multimedia monday: purity myth trailer

Via @courtwrites (and lots of others by now, but that's where I first saw the link!):

The Purity Myth Trailer from Media Education Foundation on Vimeo.

I read and reviewed Jessica Valenti's Purity Myth when it first came out back in 2009 and in my opinion it's the best of her published works to-date. I'm definitely going to check out the documentary version.

See also: my review of Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History.

multimedia monday: "automobile row"

Hanna and I live in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, just west of Boston University's main campus. Commonwealth Avenue stretches from Kenmore Square (near Fenway Park) to Boston College out in Newton. We live in an apartment building sandwiched between Comm Ave to the north and the town line of Brookline to the south, and the neighborhood in this little documentary is one through which we walk and ride the "T" on a regular basis:

The Kenmore Square building that now houses Barnes & Noble at BU was home to a dealer of Peerless automobiles. The Star Market by Packard’s Corner was once a Chevrolet dealership. And in between lay more than a mile of storefronts selling cars, parts, and accessories or repairing cars. In the 1920s there were more than 100 such businesses on and near that strip of Comm Ave. Downtown Boston had its “Piano Row” and its “Newspaper Row.” This was Boston’s “Automobile Row.”

 

The article which accompanies this video is quite interesting in its own right. I'm really impressed by the research that went into making the video -- obviously a few people spent some time in the BU college archives! -- and the way in which the historical images were edited into the present-day footage.

multimedia monday: "but mary his mother she nurses him / and baby jesus fell back to sleep"

When we were small, my mother sang us an alternate version of the Christmas carol "Away in a Manger" because we were upset by the factual error of a baby who supposedly didn't cry (being the eldest of three, I knew what a lie this was). In our version, Away in a Manger went like this:

Away in a manger,

No crib for His bed

The little Lord Jesus

Laid down His sweet head

The stars in the bright sky

Looked down where He lay

The little Lord Jesus

Asleep on the hay

The cattle are lowing

The poor Baby wakes

And little Lord Jesus

What crying he makes

But Mary his mother

She nurses him

And baby Jesus

Falls back to sleep

Needless to say when I joined the Holland Area Youth Chorale as a teenager and tried to insist on singing the song my way it didn't go over so well. Not just because it was "non-traditional" but because there was nursing! And probably some blasphemous implications that baby Jesus wasn't a perfectly angelic being.  But also nursing! (This was the same youth chorale that had issues with the word "breast" in a song about a robin. As in the bird.)

Our contemporary, American culture is so freaked by breastfeeding and I don't really get it. I've known enough folks for whom nursing didn't work that I know better than to be all "breastfeeding is the only responsible way to feed your infant" about it. But I also don't understand the politics of disgust and outage that surround nursing in public places.  What is particularly fascinating is to realize how recent a development this is (or rather, how recently the pendulum has swung back from the free-to-be-you-and-me 1970s). Gwen Sharp @ Sociological Images posted clips from Seseme Street recently that depicted women matter-of-factly nursing infants on screen. Here's one of them:

multimedia monday: "Americans only have children by accident"

The new House and Human Services classification of birth control as preventative medicine has the crazies at Fox News up in arms. Why? Stephen Colbert is on hand to explain: "If we give your daughters and granddaughters access to birth control they will instantly turn into wanton harlots with an insatiable sexual appetite!"

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Women's Health-Nazi Plan
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Via Feministing, RhRealityCheck and many others.

multimedia monday: archival conservation in action

This is a bit of shameless workplace and colleague promotion!

The Massachusetts Historical Society has just released its second YouTube video, featuring our art curator Anne Bentley discussing the process of conserving Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. It was directed and edited by my friend and colleague Heather Merrill.

You can view the digital version of Thomas Jefferson's manuscript (which Anne talks about in the video) online at the Thomas Jefferson Papers Electronic Archive.

multimedia monday: history of the menstrual cup

via Tenured Radical.

Just a quick disclaimer: I personally use and love the menstrual cup, which is our house is referred to as "the horrendous device." But before that I used and thanked the Goddess every month for tampons. So while I will happily share my positive experience with the menstrual cup I am not judgy about other peoples' preferences if they happen to differ from my own. Bodies are all different!

multimedia monday: photograph of jesus

It's been awhile since I posted a multimedia Monday post. This one is courtesy of my friend Heather, who is a former colleague at the MHS and now works in documentary film-making. While at the MHS, she worked on processing image permission requests (a job I now handle), so when she saw this film she figured it had my name all over it. I particularly love the stop-motion animation approach the film-maker used.

