[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Thursday, April 1st, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 11:00a | The Archive of Healing Is Now Online: UCLA’s Digital Database Provides Access to Thousands of Traditional & Alternative Healing Methods
Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash Folk medicine is, or should be, antithetical to capitalism, meaning it should not be possible to trademark, copyright, or otherwise own and sell plants and natural remedies to which everyone has access. The entire reason such practices developed over the course of millennia was to help communities of close affiliation survive and thrive, not to foster market competition between companies and individuals. The impulse to profit from suffering has distorted what we think of as healing, such that a strictly allopathic, or “Western,” approach to medicine relies on ethics of exclusion, exploitation, and outright harm. What we tend to think of as modern medicine, the Archive of Healing writes, “is object-oriented (pharmaceuticals, technologically driven) and structured by historical injustice against women and people of color.” The Archive, a new digital project from the University of California, