or that I consider such fluff below my standards of consumption. I watch a lot of fluff, and much of it participates in the kind of audience-chasing hustle of which “reactions” are a shop-worn tool. What I find irksome is that “reactions” plug into a primal psychological system of sympathy and emotional mirroring, and that has the sickly-sweet stink of manipulation. Of course, many great works of art have traded on the compelling emotional displays of their characters to elicit an emotional response from their audience. It’s not some devious 21st-century marketing trick. But in the context of algorithm-driven, big-data-leveraging behemoths like Google et al., the vulnerability to such affective infiltration feels dangerous and debasing. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

In the third Indiana Jones film, The Last Crusade (the one with Sean Connery), the adventurous archaeologist must race to find the Holy Grail, the cup Christ drank from at the last supper which was used to catch his blood during the crucifixion. According to Authurian legend, who ever shall drink from the cup will have eternal life. He’s not the only one seeking this mystical artifact. His competitors, the Nazis, hope to use the Grail to ensure a thousand year rule by their leader. In one memorable scene, now often deployed in animated gif form on social media, Dr. Jones infiltrates a Nuremberg style rally, noting to his companion, “Nazis! I hate these guys!” The film ends with a race to the Holy Grail, the Nazi heavy dying, but Jones failing to turn his Nazi love interest to the right side of history.

The franchise was created by George Lucas and directed by Steven Spielberg, both of whom made a name for themselves taking film genres primarily from B-roll films (lower budget genre films) and making them into high budget summer blockbusters. The Indiana Jones trilogy is no exception. In these films, Spielberg married a tale of adventure and discovery with a fight against an obvious bad guy with little nuance—you know who is good and evil in these films. Nazis fit that role perfectly, providing two of the baddies for the four films (with a planned fifth in production). Nazis in fact often act as a stand-in for unmitigated evil in many films (in many cases cartoonishly, mustache twirling type evil) with little grounding in reality. The question becomes: is that a problem in shaping our understanding of Nazis (or fascism in general) as a historical phenomenon? I’d argue that indeed, our understanding of fascism has been somewhat obscured by our popular cultural views that use Nazis or fascists as stand-ins for pure evil, rather than emanating from some of the same underlying ideologies that animated racism, segregation, and colonialism among Western powers. As such, we’ve ignored its growth in recent years. This is a problem, as these ideologies pose a real threat to our political system, especially in our postmodern media landscape. Read more »

The Eisack river is like this in Franzensfeste today. It is roaring down with a stupendous amount of water at incredible speed and with a kind of violent force which is frightening to behold. And to top it off, it is rolling large stones along which crash into each other under water and sound like thunder (at least that is what I am told those deep booms come from). It is an awesome sight and sound. This massive flow of water is headed toward Brixen as it cannot be held by the dam in Franzensfeste (the dam reservoir is already almost overflowing) and it may break over its banks in Brixen and further downriver in Klausen (where people in low-lying areas are already being told to move to higher ground, sandbags are being placed, etc.). If one were to fall into the river anywhere today, one would not survive more than a few seconds and would be smashed against the rocks on the riverbed with bone-breaking force almost instantly. I can hear it loudly even as I sit across the street at my desk.

Here is a video I made of the Eisack by the time it is in Brixen. Watch full screen and with sound on. You will see just how wild the river is by the end and how it is flowing very hard and fast and muddy and sometimes spontaneously bursts skyward in plumes as it goes forth frothing and foaming through Brixen. Keep in mind, the video has been slowed down by a factor of 10 (shot at 250 frames/sec) so it is a bit hard to tell just how fast the water is moving.

by Charlie Huenemann

It is commonplace to observe just how marvelous books are. Some person, perhaps from long ago, makes inky marks onto processed pulp from old trees. The ensuing artifact is tossed from hand to hand, carrying its cargo of characters, plots, ideas, and poems across the rough seas of time, until it comes to you. And now you have the chance to share in a tradition of readers stretching back to the author, a transtemporal book club who communicate with one another only by terse comments scratched into the margins of this leather-bound vessel.