Photograph of Jesus by Laurie Hill in association with the Getty Images Short & Sweet Film Challenge from Hulton Archive on Vimeo.

I can't say I've received a request for a photograph of Jesus ... yet. But I've only been working on image permissions for five months, so I figure it's only a matter of time.

You can read more about the context in which the film was made on Vimeo.

multimedia monday: "my baby likes a bunch of authors"

NPR's On the Media recently did an hour-long show devoted to books, bibliophiles, and the future of the printed word. You can cherry-pick segments or stream the whole show over at their website; Unfortunately I can't embed it here. To give you an idea of the content, here's an excerpt from segment Books 2.0.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Reading a book, losing oneself in the imagination of an author is usually a solitary enterprise. So, too, is writing a book, says author Neil Gaiman.

NEIL GAIMAN: Writing is like death, a very lonely business. You do it on your own. Somebody is always sitting there figuring things out. Somebody is always going to have to take readers somewhere they have never been before.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But, as books move from printed page to networked screen, it grows easier for writers and readers to gather in the virtual margins to discuss the plot and characters and for readers to actually help shape them.

Crowd sourcing artistic expression in this way may seem contrary to the rules of creativity - books by committee? But Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book, sees an inevitable merging of writer and reader.

As someone who for decades has experimented with new forms for books, he’s used to people who grew up with traditional books reflexively rejecting his ideas, as when he explained his vision to a group of biographers.

BOB STEIN: One of the people in the room was one of these writers who gets a two-million-dollar advance, goes away for ten years, literally, writes a book, sells a lot of copies and then does it all over again. So I said to him, instead of getting your two-million-dollar advance and going away for ten years, how about if your publisher announced to the world so-and-so is going to start work on a biography of Barack Obama, who’s interested?

And n-thousands of people say, yes, I'm interested, and they subscribe to your project and they pay two dollars a year, whatever it is. I said, at the end of ten years you'll have a body of work, and you'll have the same two million dollars.

The difference will be that you've done this in public and you've done this with a group of people helping you in various ways.

And he, of course, as I expected, you know, put his fingers up in a cross, saying, oh, my God, that’s the most horrible thing I've ever heard of, that’s the last thing I ever want to do.

And I said to him, I'm willing to bet you that there’s a young woman who’s getting her PhD right now who grew up in MySpace, in Facebook, somebody who is comfortable and excited about working in a public collaborative space. She is a seed of the future.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But how do you make money in your vision, the subscription model?

BOB STEIN: It’s all subscription. The day that the

author is no longer interested, and she doesn't want to work with the readers any longer, she stops getting royalties.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, there are many authors who talk about a quiet place, a moment of inspiration, alone.

BOB STEIN: It’s very interesting. The very concept of an author, the very idea that somebody owned an idea, is extremely recent. Remix culture, you know, where something is constructed from lots of different parts, remix culture was actually the standard until print came along. Print actually changed everything because suddenly you weren't relying on -

BROOKE GLADSTONE: An oral tradition.

BOB STEIN: - on the oral tradition.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I'm simply raising the fact that whether or not the author holding up his hands in a get-thee-from-me-Satan position is a biographer or a philosopher or a novelist, there’s not necessarily a role, at least in the beginning of creation, for the reader.

BOB STEIN: I – we're, we’re definitely in a space where it’s almost impossible to argue about this.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Because you’re projecting into a future where that quiet place will no longer be necessary?

BOB STEIN: [SIGHS] Basically, yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about the thingness of books?

BOB STEIN: I'll miss it. I love holding the object in my hand. On the other hand, when I'm online and suddenly my daughter, who lives in London, shows up in the margin of something we're reading together, chills go up and down my spine. Being able to share an experience of reading with people whose judgment I care about is deeply rewarding.

Here’s a wonderful sort of factoid which may be helpful: The western version of the printing press is invented in 1454. It takes 50 years for page numbers to emerge. It took humans that long to figure out that it might be useful to put numbers onto the pages.

