Albion State Butchery, ca.1925
Three butchers posing with their delivery vans in front of the Albion State Butchery. The men are wearing striped butchers’ aprons and waistcoats and one of them has a large leather coin bag over his shoulder
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eight hours sleep a myth, say experts//the age
“…If you find that you can’t easily drift back off you might want to take a leaf out of the pages of history and engage in some low-stimulus activity for an hour or two rather than sit there worrying about it.”
more on the X-files, the 90s, and conspiracy
More than the ugly clothes, more than the overly coiffed hairstyles, I think my favorite random ‘period piece’ element of this show is when they reference things like (in this episode) the Jim Bakker scandal, or the Bosnian War, or the (recent, to them!!) fall of the Berlin Wall, because this stuff really does set the stage. This is a political show — this is a show about politics more than it is a show about aliens or monsters, and what’s fascinating to me watching it now is how much the political landscape has been demonstrably altered in the last twenty years.
I mean, if she had not been a frequent guest on The Howard Stern Show (which my parents have always loved) in my childhood while pursuing her modeling and acting career, I would not have any idea who Jessica Hahn is. I imagine a lot of these pop cultural references fly over the heads of people my age watching this show (including me), because they’re so specifically topical to the late 80s and early 90s.
In “E.B.E.” when they showed a scene set in Iraq in the teaser, I was struck by the fact that the Iraqis appeared to have a very functional air force operating — then I was like OH RIGHT because it’s 1993 and we haven’t destroyed their entire infrastructure yet. Because the international political stage is in a state of rebuilding after the fall of the U.S.S.R., as opposed to a state of immediate and unrelenting chaos due to wars that won’t end. The conspiracy plot itself relies overwhelmingly on the idea that the U.S. Government is a totally solidified superpower completely in control of everything going on within its borders — terrorism hasn’t even been mentioned yet, aside from a brief reference to the failed 1993 WTC bombing in “Squeeze”.
It’s just interesting because this show has been so often replicated — as Fringe, most recently — but never seems to hit quite the same successful note with critics or general audiences, and I wonder if that isn’t because this concept was so specific to the immediate post-Cold War era.
Just food for thought.
yeah, I think contemporary Western narratives about vast conspiracies are generally less zeitgeisty than they were in the 90s. (does contemporary still mean post 9/11 or are we post-post-9/11 now? discuss.) the x-files in particular is also very informed by pre-90s shit from Chris Carter’s formative years — the Watergate hearings, for example, are a bit of a leitmotif. so the Red Scare is no longer really a thing in the X-files, but you’ve still got that heightened paranoia, this time directed at the sole superpower. (there are a couple of episodes about Russia but they are boring and confusing and I don’t remember what happens in them.)
the show’s about the enemy within — not in the sense of watching out for spies of foreign powers, but in the sense of there being vast structures you are inescapably embedded in that are corrupt. this pops up thematically in a number of different ways. most obviously, our protagonists are FBI agents struggling against their mysterious superiors, rather than independent truth-seekers. the possibility of building an effective counter-power is not really considered in this narrative — you do get some sympathetic characters who are working outside the US government (the Lone Gunmen), but they’re largely support crew and they don’t generally drive their own stories. on a more metaphorical level there’s the constant strand of storylines about the violation of bodily autonomy and implantation of disease or danger-causing objects — cancer, microchips implanted under the skin, forced pregnancy, and orifice-invading mind-controlling monsters. even the aliens aren’t really played as alien — there’s a constant question over whether aliens exist, or whether the government is using their potential existence as a smokescreen, or whether the “aliens” might actually be from Earth.
you can definitely do post 9/11 paranoia, of course, but you would have to do a significant retool and I just think the show was a bit creatively tapped out by 2001. but I maintain that the slow collapse of the internal continuity of the show was an amazing mirror of the change in popular belief re: conspiracy vs. chaos as the driving force behind international and US domestic politics.
…It is logical to argue that if bobbed hair is wrong because it makes men and women look alike, natural breasts which make women look more different from men should be considered meritorious. However, many things in this world do not depend on argument, but on some emperor’s edict or warlord’s sword.
Otherwise, to those women guilty of bobbed hair will be added those guilty of natural breasts, or even those guilty of natural feet. A woman has so many parts to her body, life is very hard indeed. "
— Lu Xun, “Anxious Thoughts on Natural Breasts”, 1927.
Secret Side of a City//The Age
“…it takes a certain sensitivity - and some imagination - to discern the true nature of a particular story, or to guess what went on at a certain building, or to suspect the ulterior purpose of a public lavatory. ”People see a place differently if they have a particular interest,” he says. ”So you can be walking down Swanston Street in 1950, 1960 or 1970 and see things that other people don’t see at all - or see them but have no idea what they mean. Or you can see them with what might be described as a ‘queer eye’, a gay sensibility.”
