To be precise, we know that in 1888 a some lucky factory employees audience in Leeds England saw several motion picture performances, well before they or anyone else had ever seen a single (halftone) photo in even the biggest national newspapers, books or magazines.
And this in what was the richest and most advanced civilization on earth.
You might expect still photos in books and newspaper to be easier to achieve than motion film but you would be quite wrong.
Those films from over 125 years ago still look engrossing today.
The first well known periodical halftones came about a dozen years later and took another dozen years after that before run of the mill halftones on good coated paper looked almost as good as original black and white snapshots of the same era.
Many small rural weeklies never did have any halftones in their papers, right into the 1950s ---- unless a national advertiser sent a flexible rubber photoengraving for a special ad.
A small town boy like Henry Dawson, born into a middle class railway man's family an hour away from big city Halifax by dad's train, possibly saw a motion film there before he saw a memorable newspaper halftone.
Young Dawson certainly remembered his first films but probably gave the daily newspaper photos from far off Africa and India no mind - the hobby of snap photography was the rage all around him growing up and halftone photos must have seemed hum drum to him.
But it was not. It marked a dramatic break in human history.
For the very first time those vivid life-like half tones - and later the cinema newsreels ---- made 'the foreign' seem suddenly very close, over familiar and 'in your face'.
And to a great many - but not to Henry --- it was all sort of scary....
Friday, April 15, 2016
Modernity began with 1870s reaction to a Canadian-owned NYC newspaper half-tone
Traditional emphasis on Victorian Era globalization and modernization always focuses on speed - faster travel of things & beings having weight and faster communication of immaterial things : images & ideas.
I think this is totally wrong - it was the shock of the totally new, not merely the faster old, that marked this disruptive process of modernization - and led to the counter-reaction we know as Modernity.
For thousands of years, all manner of people had travelled abroad and then reported back their observations -- in speech, text, drawings & paintings.
Even if they now travelled back from NYC to Southampton in mere days not weeks, this is of no real consequences for ongoing stories - which most news stories usually are.
After all, American southern whites regularly lynching Negroes was an ongoing story for over 100 years - can another account really matter if it is delivered to readers in mid-January 1912 rather than six weeks later in early-March 1912 ?
I argue not.
Instead it was three inventions grouped around photography that was what was shockingly new : photography itself, the halftone newspaper photo and the silent motion picture.
(The latter two - by strange but true coincidence - arriving onto the global consciousness in the same year, 1895.)
Even if the penny stamp and the telegraph, together with the steam railway, steam ship and steam printing press, hadn't been invented in the 19th century, the photography revolution would still have overthrown the old known certain world.
Because, put simply, mass travel abroad still doesn't exist.
Most poor people in poorer countries have never gone abroad and even most people in richer countries have merely gone to a small foreign resort where they spent a week or two among their own kind in a semi-gated community ---getting to know Mexico's sunshine very well - but not its people or its culture.
Even today, even among the rich, we rely on secondhand accounts & firsthand images to supply us with our mental picture of at least 99% of the world's land and water surface.
(How many billionaires have ever been to the South Pole or the Gaza Strip ?)
Written & verbal & hand drawn/painted accounts are always filtered : secondhand.
We know photos and films can lie but no where as easily as can these others.
Foreign audio isn't at all helpful : foreign languages are what makes other people foreign.
But even a silent black and white motion film of two people fooling around from over 120 years ago remains fully readable today via body language - and readable by both children and illiterates.
But details, as opposed to impossible to fake body language, are still best read off a high resolution/large format still photo in a newspaper , magazine or book.
Not only is the image way way way sharper than an image caught on a half frame of 35mm motion film shoot at a very slow shutter speed, it remains on the page forever, to be carefully studied, not seen but once & fleetingly on a distant screen.
I argue it was the invention of the practical periodical halftone screening process (by two Montrealers incidentally) that made mass market newspapers worth buying --- their own unique sell.
It took a fair bit longer to have routine halftones work well on cheap coarse porous newsprint than on the expensive hard smooth coated stock used in magazine and book halftones, but it eventually got 'good enough'.
Previously, one could wait for a wealthier newspaper-buying neighbour to tell a friend who tells friend, until it reached you, that the Tsar had been shot.
But actually seeing the fallen Tsar's body and his bloodied killer led away in chains - to actually see them - that was well worthy buying a paper for !
I believe it was the arrival of mass market halftone photos that were cheap, plentiful and accurate, that made the still-distant foreign and the new seem real enough and close enough to rouse defensive primeval fears that lay behind the surface aggression of Modernity.....