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

We're at the very, very beginning of the shift from the book to whatever is going to become more important than it. I realize that there’s a way to see what I'm saying and, and sort of say, there is a truly mad man, and, and in a lot of ways I, I can't prove it, but – you, you understand the problem.

Listen or read the full transcript over at On the Media.

And something fun that I can embed, here's the music video for a song they use on the show as a bridge between segments, the classic "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors," by the band Moxy Fruvous.

Happy reading (however you choose to go about it)!

multimedia monday: new economy of the poor

My audio for the week is an interview by Terry Gross of journalist Gary Rivlin, whose new book Broke USA explores the world of marginal finance.

Full transcript available at NPR.

I particularly like the way Rivlin discusses exploitation without flatting out the narrative into one of class warfare. He talks about the ways in which institutions like payday lenders and rent-to-own businesses provide services to poor neighborhoods and rural areas that are often vital and welcomed by their clientele. He doesn't come across as shaming poor people for being dupes of predatory loan companies or (for that matter) universally condemning financial institutions for providing services that are in high demand.

multimedia monday: facebook privacy on 'on the media'

While I mostly use facebook to occasionally look up contact information rather than do the sort of social networking it was designed for (that's what email, blogger, and twitter are for in my humble opinion), I liked this recent interview with Ryan Singel on NPR's On The Media about the dynamics of Facebook's campaign for personal non-privacy on the internet.

Full transcript available at One The Media's website.

What I particularly noticed is the point Singel makes about our society's supposed desire for less and less privacy. There's a lot of hand-wringing in the media about young people ("digital natives") being less and less concerned about personal privacy. But what if it's less a personal inclination and more that they (we) feel that loss of privacy is the price we pay for using the medium of the internet, which is inceasingly indespensible for moving through the world socially, politically, economically.

MARK ZUCKERBERG (audio clip): The Web is at a really important turning point right now. Up until recently, the default on the Web has been that most things aren't social and most things don't use your real identity. We're building towards a Web where the default is social. Every application and product will be designed from the ground up to use real identity and friends.

RYAN SINGEL: Mark Zuckerberg likes to say that Facebook is just reflecting the changing privacy norms of the public, but Facebook is, I believe, forging that change, not so much reflecting it.

I think it’s a little self-serving of him to say that, you know, we've all become more public people. A large part of that has to do with default settings that Facebook gives us. We're sort of being pushed into revealing more information. And now that Facebook is the place that these conversations happen, we kind of have to buy into that bargain just to be part of the conversation.

By and large I don't move around the web anonymously: I blog under my own identity and comment on others' blogs using my "annajcook" screen name which is just a mushed-together version of my real name. I use photos of my actual self in profile images.

However, I'm a big fan of this being my choice, and of knowing -- when I sign up for a service -- that I am able to understand the level of privacy or not-privacy that service is offering. And that I have a choice to opt in rather than opt out when those privacy settings change (which, let's face it, on the web is pretty much inevitable).

I find it a real accessibility issue that we're moving toward a web where "the default is social," where the default is using one's real identity, when more and more vital information is accessed through the internet -- including information that people may not wish to seek out while embedded in real-life social networks. Information about getting out of an abusive relationship, for example, or answers to a question related to sexual activity or identity.

This is definitely a conversation taking place in the library community -- how to help patrons navigate the new world of internet privacy concerns. I see it as a feminist issue as well, given the intersection of feminist politics with politics of vulnerable groups whose ability to maintain their privacy when desired is a legitimate safety concern in the real world (see the response to Gmail's launch of Buzz earlier this year). Social networking on the web is an awesome tool, but it's important that we enable folks to choose not to participate -- without making them opt out of using the internet entirely.

Update: The week following the story shared above, On The Media again visited the issue of facebook and internet privacy, asking what the price of expecting anonymity of data might be.

The Cost of Privacy
May 28, 2010
Facebook changed their privacy settings this week after much vocal criticism. The settings are easier to control and more people will presumably change their settings to private. The media unanimously decided that this was a good thing, but Bob asks whether it's that simple.

The two stories make an interesting comparison study, and once again I think OTM proves that it doesn't settle for the media meme.

multimedia monday: earth days

Back in April, Hanna was kind enough to set up the mystical VCR to tape the PBS American Experience documentary on Earth Day, eponymously titled Earth Days so I could watch it as sociopolitical background for my thesis.