But, boy, do they pile up over time! Shelves groan under the weight of old textbooks, exclamatory treatments of hot topics long past their sell-by date, endless reissues of classics, sci-fi paperbacks that disintegrate when opened, and that one book on economics you were supposed to return to somebody five, no, maybe ten years ago. Some, perhaps, have resale value. The rest could be dropped into a charity box to join the massive graveyard of books to be boxed up and never seen again.

The remaining option is to dump them unceremoniously into the recycling bin – but most of us recoil from the suggestion in horror. Why? We venerate books as objects. Some books preserve important ideas that threaten bigots and tyrants, and these are the ones often burned by said barbarians. Holding onto these books is one way to affirm their importance in preserving our fragile civilization. Some of these books are old friends to us, our teachers and soulmates, and so dumping them is unthinkable. “Books” as a common noun typically picks out the ones that mean so much to us, and if we were to announce to our friends that we were dumping out our old books, we might as well have said we were doing so on our way to burn down the Parthenon and slap a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Read more »

by Rafiq Kathwari

Dapaan, Rama saw Sita bathing nude in Sitaharan, a spring near the Line of Control in Kashmir. It was lust at first sight. Dapaan, the demon king Ravana abducted Sita to Sri Lanka to avenge a previous wrong. Rama flew in anger south to Sri Lanka in his glitzy winged chariot. Dapaan, the chariot was Made in Prehistoric India, using indigenous materials. Dapaan, Hanuman, the son of Vayu, god of the wind, steered the chariot. Dapaan, clouds cloaked the chariot to foil discovery by enemy radar. Dapaan, Rama shot a divine arrow which pierced Ravana in the heart and killed him. Dapaan, Rama flew Sita back to Sitaharan where they lived happily until India partitioned herself, tearing apart 15 million souls, the largest migration of people in modern history.

Dapaan, Hindutva has been weaponized to impose mythology upon history to create Greater India — Akhund Baharat, united and undivided Hindu Rashtra from Afghanistan to Myanmar. Dapaan, Kashmir strikes at the heart of this nirvana because of its Muslim majority.

Dapaan, every Summer the army shields thousands of Hindu pilgrims who spread the legs of a virgin glacier in Kashmir to worship Shiva’s icy lingam thawing in a cave — daring an ecological disaster. Dapaan, Hindutva is a pandemic.

Dapaan, Neanderthals of Nagpur are marching in Kashmir to the drumbeat of Hindutva supremythology: gharwapsi, zaminjihad, lovejihad to herald acche din. Dapaan, fascists clasp opposite concepts to serve their own puffery. Dapaan, Kashmiris will be told to hold the scalpel for their own execution to chill the blood of Neanderthals.

Dapaan, prepare for the moment when history throws up a rainbow over the Zabarvan. Rainbows are ephemeral. Preparedness is everything. When they ask, Azadi ka matlab kya? Shout out loud — Jamhooriya, Jamhooriya. Dapaan, poets will be caged because poetry is the fuel of Azadi.

Glossary

• gharwapsi: return home — (to Kashmir of Hindu myths)
• zaminjihad: The East India Company sold Kashmir to the Rajput Dogras who enslaved Kashmiris for over 100 years. Sheikh Abdullah, with a swirl of his fountain pen, deemed tillers owners of land they till, freed Kashmiris from serfdom, made peasants landowners, zamindars, earned the honorific, ‘Lion of Kashmir.’ This scared India’s suave socialist prime minister, Pandit Nehru, and his inner circle of prominent and privileged Kashmiri pandits. They exiled the Sheikh for nearly 20 years.
• Zabarvan: Foothills of the Himalayas that ring the Vale of Kashmir
• lovejihad: Hindutva drive to wage war at love between young Muslims and Hindus
• acche din: Good days
• Azadi: Liberty
• Azadi ka matlab kya: What does liberty mean?
• Jamhooriya, Jamhooriya: Democracy, Democracy.

by Peter Wells

My mother believed that games were good for you. Her faith was unshaken by the occasions when my brothers and I returned from our outdoor games with a grievance between us, or by the times the Monopoly board was overturned in anger during the winter months. She considered that games were a preparation for life. I think she underestimated them.

