Posts Tagged ‘television’
“To a real child anything will serve as a toy”*…
The story of a toy that both confirms and contradicts that sentiment, Mr. Potato Head…
Mr. Potato Head is an American toy brand consisting of a plastic model of a potato “head” to which a variety of plastic parts can attach — typically ears, eyes, shoes, hat, nose, pants and mouth.
Mr. Potato Head was invented and manufactured by George Lerner in 1949, but was first distributed by Hasbro in 1952… In its original form, Mr. Potato Head was offered as separate plastic parts with pushpins to be affixed to a real potato or other vegetable. Due to complaints regarding rotting vegetables and new government safety regulations, Hasbro began including a plastic potato body with the toy set in 1964.
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In the early 1940s, Brooklyn-born toy inventor George Lerner came up with the idea of inserting small, pronged body and face parts into fruits and vegetables to create a “funny face man”. Some speculate he got the idea from his wife’s nephew Aaron Bradley, who was seen placing sticks inside of potatoes in the family garden. Lerner would often take potatoes from his mother’s garden and, using various other fruits and vegetables as facial features, he would make dolls with which his younger sisters could play. The grape-eyed, carrot-nosed, potato-headed dolls became the principal idea behind the plastic toy which would later be manufactured.
Mr, Potato Head turned out to be a trailblazer– the pioneer of a new form of marketing that supercharged the toy category and paved the way for the toy-character-centered entertainment environment in which we live…
On April 30, 1952, Mr. Potato Head became the first toy advertised on television. The campaign was also the first to be aimed directly at children; before this, commercials were only targeted at adults, including toy advertisements. The commercial revolutionized marketing, and caused an industrial boom. Over one million kits were sold in the first year…
“Mr. Potato Head” from @Wikipedia.
Image above: from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum
* John Cowper Powys
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As we play, we might send tasty birthday greetings to the literary genius behind green eggs and ham, Theodor Seuss Geisel, AKA “Dr. Seuss”; he was born on this date in 1904. After a fascinating series of early-career explorations, Geisel settled on a style that created what turned out to be the perfect “gateway drug” to book addiction– and a love of words– for generations of young readers.
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
– I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)
“One cries because one is sad. For example, I cry because others are stupid, and that makes me sad.”*…
From our friends at The Pudding, a case study in Chinese censorship: Manyun Zou watched the first 100 episodes of The Big Bang Theory that stream in the U.S. and on the Chinese streaming site Youku, side by side, and tracked 206 missing scenes from the Youku version…
Growing up in China, I had a blast watching American TV shows. They not only helped me learn English, but also introduced me to fresh perspectives and worldviews. The Big Bang Theory was among my favorites.
I quickly became a fan of the sitcom when it was officially introduced in China on a video streaming website in 2011. But when I rewatched the show in 2022 on Youku, a Chinese video streaming website backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, I couldn’t help but notice weird jumps, pauses, and disconnected canned laughter…
What happened to the show?
To understand that, we have to back up a bit. This change can be traced to a sudden political decision in 2014. According to the state-owned media outlet Xinhua, streaming platforms received a private notification from regulators to remind them of one key rule:
“imported American and British TV shows must be ‘reviewed and approved by officials before streaming to the public.’”
Shortly thereafter, The Big Bang Theory was among a handful of imported shows pulled from Chinese websites. Audiences were only left with a black screen and a line: “video has been removed due to policy reasons.”
When these shows resurfaced, they were full of these weird jumps, signaling that scenes were removed during censorship because someone somewhere thought it would be inappropriate or illegal to stream such content.
So the question has to be asked: what kind of content has been removed, and why?
To find out, I compared 100 episodes of the original version of The Big Bang Theory with the edited Youku version to understand what was cut out and decipher the logic behind the decision…
A fascinating look at what Chinese censors fear: “The Big [Censored] Theory,” from @Manyun_Zou in @puddingviz.