You can watch the entire film online at the American Experience website, where they have also made a full transcript available.

I thought they did a particularly thoughtful job selecting the requisite talking heads, choosing a wide range of folks involve in environmental policy and activism from the 1960s through to the present. What I found most fascinating was the way in which environmental activism in the early days (prior to the Reagan administration) was not a strictly partisan issue -- controversial in some aspects, yes, but not seen as a Democratic cause (or a Republican cause for that matter).

The most striking part of the film, for me, was the section in which they discuss the commitment brought by the Carter administration to environmental sustainability in the late Seventies, galvanized in part by stagflation and the fuel crisis -- and then the Reagan administration's reversal of all, and more, of the previous decade's worth of progress toward a more environmentally-friendly America.

Denis Hayes, The Organizer: [Carter] had solar water heaters installed on the White House roof.

President Jimmy Carter (archival): A generation from now, this solar water heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest ventures ever undertaken by the American people.

Denis Hayes, The Organizer: He gave me the best job of my life running the Federal Solar Energy Research Institute and a budget that increased and doubled every year that I was there and the opportunity to really do some important things.

President Jimmy Carter (archival): The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly. It is a problem that we will not be able to solve in the next few years; it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. We must not be selfish or timid, if we hope to have a decent world for our children and our grandchildren. We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future rather than letting the future control us.

Hunter Lovins, The Motivator: Carter, I think, made a fundamental mistake, which was he saw the transition as one of constraint and of one of privation, and of giving up, and of lowered lifestyle.

Denis Hayes, The Organizer: In a period from 1973 to 1980 the price of oil went from $4 a barrel to $30 a barrel. And that clearly was enough to cause the public to support things like fuel efficiency standards for automobiles and other things that would have been inconceivable unless you’d had a crisis.

* * *

Ronald Reagan, Presidential Candidate (archival): They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been, that the America of the coming years will be a place where because of our past excesses, it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true. I don’t believe that and I don’t believe you do either. That’s why I am seeking the Presidency. I cannot and will not stand by and see this great country destroy itself. Our leaders attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts, who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our high standard of living, a result of thrift and hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance, which we must renounce as we join in sharing scarcity.

* * *

Denis Hayes, The Organizer: For reasons that I just cannot even begin to comprehend, Reagan did his very best to completely shut down the renewable energy effort. In the instance of the institute that I led, he reduced our budget by more the 80%, fired half of the staff and fired all of our contractors, two of whom subsequently went on to win Nobel Prizes. It was just devastating, but for one year we did have within an element a very good energy policy.

Ronald Reagan, Public Service Announcement (archival): It’s morning again in America. And under the leadership of President Reagan our country is prouder, and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to the way we were?

Reporter (voice over, archival): The Reagan White House has finally dismantled the last vestiges of the Carter Administration. Workmen have now taken down the solar water heating system installed on the White House roof in 1979.

I highly recommend watching some or all of Earth Days, since (at least for those of us who barely remember the Reagan era, let alone the 1960s and 70s) it gives us a chance to re-imagine the public discourse surrounding environmental issues in ways that don't lock us into partisan divides -- gives us a chance to imagine a time in the not so distant past (and hopefully in the not so distant future) when there was more emphasis on the fact that we're all in this together, as human beings on a living planet, and partisanship aside sustainability is really the only way forward if care to have a "forward" to be moving toward at all.

multimedia monday: clean living

Two videos for you this morning that attempt to teach young people just how narrow a road they must walk in order to survive into adulthood.

First, a health education film for 1950s college students. While it ostensibly targets both men and women, notice how much more time they spend panning the camera up and down the coeds' bodies, and how clearly the female students are positioned as primarily objects of the male gaze (forget about your homework, girls!). It's also clear that although the women are supposed to be sexually alluring they are not under any circumstances supposed to cross the line into sexual availability (slut!) or actual sexual activity.

And second, thanks to Hanna,who found this at Genevieve Valetine's livejournal, we have "Pamela's Prayer," a 1980s Christian anti-kissing propaganda film that teaches young adults to save their first kiss until after the marriage vows (or something truly unspeakable will happen).

As my friend Rachel put it: "CREEPIEST. DAD. EVAR."