Games require two complementary faculties that are extremely difficult to maintain in tandem at full strength. The first is the ability to take a game absolutely seriously. While it is in progress, it matters. The rules must be obeyed, but participants are encouraged to use their ingenuity to exploit the rules, as well as every facet of their mental and/or physical ability, in order to win. The aim is not primarily skill development, or increased fitness, or social interaction, it is victory, and victory over an enemy doing their best. As soon as we know our opponents are not trying, the game disintegrates. Children quickly learn to spot when their parents are letting them win, and they don’t like it. They would rather suffer repeated defeats than such condescension.

The second faculty is the ability to keep the game self-contained, and not allow it to spill over into the players’ non-game lives, or be vulnerable to their personal character flaws or relationship issues. If the desire to win causes the participants to cheat, become angry, or bear a grudge after defeat, or even to be triumphalist and scornful in victory, the game is ruined. Because it is, after all, ‘a game.’ Note, I did not say ‘only.’ Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

An American parent who named their child “Kamala Devi” in the 1960s is likely to have been either Indian or a hippie. When I first heard Kamala Harris’ name during the 2020 Democratic presidential race, I assumed it was the latter since she was generically described as a “black woman”. What I have since learned is that her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an Indian immigrant. I barely understand my own personal life, so I won’t pretend to have any insight into Kamala Harris’s. Maybe she’s close to her Indian family, maybe she’s not. I’ll never know, and frankly neither will you. The only thing I can safely conclude from this information is that Kamala Harris has an Indian side.

As a country of immigrants, Americans are familiar with diversity even if they are not always accepting of it. Diversity across different people is, however, different from diversity within the same person. Americans seem disoriented by individual diversity. My admittedly rudimentary understanding is that they alleviate this unease by reducing the dimensionality of ethnic, racial or cultural identity in a person. The thankfully obsolete one drop rule is an example of this.  Harris’s mother seems to have understood it early on. As Harris explains in a New Yorker profile, her mother “knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya [Kamala’s sister] and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”

We know by now that the description of Harris as a “black woman” is incomplete. The opening paragraph of “Kamala’s story” on her new campaign website describes her as both “Black” and “Indian”, and notes her parents’ immigration to the U.S. from Jamaica and India. Then, in her DNC convention acceptance speech, she gave a shout out to “my uncles, my aunts and my chithis”. Padma Lakshmi, the model-turned-celebrity-chef, explained through tears of joy that chithi meant “auntie” in Tamil. Harris didn’t announce the fact that her mother’s side of the family is Brahmin, but that would have been obvious to any Tamilian looking at Harris’s Indian family photo. So now, on her Indian side alone, we have geography, language, religion and caste in the mix. Sorting all of that out has got to be confusing for anyone. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Lincoln consistently scores top or at least top 3 in every ranking of US presidents. This high standing has long puzzled me. After all, this is the leader who presided over a long brutal civil war that killed 620,000 of his own people. For context, as a percentage of the population, that is more American lives than all other presidents put together have managed to expend in all America’s other wars. On the face of it, that is a massive failure of statesmanship. The usual response is that the war was a necessary sacrifice to end the supreme evil of slavery. I do not find this convincing.

I. The civil war was not inevitable: Lincoln caused it by his election and choices

War happens because politics fails. Lincoln’s Republican party was perceived as anti-Southern, as evidenced by its immediate promise to impose import tariffs that would hurt the South’s economy (to the benefit of the industrial North) and long-term commitment to the abolition of slavery. Although not the most radical candidate the Republicans could have nominated (more on which below) Lincoln was thus an extraordinarily divisive presidential candidate who was elected entirely by Northern voters. The Southern states launched their secession as soon as they heard Lincoln had won because they believed he (and his Republican party) intended to pursue an anti-South agenda that would further cement their political marginalisation within the USA. Perhaps reflecting his party’s political ignorance of the South and his administration’s inexperience, Lincoln seems not to have understood this. He therefore dramatically underestimated popular support for secession in the South and assumed a show of force would quickly crush it.

