A vintage signpost for how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.
In 1967, CBS aired an episode of the network’s CBS Reports series exploring homosexuality, a topic so taboo and controversial at the time that it took three years in the making, several revisions and a change of two producers to finally air the program. Titled The Homosexuals, the hour-long broadcast was anchored by Mike Wallace, whom you may recall from his provocative conversation with Ayn Rand on morality and love as a business deal, and was the first American network documentary to ever explore the topic of homosexuality on national television. It featured interviews with a number of gay men from San Francisco, Philadelphia, Charlotte and New York, legal experts, cultural critics, priests and psychiatrists, as well as footage of young men interacting in a gay bar and a teenager being arrested during a police sting operation, complete with psychoanalysis that pegged it all on the inevitable domineering mother.
Particularly poignant is this short interview with a young man identified as “Warren Adkins,” who is in fact the prominent gay rights activist Jack Jichols, founder of the Mattachine Society:
The innermost aspects of a person’s personality is his sexual orientation, and I can’t imagine myself giving this up, and I don’t think most other people who are sure of their sexuality, whether they’re homosexuals or heterosexuals, can imagine giving that up either.”
When asked about the “cause” of his homosexuality and whether he dwells on it, Nichols responds with a kind of quiet bravery certainly far ahead of its time and in many ways still more evolved than the opinions of many on the subject even today:
I have thought about it, but it really doesn’t concern me very much. I never would imagine if I had blond hair that I would worry about what genes and what chromosomes caused my blond hair, or if I had brown eyes… My homosexuality to me is very much in the same category. I feel no more guilt about my homosexuality or about my sexual orientation than a person with blond hair or with dark skin or with light skin would feel about what they had.”
As part of the research for the broadcast, CBS conducted a survey that found 90% of Americans saw homosexuality as an illness and the vast majority favored legal punishment even for homosexual acts done in private between two consenting adults. But what’s most fascinating is that the segment portrays gay men — and, mind you, completely neglects gay women as part of the homosexual community — as inherently promiscuous, incapable of sustaining long-term monogamous relationships. And yet, even as we cringe at the general trauma and civil rights failures around the issue in 1967, here we are nearly half a century later, still debating gay marriage and questioning the rights of those men and women who do want to legally enact these loving long-term monogamous relationships. One has to wonder whether a documentary on today’s gay rights opponents would sound just as foreign and antiquated half a century from now.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
What cubism and Lewis Carroll have to do with the foundations of modern photojournalism.
There’s something about photography that makes its fundamental ethos spill over into a multitude of disciplines and resonate on a deep human level. In 1989, Brooks Johnson set out to unearth that x-factor by hunting down the writings of yesteryear’s greatest photographers and asking the era’s greatest living ones to reach within and extract the essence of their art. The result was Photography Speaks: 66 Photographers on Their Art, followed by Photography Speaks II: 76 Photographers on Their Art in 1995 and the 2004 crown jewel, Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers On Their Art — a remarkable anthology of micro-essays by icons like Robert Frank, Cindy Sherman, Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and a wealth more. Each glorious double-page spread features one image from each photographer on the right-hand page, facing biographical background and a short, insightful personal reflection on the left.
Ilse Bing, American (b. Germany), 1899-1998
John Guttman, American (b. Germany), 1905-1998
Jan Groover, American, 1943-
Besides the rockstar photographers, the tome is also sprinkeld with cross-disciplinary surprises, creators like Lewis Carroll, René Magritte and David Hockney better-known for an art other than photography but whose photographic pursuits are nonetheless unmissable works of art.