I think this is totally wrong - it was the shock of the totally new, not merely the faster old, that marked this disruptive process of modernization - and led to the counter-reaction we know as Modernity.
For thousands of years, all manner of people had travelled abroad and then reported back their observations -- in speech, text, drawings & paintings.
Even if they now travelled back from NYC to Southampton in mere days not weeks, this is of no real consequences for ongoing stories - which most news stories usually are.
After all, American southern whites regularly lynching Negroes was an ongoing story for over 100 years - can another account really matter if it is delivered to readers in mid-January 1912 rather than six weeks later in early-March 1912 ?
I argue not.
Instead it was three inventions grouped around photography that was what was shockingly new : photography itself, the halftone newspaper photo and the silent motion picture.
(The latter two - by strange but true coincidence - arriving onto the global consciousness in the same year, 1895.)
Even if the penny stamp and the telegraph, together with the steam railway, steam ship and steam printing press, hadn't been invented in the 19th century, the photography revolution would still have overthrown the old known certain world.
Because, put simply, mass travel abroad still doesn't exist.
Most poor people in poorer countries have never gone abroad and even most people in richer countries have merely gone to a small foreign resort where they spent a week or two among their own kind in a semi-gated community ---getting to know Mexico's sunshine very well - but not its people or its culture.
Even today, even among the rich, we rely on secondhand accounts & firsthand images to supply us with our mental picture of at least 99% of the world's land and water surface.
(How many billionaires have ever been to the South Pole or the Gaza Strip ?)
Written & verbal & hand drawn/painted accounts are always filtered : secondhand.
We know photos and films can lie but no where as easily as can these others.
Foreign audio isn't at all helpful : foreign languages are what makes other people foreign.
But even a silent black and white motion film of two people fooling around from over 120 years ago remains fully readable today via body language - and readable by both children and illiterates.
But details, as opposed to impossible to fake body language, are still best read off a high resolution/large format still photo in a newspaper , magazine or book.
Not only is the image way way way sharper than an image caught on a half frame of 35mm motion film shoot at a very slow shutter speed, it remains on the page forever, to be carefully studied, not seen but once & fleetingly on a distant screen.
I argue it was the invention of the practical periodical halftone screening process (by two Montrealers incidentally) that made mass market newspapers worth buying --- their own unique sell.
It took a fair bit longer to have routine halftones work well on cheap coarse porous newsprint than on the expensive hard smooth coated stock used in magazine and book halftones, but it eventually got 'good enough'.
Previously, one could wait for a wealthier newspaper-buying neighbour to tell a friend who tells friend, until it reached you, that the Tsar had been shot.
But actually seeing the fallen Tsar's body and his bloodied killer led away in chains - to actually see them - that was well worthy buying a paper for !
I believe it was the arrival of mass market halftone photos that were cheap, plentiful and accurate, that made the still-distant foreign and the new seem real enough and close enough to rouse defensive primeval fears that lay behind the surface aggression of Modernity.....
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Doctors asked to assist at suicides for same reason they're asked to assist at executions
Doctors are usually hired to use their scientific expertise to save lives but that fact hasn't made them any less popular to employ to salve the consciences of people who are about to kill - kill others or even themselves.
Doctor assisted suicides in Canada, doctor observed executions in America, or doctor conducted Aktion T4 and Holocaust murders in Germany ----- having a doctor about makes violent death seem almost like a medical procedure and eases consciences big time.
Look, if you want to kill yourself or others, just do it yourself and man up and take full responsibility.
Don't drag in others to spread the blame about.
God isn't fooled....
Doctor assisted suicides in Canada, doctor observed executions in America, or doctor conducted Aktion T4 and Holocaust murders in Germany ----- having a doctor about makes violent death seem almost like a medical procedure and eases consciences big time.
Look, if you want to kill yourself or others, just do it yourself and man up and take full responsibility.
Don't drag in others to spread the blame about.
God isn't fooled....
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Modernity Faithful : Rex Murphy
Modernity is all about faith, not facts --- its about you what you want to think is true and not what is actually true.
Case in point, commentator Rex Murphy and seemingly everybody at Canada's CBC, that James Fenimore Cooper of news accuracy.
He and they have been insisting for that last few days that if the federal NDP has its way, Canada's 'energy' sector will be closed down and 'all' its jobs lost.
How true ?
(Not that the truth ever mattered much to Murphy, not when faith could make anything he wanted seem factual.)
Now it easy to see why the provinces of Alberta and to a lesser extent, Saskatchewan, Big Lie to the world, whenever they claim that to close down their provincial petroleum industries would be to shut down Canada's energy industry.
Believe me, dear reader, if every province in Canada had huge oil and gas reserves, Albertans would not be so intent on saving the processing of globe-killing fossil fuels.
Alberta really fears losing its unique hold on a revered Canadian resource - the only stuff that currently fuels our all important personal cars.
If you think Albertans hate the NDP LEAP Manifesto, you should hear all the death threats they make against Musk's Tesla electric car.
A trendy popular car car that uses Quebec hydro power, not Alberta gas : "the horror, the horror !!!!"
Back to the odious Murphy.
Hydro dams won't shut down under the NDP plan, nor wind farms, solar farms, the burning of wood chips and extracting heat from air or ground via heat pumps.
The real problem I have with Rex is that there is far far more energy powering life on Earth than petroleum or indeed all the forms of directly human harnessed renewable energy.
For a start the sun does most of our heating for us --- heating up the soil, water and air enough to make it possible to easily grown corn in southern Ontario -------- but not at icy cold CFB Alert or on icy cold Mars, even under glass.
It fuels the liquid-vapour water cycle, so necessary for any form of life.
As well it powers the photosynthesis system that feeds us all and gives us enough new oxygen to replace the stuff that daily slips off for good into outer space.
If Rex doubts, he should just try to heat, feed and supply with oxygen and liquid water a small glassed-in city on ice block Mars, using only fossil fuels (I include uranium among them), to begin to appreciate what old-fangled solar energy already does to keep this planet viable for life.
In point of fact, all the fossil fuels contribute far far far less than 1% to the Earth's annual total energy consumption.
So Rex & CBC relax.
We humans will need all the energy we did before we shut down coal and oil and their direct jobs for a few generations, and we still be able to consume the same amount of energy as before.
It is just that now that energy would come from renewable energy : hydro, wood & straw, wind, solar, geothermal.
All which take a lot of human employees to manage - most of their new employees will probably come from the former fossil fuel industries.
Yes, energy use will shift and yes jobs titles will shift , but there will be no basic change in either energy use per capita or in energy industry employees per capita.
But Alberta - financial and electoral heartland of the Canadian Conservative Party - will then be reduced to just one province among all ten energy producing provinces.
That dire possibility ---- for the Tories --- is what is truly driving (former Conservative party candidate) Murphy's animus against LEAP ...
Case in point, commentator Rex Murphy and seemingly everybody at Canada's CBC, that James Fenimore Cooper of news accuracy.
He and they have been insisting for that last few days that if the federal NDP has its way, Canada's 'energy' sector will be closed down and 'all' its jobs lost.
How true ?
(Not that the truth ever mattered much to Murphy, not when faith could make anything he wanted seem factual.)
As long as Oil holds the whip hand, so does Notley & Harper's Alberta
Believe me, dear reader, if every province in Canada had huge oil and gas reserves, Albertans would not be so intent on saving the processing of globe-killing fossil fuels.
Alberta really fears losing its unique hold on a revered Canadian resource - the only stuff that currently fuels our all important personal cars.
If you think Albertans hate the NDP LEAP Manifesto, you should hear all the death threats they make against Musk's Tesla electric car.
A trendy popular car car that uses Quebec hydro power, not Alberta gas : "the horror, the horror !!!!"
Back to the odious Murphy.
Hydro dams won't shut down under the NDP plan, nor wind farms, solar farms, the burning of wood chips and extracting heat from air or ground via heat pumps.
The real problem I have with Rex is that there is far far more energy powering life on Earth than petroleum or indeed all the forms of directly human harnessed renewable energy.
For a start the sun does most of our heating for us --- heating up the soil, water and air enough to make it possible to easily grown corn in southern Ontario -------- but not at icy cold CFB Alert or on icy cold Mars, even under glass.
It fuels the liquid-vapour water cycle, so necessary for any form of life.
As well it powers the photosynthesis system that feeds us all and gives us enough new oxygen to replace the stuff that daily slips off for good into outer space.
Send Rex to Mars --- to prove up his fatuous claims
If Rex doubts, he should just try to heat, feed and supply with oxygen and liquid water a small glassed-in city on ice block Mars, using only fossil fuels (I include uranium among them), to begin to appreciate what old-fangled solar energy already does to keep this planet viable for life.
In point of fact, all the fossil fuels contribute far far far less than 1% to the Earth's annual total energy consumption.
So Rex & CBC relax.