Enjoy. And then go wash your eyeballs with carbolic soap.

multimedia monday: religion & politics

Welcome to the month of March! This month, I will be taking a two-week research trip to Lincoln, Oregon, in order to conduct oral history interviews with, and read through the personal archives of, faculty at the Oregon Extension. This work (fingers crossed) will provide the backbone of primary source material for my thesis on the early years of the program and its context in American countercultural, religious, and educational history.

Meanwhile, one of the alumni of the OE is a scholar of American religious history and author of numerous books on the subject of Evangelicalism in American life. One of his more recent books, God in the White House, charts the history of faith and the office of the Presidency during the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, you can listen to him discuss faith and politics with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air.

multimedia monday: 2-for-1 on mental health

This week, I bring you two segments from NPR's Talk of the Nation and On the Media that I listened to last week while entering metadata at Northeastern. First up, we have author Ethan Watters discussing his book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.


Transcript available at NPR.

I really like hearing medical professionals place illness and healing in cultural context: while physical and mental suffering is undeniably real, so often the way distress manifests itself is shaped by the time and place in which those suffering are located (much like, kofkof, sexual orientation and gender identity/expression).

Likewise, Johnathan Metzl, author of the new book The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease charts the evolution of schizophrenia through the latter half of the twentieth century from being a disease of white female passivity to being associated with male aggression (and diagnosed disproportionately in African American men).



Transcript available at On the Media.

Check 'em out. Learn something new today.

multimedia monday: stoned olympics

This week, in honor of the Olympics, I bring you the inimitable Eddie Izzard describing the (highly amenable) course of the Olympic games if everyone competed, well, stoned.

multimedia monday: "i can download protection for up to a thousand periods!"

TECH UPDATE: Reader Saskia Tielens alerted me to the fact that this video is marked "private" and will not play as an embed. I will try to locate a usable video! ~A.

Further tech update: Finally had a chance to find a YouTube version that wasn't private. The embed should work now ~A.

After Apple announced that it's latest gadget was going to be named the iPad, a number of my feminist blogs pointed out that "tablet computer" was not the first thing that came to mind when they heard the word. Turns out (hat tip to my friend Rachel for the video link) that MadTV was ahead of them.



I've seen critiques of the iPad/period jokes based on the fact that they're predicated on the idea that periods (and by implication the working of women's bodies) are gross and icky . . . and Hanna contends the joke is just a "groaner." Personally, while I recognize the validity of both of these criticisms, I also think the MadTV video is making fun of the cheeriness of menstruation product and Apple product marketing than passing judgment on the inherent value of either.

multimedia monday: 9

As the semester gets underway, I've been trying to find ways to organize the links I'd like to share here on the blog and also write smaller posts so the blog stays fresh but I don't begin to feel burdened by commentary. So in addition to the Sunday Smut list, I'm adding a "multimedia monday" weekly feature that's going to highlight one of the online audio or video links I've listened to or watched during the previous week.

To start us off, then, here's the trailer for the film 9, which was released last fall and which Hanna and I finally had a chance to watch this past Friday.


I really don't understand how this film got so little press when it came out, since (along with Coraline) it's easily the most magical bit of animation I've seen since Wall-E. Darker, perhaps. It certainly doesn't end on a cheerful note. But visually, it's a glorious piece of imagined reality: from the moment the story opens, you're sucked into the world of these small created beings who are all of the (humanity? well, we aren't quite sure) that is left on a post-apocalyptic world after the humans have destroyed themselves. All that's left, that is, except for malevolent machines.

The only real flaw, I thought, in the film, was its ending, which was surprisingly pat given the inventiveness of the rest of the story (and the storytelling team that's behind it). The surviving beings are left to make of the world what they will, hopefully doing a better job than those who came before. It's not a bad message, just a little . . . simplistic? unreflective? I'm not sure. I was not left satisfied. It shoehorned in a sort of adam-and-eve theme that explained the need for the one female voice actor in film otherwise full of male voices -- not that I opposed having a female character: I was kinda waiting for one to show up. But I also object to specifically creating one so that the end of the film contains the possibility of some sort of hetero reproductive model of future civilization. Personally? I'd put my money with the librarians.

That small critique aside, it was a gloriously realized world with great heroes and villains, and I heartily recommend it to y'all. Best wishes for the week ahead.