Almost all cubist pictures are about things close to us. They don’t jump off the wall at you. You have to go to them, and look, and look. The camera does not bring anything close to you; it’s only more of the same void that we see. This is also true of television, and the movies. Between you and the screen there’s a window, you’re simply looking through a window. Cubism is a much more involved form of vision. It’s a better way of depicting reality, and I think it’s a truer way. It’s harder for us to see because it seems to contradict what we believe to be true. People complain that when they see a portrait of Picasso where, for instance, somebody has three eyes! It’s much simpler than that. It’s not that the person had three eyes, it’s that one of the eyes was seen twice. This reads the same way in my photographs. The fact that people can read photographs in this way made me think we’ve been deceived by the single photograph—by this image of one split second, in one fixed spot. I now see this fault in all photographs, and I can tell when drawings or paintings have been made from photographs. You can sense when the picture is not felt through space.” ~ David Hockney
From the practicalities of photography to the grandest theories of art, Photography Speaks is an extraordinary time-capsule for the cognition and emotion that fueled history’s most timeless and influential photographs, a rare backdoor into the minds of the creators who envisioned them and brought them to life.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
What emancipated penguins have to do with digital archives, propaganda art and the future of remix culture.
Antarctica is a strange kind of no man’s land — a territory owned by no single country, with no government, formally uninhabited and hardy inhabitable, and yet of endless allure to researchers, explorers, artists and curious minds from all over the world. It’s also the closest thing we have to a geological clock, its ice sheath reflecting the transformation of our atmosphere and climate with striking precision. In 2007, fascinated by the enigmatic continent’s peculiarities, artist, thinker and musician Paul D. Miller — whose investigation of remix culture and collaborative creation you might recall — traveled to Antarctica to shoot a film about the sound of ice. That was the start of Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica — a larger multimedia project aiming to capture a dynamic portrait of this rapidly changing microcosm. The project’s latest incarnation, The Book of Ice, arrives this month — a poignant reflection on humanity’s relationship with the frozen neverland and climate change at large, by way of poetic visual and textual meditations ranging from archival images of historic exploration on the continent (including these rare photos of the first Australian expedition in 1911) to maps to timelines to hypothetical propaganda art for an imaginary Antarctica liberation movement.
Perhaps most compellingly, the project is a living testament to cross-disciplinary creativity, touching on disciplines as diverse as history, information visualization, music composition, propaganda art, media theory and more, with influences as varied as Emory Douglas, Rodchenko, Mirko Illic and Alex Steinweiss.
Today, I sit down with DJ Spooky to chat about the creative impetus behind the project, its most compelling insights, and the longer-term vision for Antarctica’s future.
How did the idea for The Book of Ice, and the larger project to which it belongs, first emerge?
The Book of Ice started as graphic design music scores taken from my Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica project. I wanted to fine-tune the book as an extension of some of my obsessions with climate change. The first soundtrack and symphony written about Antarctica was by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1948, but other composers — Handel’s 1717 AD composition entitled simply “Water Music” or John Luther Adams Arctic compositions, or even more close to home John Cage’s 1936 first composition for turntables “Imaginary Landscape,” Charles Ives “Central Park in The Dark,” or Cornelius Cardew’s graphic design scores — are all influences.
I guess you could say The Book of Ice is an inter-connected, hyper-expandable/scalable museum/gallery show, book, and symphony. Simple!
Antarctica – a place that no one owns, with no government or law, yet belonging to everyone – seems to be a beautiful metaphor for remix culture. Given your background, was this in any way part of the allure? How did you incorporate your work on and beliefs about remix culture into the Antarctica project?
I wanted to show the Utopian/Dystopian aspects of how graphic design interacts with geopolitics and propaganda. Me, Shep Fairey (an old friend) and Steve Heller spoke at Phaidon books a little while ago about this, from the beginnings of “The War on Terror” you can go back to stuff like DW Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” and other texts that give people a feigned sense of oppression. My Antarctica remix project would have to include how people despoil the planet, our “commons” and what if people started to say everyone has a right to clean air and water, to having food untainted by mercury or nuclear isotopes?
What has been the most startling, unexpected insight that emerged for the creative process on the project?
I guess I always naively think that if you put information in front of people, they’ll get it. They don’t. This project is Utopian in that it seems like the bleedingly obvious fact that our species might not get out of this century in too good condition is being ignored. Ice sheets are melting. Water is scarce. Global weather patterns are the most complex phenomena we’ve encountered.
Adam Smith wrote, ‘all money is a matter of belief.’ The realm of the possible is always greater than the realm of the real. I try to navigate between the two: that’s art.