* “Sheldon,” The Big Bang Theory, “The Gorilla Experiment” (Season 3, Episode 10)
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As we contemplate censorship, we might spare a thought for Immanuel Kant; he died on this date in 1804. One of the central figures of modern philosophy, Kant is remembered primarily for his efforts to unite reason with experience (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], 1781), and for his work on ethics (e.g., Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797) and aesthetics (e.g., Critique of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft], 1790). But he made important contributions to mathematics and astronomy as well; for example: Kant’s argument that mathematical truths are a form of synthetic a priori knowledge was cited by Einstein as an important early influence on his work. And his description of the Milky Way as a lens-shaped collection of stars that represented only one of many “island universes,” was later shown to be accurate by Herschel.
Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means.
“When languages are lost most of the knowledge that went with them gets lost”*…
We’re all aware that many of the world’s plants and animals are in danger of extinction, but not so mindful that many human languages are in danger of becoming extinct too. Globalization has helped to make the world a smaller place. But, as Stephen Jones illustrates, it has also contributed to the loss of many languages around the world…
Across the 7,168 living languages today, 43% are at risk of being endangered.
In fact, a language dies off every 40 days. The vast majority of endangered languages are found in Indigenous communities, which risk the loss of culture and knowledge that they contain. At current rates, 90% of the world’s languages could disappear over the next 100 years…
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For instance, during the 1970s, the Māori language was spoken by just 5% of Māori schoolchildren. Fast forward to today, and 25% speak the language, driven by efforts from the Māori, leading the government to protect it by law.
In Hawaii, just 2,000 people spoke the native language in the 1970s. After the government ensured it was taught in schools, the number of speakers jumped to 18,700 in 2023…
“The State of the World’s 7,168 Living Languages,” from @derivationllc @VisualCap.
AI is being used to preserve endangered languages (e.g., by Google, Microsoft, and Jones’s own organization, Derivation). But in the end, what keeps a language and its cultural impact alive is human use. Check out Wikitongues for an organization that’s devoted to preserving collective wisdom the old-fashioned way.
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As we deepen linguistic diversity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1928 that a milestone in the development of a technology that has contributed to the globalization of culture (and the threat to languages) was achieved: John Logie Baird transmitted a TV image across the Atlantic ocean (using short wave radio) from station 2 KZ at Purley, England to Hartsdale, NY.
Baird’s system was electromechanical: a light sensitive camera behind a rotating disc. The picture was crudely formed from a scan of thirty lines at twelve frames per second. The television receiver in Hartsdale displayed a tiny, uneven– but “readable”– image. Still, this caused a sensation: The New York Times (accurately) compared the event to Marconi’s sending of the letter “S” by radio across the Atlantic, 27 years earlier.
“The imaginary is what tends to become real”*…
Editorial note: your correspondent will be off the grid tomorrow, so (Roughly) Daily will be in “roughly” mode; “daily” service should begin again on Monday.
Surrealism took a hit in the later 20th century. For instance, Susan Sontag suggested that “surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.” The great designer Milton Glaser averred that “in an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.”
But (in an excerpt from his fascinating new book, Why Surrealism Matters) Mark Polizzotti argues that it’s relevant still…
Does Surrealism still matter? Has it ever mattered? The question is hardly new, and has been debated practically since the movement was launched. Already in 1930, a mere six years after its brash inauguration, the twenty-something poet René Daumal was cautioning André Breton, Surrealism’s founder, primary theorist, and author of the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), against the threat of irrelevance through popular acceptance: “Beware, André Breton, of one day figuring in study guides to literary history; whereas if we aspire to an honor, it is to be inscribed for posterity in the history of cataclysms.” (An apt warning, as Breton and many other Surrealists have since figured in quite a few study guides.)
A dozen years later, Breton himself, in exile in the United States during World War II, fulminated to students at Yale University against the “impatient gravediggers” who declared Surrealism over and done. Given that many of the young men in the audience were thinking about their looming draft notices, we can imagine that they, too, were wondering how relevant Surrealism was to their lives at that moment. And today, as Surrealism marks its centennial, and as its fortunes over the past fifty years have risen, fallen, and risen again, it’s a question worth pondering once more.
Indeed, much like the students at Yale, young people of the twenty-first century could hardly be faulted for wondering what a bunch of eccentric writers and artists showing off their dream states could have to do with such pressing concerns as social and racial injustice, a faltering job market, gross economic inequities, the decimation of our civil liberties, questions of gender identity and equality, environmental devastation, education reform, or, once again as I write this, the specter of world war. All the more so in that the word “surreal” has come to stand, in the popular imagination, for a vague cluster of things, a catchall term that runs the gamut from the unnerving to the merely kooky.
The answer is that Surrealism engaged with all of these crises. To cite several examples: The Surrealists’ outspoken critiques of French colonialism and racism share many points in common with current debates about racial equality and social justice. Their opposition to war and the military, dating as far back as World War I, was echoed in protests against France’s involvement in Algeria and America’s war in Vietnam, among others. The frankness with which they addressed sexuality, though this does not airbrush the more than equivocal position of women in the movement, was audacious for its time, and has had lasting echoes in contemporary attitudes. Their skepticism about work is almost a direct pre-echo of today’s Great Resignation…
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… To my mind, Surrealism’s true legacy is less as a forerunner than as a disruptor, something that perpetually challenges the existing paradigms and seeks new forms to maintain its emotional intensity. Or again, as a code-mixer, which takes in elements of its past, present, and projected future and recombines them, reworks them, reimagines them into something new, and then something newer…
One of Surrealism’s main drivers was a refusal of the values that European society tried to force on them. As political beings, they abhorred the bellicose jingoism that came screeching to the forefront during the War of 1914-18, and they felt revulsion not only toward the war itself but also toward the societal status quo that had fostered it, as well as the economic disparities, blatant racism, and intellectual blandness that went with it.
As writers and artists, they repudiated—at least in theory—the careerism and complacency that underscored so much literature and art, and that led to creative stagnation, not to say to a tacit or overt endorsement of the crumbling social contract. By nature, Surrealist works are animated by an emphatic dissociation from the reigning orthodoxy, whether political, societal, or aesthetic…
… the aspect of Surrealism that to me epitomizes why it continues to resonate through changing trends and urgencies is its unwavering belief that the marvels it sought were a force for universal emancipation, within everyone’s reach. The aim was to tap into previously unsuspected resources and unleash the potential we all possess for wonder, invention, and salutary rage.
Otherwise put, Surrealism’s importance lies not so much in the works it produced as in the attitudes underlying them. Those who equate the movement with names such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Paul Eluard, and Robert Desnos might find this surprising. But though Surrealism is now generally considered a movement in literature and the arts, and while its principal members indeed used artistic means, their initial impulses were mainly philosophical, political, and experimental.
Breton, a former medical student who had studied neurology and psychiatry, defined it with scientific tonalities as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express… the actual functioning of thought.” Surrealism in its essence tends not toward aesthetics but toward a radical new means of seeing the world, even a set of ethical guideposts…
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More than any other intellectual current of modern times, Surrealism posited a world that could embrace, equally and indivisibly, the violence of rebellion and the passion of creation. This book aims to parse out what is living and what is dead in Surrealist ideas, what is vibrant and what stale; to evaluate why, and whether, the revolution that Surrealism sought to foment can still claim the qualifier, as one of its tracts put it nearly a century ago, of “first and always.”
The legacy of one of the 20th century’s most innovative artistic movements: “Permanent Newness: Surrealism at 100,” in @lithub.
* André Breton
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As we wrestle with reality, we might send dream-like birthday greetings to David Lynch; he was born on this date in 1946. A filmmaker, painter, visual artist, musician, and actor, he is best known for his films– Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006)– and for the series Twin Peaks (co-created and co-written with Mark Frost).
Critic Pauline Kael labeled him “the first populist surrealist.”
Bonus: “I Found David Lynch’s Lost Dune II Script.”
“I would drive on streets that were one-way and think, ‘Why are they all honking at me?'”*…
Lachan Summers decodes the “language” of Mexico City’s streets…
Anyone who spends time in Mexico City will spend much of it in traffic. One of the most clogged cities in the world, residents will lose on average 158 hours per year to congestion on the road (Ortego et al 2021). In recent years, the city government has sought to limit the number of cars that take to the streets each day, but these efforts have largely targeted poorer people who travel from their homes in the city’s outskirts to their workplaces in the centre, rather than those who live and drive short distances in wealthy, congested regions (Guerra and Reyes 2022). So, gridlock continues apace…
Mexico City’s streets have a peculiarly large number of endemic sounds (Alba Vega and Rodríguez 2022). When I bring up street sounds with my friends, we invariably begin listing all we can, often reaching 15 or 20 unique sounds that can be heard on Mexico City’s streets on any given day. We can add to this the symphony of expressive honks that echo along the city’s brimming streets. With the thickening traffic, the sound of the street increases exponentially, each new car adding to the din while demanding auditory escalation from other motorists. Although the traffic might be stationary, its sound will still travel, overflowing the streets to amble through parks, markets, and the most buffered corners of the city’s apartments. Even if you’re not on Mexico City’s streets, you never really leave them.