It is reasonable to suppose that if a different party’s candidate had won the 1860 election, secession would not have happened then (or perhaps at all), despite the long-running tensions between South and North. Moreover, it seems likely that a different president could have managed any secession crisis without resorting to war because that president would have had the trust and legitimacy in the South that Lincoln lacked. (For example, one of Congress’s various efforts to resolve the secession crisis by constitutionally protecting slavery might have succeeded.) Or the South could have been allowed to secede, on the same principle that the colonies had claimed in declaring their independence from Britain. The South’s goal was just to leave the USA, and this was perfectly compatible with the continued existence and flourishing of the country that remained (though perhaps not with its pride). It was the South’s choice to declare independence from the USA, but it was the choice of President Lincoln’s government to go to war to force them to stay. Read more »

Ostinato

first their concerted honks—
unseen, …………then
as apparitions they rise
from foliage at the foot of the hill
framed in a window sash
they rise to the cackles of crows
already at breakfast in our yard
arrayed upon green, black notes
of an almost endless chord,
ostinato of the articulated
sounds of vees that appear overhead,
levitating geese in glass,
all of a boundless chord drawn-out,
a day in the life
……………………..they vanish
over the window top
truck tires hum on tar
dopplering down around a bend
played out
a last crow lifts off
speaking a
……………………..last word

Jim Culleny
9/5/18

by Joseph Shieber

As the quadrennial presidential and vice presidential debate season nears once more, we’ll soon see opinion pieces reminding us that debates have at most a very slight impact on the outcome of presidential contests.

Typically, the writers of those pieces frame their discussion as a warning not to place too much importance on the debates. I want to make a different argument about the presidential and vice presidential debates: we would do better to get rid of them altogether.

The crux of my argument against the presidential and vice presidential debates is that they don’t serve any of the audiences who might tune into them.

Those who follow politics already know the candidates’ track records and plans, so — as anyone familiar with the literature on the informativeness of job interviews can tell you — the debate doesn’t provide any salient information, just noise.

And what about those who aren’t informed consumers of political information? Focusing on the effect of debates on uninformed or undecided voters arguably distorts the discussion of the relative merits of the presidential candidates in ways that damage substantive coverage of political issues.

This is because, if they’re even watching the debates at all, uninformed or undecided voters are almost certainly focused on the wrong signals. Appreciating who refrained from perspiring, who wasn’t sighing annoyingly, or who had the snappiest one-line rebuttal doesn’t actually tell voters anything about who would promote policies that best represent those voters’ — and the country’s — interests.

And for the media, debates just provide another excuse to focus on horse race and style over track record and substance. Read more »

by Jackson Arn

It used to be
the guilty fantasy
of theory bros and voluntary beggars.
When turning points expired or wavered
they’d hold it to their chests at night,
a Molotov they didn’t dare ignite:
Could revolution, usually so plodding,
be brought about by some proud, precise Nothing?

By standing very still
and thinking, could you will
the universe into your orbit?
Rather than Changing
or its hotter cousin, Rearranging,
why not secrete a thin disinterest
and let society struggle to absorb it?
The best part was, it made the change-obsessed
look foolish for their interest
in lobbying, petitions, and the rest—
in lieu of noisy sawing, one sharp swish
to make the engagé seem babyish
and also, one supposes, slay the state,
though even that might be too animate,
too quick to grant the state its dying wish.
Put better: one smart drop of crimson paint
to make the canvas as a whole look faint.