Such places might be the vegetarian restaurant in Swanston Street that was once Val’s coffee shop - a much-loved bohemia frequented by artists, theatrical types, activists and camp men and women (as they were then known). Or what is considered Melbourne’s oldest gay pick-up spot, a urinal outside the Queen Victoria Hospital, known as such since the 1860s (it was removed in the 1990s).
Because homosexuality was criminalised for so long in Victoria, it was pushed underground into such places. ”For camp women and men, social disapproval made it difficult for romantic or sexual relationships to emerge in the ordinary ways available to heterosexuals - through family, church, clubs and at work,” Wayne Murdoch writes in Secret Histories.
The walks that Willett conducts range about the CBD and inner suburbs. This year’s walk, as part of the Midsumma festival, will focus on the ’50s, an era when suspicion, oppression and police entrapment of gay men were at their height.
The Midsumma history walk is on January 22. Bookings at midsumma.org.au, alga.org.au
— From “Colors/Mauve” By Shelley Jackson (via modernandmaterialthings)
origin of the name “bluetooth”
Harald Blåtand was King of Denmark from approximately A.D. 940 to 985. During his reign King Harald is reported to have united Denmark and Norway and to have brought Christianity to Scandinavia. Apparently “Blåtand” translates, at least loosely, to “Blue Tooth.” The origins of this name are uncertain, although it was relatively common during this time for kings to have a distinguishing name. (Some histories say that the name is attributed to Harald’s dark complexion; some accounts even indicate that King Harald was known for teeth of a bluish hue resulting from his fondness for blueberries, although this is probably folklore.) For a technology with its origins in Scandinavia, it seemed appropriate to the SIG founders to name the organization that was intended to unify multinational companies after a Scandinavian king who united countries. Thus was born the Bluetooth name, which initially was an unofficial code name for the project but today has become the trademark name of the technology and the SIG.
file under: shit I did not know.
Illustration of Voltairine de Cleyre, watercolour and ink on watercolour paper. Quick and impulsive. Could be tidier. Ah well.
I have a deep and long-standing fascination with this woman. The flowers behind her are wilting roses, I’m not sure if that really comes across very well.
reblogging here for my Voltairine de Cleyre loving followers. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.
Is it possible to imagine a world without police? Actually it’s easy, if you’re a historian. London didn’t get a professional police force until 1829; New York didn’t get one until 1845. Before that, law enforcement was more of a private affair. Crimes at night were somewhat deterred by watchmen, who were in some cases volunteers and in others paid, but by day there was little to no government-organized, government-subsidized surveillance. If you were the victim of a crime, you generally had to identify the criminal yourself and then pay a fee to a government official such as a constable or a bailiff in order to have them bring the criminal to justice.
The system worked, however imperfectly. Most people don’t obey the law because they fear punishment; they obey it because they feel that they belong to society and share the values embodied in its laws. When a professional police force was first deployed in England, homicide rates had already been dropping for centuries. In “American Homicide,” the scholar Randolph Roth doubts that the introduction of police into America improved the prevention of violent crime. While murder did decrease in late-nineteenth-century America, Roth credits the taming effect of working in factories and even speculates that police may themselves have contributed to homicide rates, thanks to their unfortunate tendency to kill suspects in the course of their law-enforcement duties.
So why invent police? What are they for? In “The Institutional Revolution,” the economic historian Douglas W. Allen theorizes that their purpose was to preserve manufactured goods from theft. Before the nineteenth century, Allen writes, theft was easy to detect. If your transport was a horse, you could recognize it. (For that matter, it could recognize you.) Not only was your coat hand sewn, but a tailor looking at its fabric could probably tell who had woven it. If any of these items were stolen, they were easy to reclaim if they could be found. With the advent of the industrial revolution, handmade goods gave way to standardized commodities, which all look alike, and it ceased to be possible to know an object’s provenance just by looking at it. The phrase “possession is nine-tenths of the law” came into vogue, and it was made illegal to hold stolen goods. After all, once goods became untraceable, they were all too easy to fence.
Allen sees these changes as driven by economics. “When goods became more standardized,” he writes, “then it was efficient for theft to be resolved by police.” If his guess is correct, then the protesters at Occupy Wall Street are right to suspect that police and property are in cahoots. They have been ever since the police were invented.
Now that we have police, of course, it may no longer be possible to do without them. We still live in a world of commodities. But the implicit social contract between citizens and the police needn’t be immutable. It may have been economically efficient for the past century and a half to assign police officers custody of social authority in ambiguous situations, but the vectors of economic efficiency can switch direction.
(Source: azspot)