Riding my bike through its traffic over the last five years, I’ve learned by force Mexico City’s wide vocabulary of horns. Being able to identify that different vehicles use different honks and toots, and knowing that these will vary according to infrastructure, conditions, weather, time of day, and part of the year, is what Steven Feld (1996) calls “acoustemology”: a portmanteau of “acoustic” and “epistemology” that names a sonic way of knowing the world. As sonic practices and expectations accumulate socially and historically, undifferentiated noise becomes differentiated sounds, and Mexico City’s streets transform from cacophony to systematic commotion. So, in the interest of systematic knowledge (and public safety), this essay tabulates the streets’ honks into a taxonomy of cláxones [horns], a “claxonomy” of Mexico City’s traffic.
Taxonomies are a peculiar form of knowledge production. Lorraine Daston (2004) shows in her history of botany that taxonomies often use holotypes, which combine the range of peculiarities a species might exhibit into an ideal specimen that has never existed. Concrete abstractions, this attention to minute detail is not only a catalogue of diversity but, as Foucault pointed out long ago, a mode of adjudicating difference that generates an overarching sense of order. By assuming the world to be rational, the taxonomic mind is deeply functionalist–famously, the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev left gaps in his 1869 Periodic Table of Elements for the yet-unknown elements a coherent world would require (Neale, Phan, and Addison 2019).
In their pursuit of the world’s universal order, taxonomists seek a universal language that avoids the problem of synonymy–multiple names for the same thing–while their critics point to the hubris of believing that the world’s multitudes could be, in G.K. Chesterton’s (1904) words, represented by a “system of grunts and squeals”…
In the spirit of classical taxonomy, this essay arbitrarily selects a series of common honks to assert an overarching system of meaning shared by people on Mexico City’s streets. While it might sound cacophonous, that residents can distinguish the meaning of each horn shows we’re far from Babel; motorists’ improvisations are a vocabulary emergent from the demands made by a megacity that is, in Dean Chahim’s (2022) memorable phrasing, “governed beyond capacity”. As residents loudly fill the void left by the state with new apparatuses of meaning and management, convention replaces rule so people can keep moving…
Complete with illustrative sounds files: “A Claxonomy of Mexico City’s Traffic,” in @allegra_lab via @TheBrowser.
* Sandra Cisneros
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As we tackle taxonomy, we might spare a thought for Errett Lobban “E. L.” Cord; he died on this date in 1974. A race car driver, mechanic, and car salesman, he was offered the opportunity to manage the dying Auburn Automobile Company in 1924. By 1928 he controlled Auburn, which by 1931 was the 13th largest seller of autos in the United States. The acquisitive Cord founded the Cord Corporation in 1929 as a holding company for over 150 companies he controlled, mostly in the field of transportation. The corporation controlled the Auburn Automobile Company, which built the Auburn and Cord automobiles; Lycoming Engines; Duesenberg Inc.; New York Shipbuilding; Checker Motors; Stinson Aircraft Company; and American Airways (later American Airlines), amongst other holdings.
After a 1937 investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into his dealings in Checker Cab stock, Cord sold the Cord Corporation to the Aviation Corporation and retired to Los Angeles… where he earned even more millions in real estate, and then in broadcasting: Cord owned several of the first radio and television stations in California and later Nevada, where he moved in the 1940s. In the call letters of his Los Angeles radio station, KFAC, the A.C. stands for Auburn Cord. In Reno, Cord established KCRL-TV and radio in the 1950s and operated it for more than 25 years. The ‘CRL’ in the station’s call letters stood for “Circle L”—a ranch Cord owned in the Nevada desert.
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