When it came true,
as guilty wishes often do,
the shrieks of celebration shattered glass:
ten million bros in witty dresses
deadpanning in manufactured messes
or scribbling alien Os in fields of grass—
anything at all that had once seemed Nothing
now marked, from skydiver eyes, a happening
alloyed with Nothing, stronger than Nothing alone,
shuddering at so many hertzes
it made dogs moan,

dogs and the unlucky some
born with an ear for pandemonium,
who hear at all hours what they cannot see,
chords rich and fat and spoiled as gravity,
and feel, in bed or in the shower, a gnawing
lust for slow chromatic scales of sawing.

by Jackson Arn

Sughra Raza. Zoom patterns, July 2020.

Credit to whoever created these amazing video effects!

by Brooks Riley

by Robyn Repko Waller

Lack of choice is frustrating,  but sometimes choice — choosing for others — can be equally daunting

This August parents and guardians of children across the country are facing unenviable decisions about childcare and school in the time of COVID. Carers of school-age kids have been surveyed by the school district, if they are lucky, as to their preferences for the fall term: Would you prefer that Kid to return to face-to-face instruction, attending class with their teacher and friends, all while social distancing in masks? Or would you rather Kid learn remotely, in your home via Zoom class meetings and online apps? Perhaps you prefer to homeschool Kid this year? 

And then comes the long-awaited roll-out of the official school reopening plans: For some, there are disappointingly limited options, only the course of delivery chosen by the district or institution; that or homeschool. But, for some, there are more options: Kid can learn in the classroom, remote, or be homeschooled. It’s up to you, the parent or guardian. You’ve been afforded the gift of freedom of choice (unless those free will skeptics are right about our reality)! 

Now there are numerous ways in which this freedom of choice is problematic — or  perhaps isn’t actually a freedom of choice in the first place. These complicating factors of childcare have been much discussed in recent months: The reality on the ground is that COVID-related childcare changes have exacerbated existing socioeconomic inequalities, especially for those with essential or essentially in-person jobs, single parents, or those without back-up carers. On the one hand, those parents face job loss (and so critical income) if reliable workday care is not available, and on the other, they must send children back to f2f schooling even if they don’t believe it is wise to do so. Learning pods — small groups of children with private instruction — aren’t an option for most considering the cost. In this way, the choices made aren’t from an expansive freedom of choice.  Read more »

by Eric Miller

Syrinx

What was it, again, that, by 1877, Thomas H. Huxley decided to call the voice box of a bird? Syrinx. He alludes to a tale from Ovid.

Rough Arcadia’s peremptory god, Pan, bears a name proclaiming an appetite that would have everything. Now he wants sex with Syrinx. The nymph refuses. She sprints as far as the marshy bank of the river Ladon, asks her sisters to rescue her, and (perhaps with their assistance) evasively adopts the shape of a hollow reed. Frustrated of his object—using beeswax as connective matter—Pan confects his typifying pipe from the stems of the calamus plant that Syrinx has become. Unlike Pan, a bird carries its pipe internally. Its wild music pleasingly resembles that of Pan’s instrument, but enfranchised or escaped to an original nymph-like liberty. In a bird, the air resounds independently of human artifice. It is worth listening while the song lasts.

Does the name syrinx conjure not just Ovid, but the reed, also, that shakes in an oboe’s mouthpiece, a chanter’s, a bassoon’s? Located, often, where the trachea branches, equipped with a tympanum on the right side and on the left, a bird’s cartilaginous syrinx can produce two separate voices—the note held by neither a harmonic of the other—as the singer breathes out. Jean Dorst explains that an avian ear responds ten times faster than ours and, further, that the Wood Thrush of North America, in whistling, may alter its pitch—its frequency of vibration—two hundred times per second. I used to hear these thrushes in Toronto. Formerly, they nested near the house where I was raised. Read more »

I took this photo of a car passing by at night with a slow shutter speed (for the streaks of light) and with a quick flash at the end to freeze the darker parts of the car (that’s why the wheels, for example, are not blurred), and I liked the resulting effect. Photo taken on Brennerstrasse in Brixen, South Tyrol, in February of 2014.