We humans will need all the energy we did before we shut down coal and oil and their direct jobs for a few generations, and we still be able to consume the same amount of energy as before.
It is just that now that energy would come from renewable energy : hydro, wood & straw, wind, solar, geothermal.
All which take a lot of human employees to manage - most of their new employees will probably come from the former fossil fuel industries.
Yes, energy use will shift and yes jobs titles will shift , but there will be no basic change in either energy use per capita or in energy industry employees per capita.
But Alberta - financial and electoral heartland of the Canadian Conservative Party - will then be reduced to just one province among all ten energy producing provinces.
That dire possibility ---- for the Tories --- is what is truly driving (former Conservative party candidate) Murphy's animus against LEAP ...
Popular Eugenics : Gr 8 Grammar
For an entire school year, I endured Nova Scotia's Grade Eight grammar circa 1964-1965, a subject taught at a level that wasn't at all like brain surgery or rocket science only because it was much much harder.
Much harder that is, than any other subject a thirteen year old student usually was expected to comprehend ---- or ever should have been expected to comprehend.
Since 1965 was the very last year of the Age of Modernity and of Exclusion, this grammar course was in fact the last throw of the era of popular eugenics.
Grammar fears were never as much a moral panic before and after 1875-1965, as they were during it.
Intense grammar instruction grew up with 1924's Johnson-Reed Act and as just as that legislation exclude from the external borders from all foreign beings, the grammar teachers worked to exclude all foreign thoughts (from radio,comics,TV, black singers,films, Jewish comedians) from illegally crossing the internal mental borders into the brains of the nations' middle class WASP children.
Even as a kid, I could see how much more angry they were if the phrase 'ain't' dropped from the lips of those of us thought likely headed to university rather than from those of us thought headed for typing jobs and the manual trades.
They didn't seem to mind poor kids talking trash --- their trash --- they just didn't want the pure Anglo Saxon tongue to shack up with that trash talk and nine months later produce some miscegenated slangy baby.
The designers of these grammar courses were very smart.
They didn't really expect any student to grow up able to quickly parse a sentence and extract the past subjunctive anterior, they just wanted to bash our brains in with all these highly technical grammar terms in order to impress upon us the high importance that adults and employers gave to speaking like a BBC announcer.
Even back in Grade Three, in 1960, I was scolded so many times for insisting that those things up in the sky were 'airplanes' and not 'aeroplanes'.
Grammar teachers as eugenicists : working full out to encourage the heightened breeding of pure Anglo Saxon English and sterilize all the impure Negroid English...
Much harder that is, than any other subject a thirteen year old student usually was expected to comprehend ---- or ever should have been expected to comprehend.
Since 1965 was the very last year of the Age of Modernity and of Exclusion, this grammar course was in fact the last throw of the era of popular eugenics.
Grammar fears were never as much a moral panic before and after 1875-1965, as they were during it.
Intense grammar instruction grew up with 1924's Johnson-Reed Act and as just as that legislation exclude from the external borders from all foreign beings, the grammar teachers worked to exclude all foreign thoughts (from radio,comics,TV, black singers,films, Jewish comedians) from illegally crossing the internal mental borders into the brains of the nations' middle class WASP children.
Even as a kid, I could see how much more angry they were if the phrase 'ain't' dropped from the lips of those of us thought likely headed to university rather than from those of us thought headed for typing jobs and the manual trades.
They didn't seem to mind poor kids talking trash --- their trash --- they just didn't want the pure Anglo Saxon tongue to shack up with that trash talk and nine months later produce some miscegenated slangy baby.
Last of the eugenicists
The designers of these grammar courses were very smart.
They didn't really expect any student to grow up able to quickly parse a sentence and extract the past subjunctive anterior, they just wanted to bash our brains in with all these highly technical grammar terms in order to impress upon us the high importance that adults and employers gave to speaking like a BBC announcer.
Even back in Grade Three, in 1960, I was scolded so many times for insisting that those things up in the sky were 'airplanes' and not 'aeroplanes'.
Grammar teachers as eugenicists : working full out to encourage the heightened breeding of pure Anglo Saxon English and sterilize all the impure Negroid English...
modernization is mongrelization is unconscious involuntary syncretism
Modernity , I always insist, was the self-conscious (hence the capital "M") and panicky response of the global educated middle class to the insistent , insidious, unconscious, involuntary, syncretism and mongrelization of modernization (hence the small letter "m").
The faster the lingo of the Jewish-Negro-Italian crooners seduced its way inside their children's psyche via Tin Pan Alley sheet music and records (and later via the radio and the movies) the faster their parents passed Jim Crow segregation laws against Negroes within and against darkish Immigrants without.
