Michael J. Kramer's Blog, page 25

Rovings

february 2022 edition.David Hockney, Piscine á minuit, Paper Pool 19 , 1978.SoundsLuna, “Marquee Moon”Wilco, “Marquee Moon”Luna, Bewitched LiveWillie Nelson, “Touch Me”Willie Nelson, “Hands on the Wheel”Emily Bick Presents Adventures in Sound and Music, 03 February 2022I Start Counting, “Talk About the Weather“Claire Rousay and More Eaze, “Hands,” Never Stop Texting MeDown HIll Strugglers, Let The Rich Go BustSecret Museum of Mankind – Guitars Vol. 1: Prologue to Modern StylesCate Le Bon, Pompeii Death Is Not The End – The Hardanger Fiddle Magnetic Fields, QuickiesBelle and Sebastian, What to Look For in Summer (Live)Marxist Brothers, Greatest Hits of Early MusicMarvel Wastelanders: Black Widow podcastElvis Costello, All The Useless BeautyPunch Brothers, Hell on Church StreetJoy of Cooking, “Too Late But Not Forgotten”WordsMaurice Berger, The Crisis of CriticismSteven Biel, Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910-1945Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human RightsJagoda, Network AestheticsAnna Kornbluth, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social SpaceDavid Hollinger, ed. The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion Since World War IIHerbert Gutman, Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working ClassMelvyn Dubofsky, The State & Labor in Modern AmericaAlan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and RevolutionAlan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal StateDavid Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor StrugglesConner Garel, “Game Changer: Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry,” Gagosian Magazine, Winter 2021“Walls” Heads, Kisses, Battles: Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns @ Aargauer KunsthausHolly Hendry: Fatty Acids @ Stephen Friedman GalleryLeon Kossoff: A Life in Painting @ LA Louver Wang Gongxin: In-Betwee n @ White CubeA Painter… of sorts: Allan Kaprow, Selected Works 1953–1975 @ Hauser & Wirth Zurich David Hockney: People, Places & Things @ Walker Arts CenterFlorine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry @ The Jewish Museum“Stages”Sean Ardoin, Library of Congress American Folklife Homegrown ConcertSpektral Quartet & Samuel Adams, Once More, With Feeling! @ Constellation Chicago, 04 February 2022Bill Murray, “The Piano Has Been Drinking,” New Worlds: The Cradle of CivilizationTom Waits, “The Piano Has Been Drinking,” Fernwood TonightTom Waits, “The Piano Has Been Drinking,” The Late Late ShowTom Waits, “Step Right Up” @ RockpalastScreens Mambo 101: Rule of the Cool, Robert Farris Thompson Cobra Season 01Shadow Lines Season 02Steve Reinke’s Excuse of the RealRestlessLa Fortuna

Blah Blah

Ms. Fancy

Generations of Baby Boomers

you are a baby, whatever generation you are. now give us your money.

In a year of Super Bowl ads that seemed to mark a shift from Baby Boomers toward Gen Xers and older Millennials, E*Trade’s resuscitator Morgan Stanley offered the return of the geriatric stock market dabbler as infantile consumer. The company’s ad, titled “Off the Grid,” featured two executive suits flying by helicopter to a remote location to bring back the infamous baby stock trader of the late 2000s and early 2010s. The baby scoffs at them until he learns that today’s online traders are making decisions based on memes. Into the helicopter and back to the future he goes, meeting up with fellow baby stock expect Benny as the beats to Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” kick in with a firm thump.

There is something feverish and desperate about the ad. It is marked right at the start by the loud, Apocalypse Now sound of the chopper blades. They get your attention immediately, like a Vietnam vet PTSD flashback. As the reunion tour-vibe intensifies, one starts to wonder: is this a last grab for baby boomer dollars (“People have their money just sitting around doing nothing,” one of the suits frets, and it is worth remembering how disproportionately Baby Boomers have held on to wealth into their dotage) or is this a kind of generational switcheroo, in which Morgan Stanley is calculating that Gen Xers and older millennials are nothing more than Baby Boomers-in-training (“they’re getting crushed by inflation,” the other suit ads, bringing us right in to Covid times).

It’s just one high-stakes effort to get our attention during the 2022 Super Bowl, but the ad nonetheless serves as a reminder of the lurking disdain the financial industry has for everyone, from Baby Boomers to their children and grandchildren. The ad spits up the acidic notion that while we may think our generation won’t be like the last one, that we can get off the grid, that we can be more grownup, the financial powers that be are nonetheless smugly convinced that they’ve got us all firmly clasped in the same economic and cultural diaper.

Plotz

stanley wells on how historians pretend not to lose the plot, but do so anyway.

History has no plot. It happens randomly, goes beyond human control. People plot, but things go amiss. The desire to capture the past is unquenchable but fruitless. A historian, whether of recent or long-past events, tries to tell it how it was, but the attempt is vain. History books have to have beginnings, middles, and ends. Whether consciously or not, their authors tell stories from particular perspectives; they choose who and what to write about; they select from the multifariousness of human experience, imposing order on randomness, seeing what they choose to see or what they subconscious minds put before them, setting their stories within a frame of their devising, revealing subjectivity even as they seek to convey an impression of objectivity.

— Stanley Wells

How Do We Learn About Technology?

billy klüver on developing new inventions to better understand what technology is or could be.Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg, 1966. Photo: Yale Joel/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images.

Only by making new inventions which are not conditioned by ordinary attitudes can we learn about technology.

— Billy Klüver (h/t W. Patrick McCray, Making Art Work)

Folk Music Emergency Exit

Toward a Multimodal Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project

digital public history as folk music hootenanny—part 2 of 3, now published at ncph’s history@work blog.

Published at the National Council on Public History’s History@Work blog, the three-part blog post “Digital public history as folk music hootenanny” explores the development of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project.

Part 1 relates how I came into contact with this remarkable “analog” archive itself.

Part 2 retraces how bringing the project along required working cooperatively with librarians, archivists, students, technologists, scholars, and participants.

Part 3 looks to where the project is headed next in its attempts to make fruitful links between folk music revivalism (with all its problems and issues as well as its possibilities and potential) and digital public history futurism.

Snow This Way

sign of the times.

Oy Canada

at the rochester main street armory, canada gets some very unequal flag treatment.