Can, and should, Antarctica liberate itself from the rest of the world? If so, how?
The title for the Manifesto for a People’s Republic of Antarctica comes from a science fiction book of the same title by John Calvin Batchelor. OK: nation state rises from the ruins of world geopolitics. Check. Environmental collapse, even though we know we can do better and avoid it. Check. Dumb politicians run all major nation states into the ground. Check. It’s great material for propaganda prints, but it could just as easily be a video game like Vice City or Halo. People like to have ‘narrative,’ so I thought, let’s give them something different. It would be cool to have Antarctica as strictly a “commons.”
What’s next for the project, and for you as an artist and explorer?
And I’m writing a group of compositions about the North Pole. Both are in development now. One of the first media spoofs of the 20th century was when Frederick A. Cook, a Brooklyn milkman who, made a film that claimed he was the first person to discover the North Pole and a fake story got put on the front of every major newspaper. There’s something very Orson Welles to that idea. I found the film, remixed it as a component of the Antarctica project DVD. You can see all of this and the material used to generate the compositions as extensions of my obsession with sampling. It’s just taken me a little further into the realm of info-aesthetics.
After all, I can basically just say music for me isn’t just music. It’s information.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
What Apartheid has to do with Victorian poetry and using peace as a weapon of mass reconstruction.
FIRST RECORDED INTERVIEW
In 1961, Nelson Mandela became leader of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and coordinated sabotage campaigns against military and government targets. On May 21st that year, mere months before being arrested for sabotage and other charges and sentenced to life in prison, a 42-year-old Mandela gave his first-ever interview to ITN reporter Brian Widlake as part of a longer ITN Roving Report program about Apartheid. At that point, the police are already hunting for Mandela, but Widlake pulls some strings and arranges to meet him in his hideout. When the reporter asks Mandela what Africans want, he promptly responds:
The Africans require, want the franchise, the basis of One Man One Vote — they want political independence.”
Towards the end of the interview, Mandela tries to reconcile the difficult dynamic between peace and violence, suggesting that the full force with which the police had gone after him might have triggered this shift from nonviolent to violent protest means — violence, it seems, does only breed violence.
THE RELEASE (1990)
On 2 February 1990, President F. W. de Klerk reversed the ban anti-apartheid organisations, announcing that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Nine days later, after 26 years in prison, Mandela reentered the free world and gave a seminal speech to the nation. The event was broadcast live all over the world, and this recording from the BBC archive is the only surviving footage of the momentous moment. Here, a deeply overwhelmed Mandela shares his first impressions of the new South Africa he had just brushed up against and revisits the complex relationship between peaceful means and armed struggle.
I have committed myself to the promotion of peace in the country. But I have done so as part and parcel of the decisions and campaign that have been taken by the ANC . . . The armed struggle is a defensive act against apartheid . . . There is not a single political organization in this country, inside and outside of Parliament, which can ever compare to ANC in its total commitment to peace.” ~ Nelson Mandela
INAUGURAL ADDRESS
On April 27, 1994, South Africa held its first multi-racial elections in which full enfranchisement was granted. The ANC won with a 62% majority, and Mandela, as leader of the organization, was inaugurated as the country’s first black President on 10 May, 1994. His inauguration address was as much a vision for South Africa’s future was it was a declaration of humanity and justice for a new global era.
Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity’s belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all. All this we owe both to ourselves and to the peoples of the world who are so well represented here today.” ~ Nelson Mandela
CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF
Released last fall, Conversations with Myself is a timecapsule of (an) extraordinary character if the world ever saw one — a remarkable anthology of materials that capture Mandela’s essence with equal parts humility and heroism. The Guardian‘s Peter Godwin eloquently called it not “so much a book as a literary album,” with its varied snippets of Mandela’s life — letters, calendars, prison diaries, vignettes of personal life, and transcripts from over 50 hours of audio recordings by TIME magazine editor Richard Stengel, who ghost-wrote Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. With a foreword by Barack Obama and an introduction by Verne Harris, head of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, the book is an absolute treasure about an absolute treasure, reminding us, as Godwin puts it, that we often see history through retrospectacles that lead us to think what happened was somehow inevitable, whereas in fact it, not unlike human character, is a series of conscious and not always easy choices.
The cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings.”
NEED TO KNOW: NELSON MANDELA
For the biographically inclined, this short documentary from The Biography Channel manages to cover the essential Mandela, from his birth in the small African village of Mvezo in the Thembu tribe to his early interest in political activism to his imprisonment, release and eventual rise to presidency, in just under 7 minutes.
WISDOM
Andrew Zuckerman’s fantastic Wisdom project is a longtime favorite. Driven by the insight that the greatest heritage of a generation is the wisdom gained from life’s experience, Zuckerman went wisdom-hunting among 50 of our time’s greatest thinkers and doers — writers, artists, philosophers, politicians, designers, activists, musicians, religious and business leaders — all over 65 years of age. The resulting brilliant book-and-film, Wisdom: The Greatest Gift One Generation Can Give to Another, features remarkable interviews with and portraits of icons like Nelson Mandela, Jane Goodall and Desmond Tutu, among a treasure trove of others. (Zuckerman subsequently divided the great tome into four smaller, more digestible sub-volumes, each with its own thematic DVD: Wisdom: Life, Wisdom: Love, Wisdom: Peace, and Wisdom: Ideas.)
Nelson Mandela
Image copyright Andrew Zuckerman | www.wisdombook.org
It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another. Peace is the greatest weapon for development that any people can have.” ~ Nelson Mandela
Say what you will of Hollywood, but they certainly know how to send chills down your spine. In 2009, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, starring Matt Daemon and Morgan Freeman as Mandela, swept the awards circuit to great acclaim. Titled after the short Victorian poem of the same name, published by William Ernest Henley in 1875, the film captures Mandela’s journey and character through the events in South Africa before and during the 1995 Rugby World Cup, hosted there immediately following the dismantling of apartheid.
In the closing scene, Matt Daemon’s character visits Mandela’s prison cell as Morgan Freeman’s voiceover reads Henley’s poem, which Mandela has professed to have inspired him in prison. The vignette is nothing short of an emotional tour de force — try, if you can, to stop the goosebumps from enveloping your whole body.
(In true Hollywood fashion, the studios seem to have disabled embedding on all clips of the Freeman-narrated poem floating around on YouTube.)
Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly interestingness digest. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week's best articles. Here's an example. Like? Sign up.
donating = loving
Brain Pickings remains free (and ad-free) and takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and write, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and value in what I do, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:
In 1967, CBS aired an episode of the network’s CBS Reports series exploring homosexuality, a topic so taboo and controversial at the time that it took three years in the making, several revisions and a change of two producers to finally air the program. Titled The Homosexuals, the hour-long broadcast was anchored by Mike Wallace, whom you may recall from his provocative conversation with Ayn Rand on morality and love as a business deal, and was the first American network documentary to ever explore the topic of homosexuality on national television. It featured interviews with a number of gay men from San Francisco, Philadelphia, Charlotte and New York, legal experts, cultural critics, priests and psychiatrists, as well as footage of young men interacting in a gay bar and a teenager being arrested during a police sting operation, complete with psychoanalysis that pegged it all on the inevitable domineering mother.
As part of the research for the broadcast, CBS conducted a survey that found 90% of Americans saw homosexuality as an illness and the vast majority favored legal punishment even for homosexual acts done in private between two consenting adults. But what’s most fascinating is that the segment portrays gay men — and, mind you, completely neglects gay women as part of the homosexual community — as inherently promiscuous, incapable of sustaining long-term monogamous relationships. And yet, even as we cringe at the general trauma and civil rights failures around the issue in 1967, here we are nearly half a century later, still debating gay marriage and questioning the rights of those men and women who do want to legally enact these loving long-term monogamous relationships. One has to wonder whether a documentary on today’s gay rights opponents would sound just as foreign and antiquated half a century from now.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
FIRST RECORDED INTERVIEW
THE RELEASE (1990)
INAUGURAL ADDRESS
CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF
NEED TO KNOW: NELSON MANDELA
WISDOM
INVICTUS