The Whiteys claimed - at the time - that they feared a day when the dark, red and yellow races took over completely and nothing of the white culture would remain.
I personally doubt that any of them believed that, even back then.
What they feared more - because they saw it happening daily - was the increasing miscegenation of both their culture and of the culture of the foreign seeming Negroes & Immigrants into something new : a syncretization of all cultures.
As in laying down Negro rhythms and ostinatos over European harmony and instrumentation.
If this process happened fastest in big cities, the bigger the better, we needn't struggle to suggest why.
In an isolated Mid West small town with just one strong radio signal on the dial, that station played whatever the advertisers among the small town power elites wanted - the German-oriented classic music styles familiar from their parents' original North West European cultures.
But in big city Memphis, every child with access to the family radio when Ma and Pa was out, could twist the dial and pick up sounds from the local black station - by sheer accident - and then get hooked on its infectious vigour and sass.
The term 'modernization' refers to the technology of the new go-anywhere -and-everywhere pipelines of for-profit communication and transportation.
By contrast, the term 'mongrelization' refers to the two way content that filled that go anywhere pipeline.....
The faster the lingo of the Jewish-Negro-Italian crooners seduced its way inside their children's psyche via Tin Pan Alley sheet music and records (and later via the radio and the movies) the faster their parents passed Jim Crow segregation laws against Negroes within and against darkish Immigrants without.
The Whiteys claimed - at the time - that they feared a day when the dark, red and yellow races took over completely and nothing of the white culture would remain.
I personally doubt that any of them believed that, even back then.
What they feared more - because they saw it happening daily - was the increasing miscegenation of both their culture and of the culture of the foreign seeming Negroes & Immigrants into something new : a syncretization of all cultures.
As in laying down Negro rhythms and ostinatos over European harmony and instrumentation.
If this process happened fastest in big cities, the bigger the better, we needn't struggle to suggest why.
In an isolated Mid West small town with just one strong radio signal on the dial, that station played whatever the advertisers among the small town power elites wanted - the German-oriented classic music styles familiar from their parents' original North West European cultures.
But in big city Memphis, every child with access to the family radio when Ma and Pa was out, could twist the dial and pick up sounds from the local black station - by sheer accident - and then get hooked on its infectious vigour and sass.
The term 'modernization' refers to the technology of the new go-anywhere -and-everywhere pipelines of for-profit communication and transportation.
By contrast, the term 'mongrelization' refers to the two way content that filled that go anywhere pipeline.....
Monday, April 11, 2016
what Age of Exclusion excluded (mostly) was complexity and uncertainty...
Our post-1965 Age of Inclusion is learning to include uncertainty along with all the other minorities in its considerations - and this is a very good thing at a time when the Globe faces its first ever existential crisis brought on by the wilful hubris of sentient beings.
Hubris is what flourishes whenever uncertainty and complexity is deliberately excluded from conscious thought - as it did in the Age of Exclusion from 1875 to 1965.
That Age had only enough intellectual vigour to be able to tick just one of two possible boxes : 'the simple pure certain universal right answer' or 'the complex, uncertain,contingent, impure, wrong answer'.
No room whatsoever for boxes for possible answers like 'we don't know' or 'need more information' or 'it all depends on the particular circumstances'.
The decision to devote scarce war resources, in the dying days of WWII ,to continue to make malt syrup, as Kurt Vonnegut did, to succour pure Ayran mothers-to-be obviously came from the right answer box in German eyes.
Just as the shower deaths, destined for impure Jewish women to 'mothers-to-be' to be useful slave labour, obviously came from the Germans' wrong answer box...
Hubris is what flourishes whenever uncertainty and complexity is deliberately excluded from conscious thought - as it did in the Age of Exclusion from 1875 to 1965.
That Age had only enough intellectual vigour to be able to tick just one of two possible boxes : 'the simple pure certain universal right answer' or 'the complex, uncertain,contingent, impure, wrong answer'.
No room whatsoever for boxes for possible answers like 'we don't know' or 'need more information' or 'it all depends on the particular circumstances'.
The decision to devote scarce war resources, in the dying days of WWII ,to continue to make malt syrup, as Kurt Vonnegut did, to succour pure Ayran mothers-to-be obviously came from the right answer box in German eyes.
Just as the shower deaths, destined for impure Jewish women to 'mothers-to-be' to be useful slave labour, obviously came from the Germans' wrong answer box...
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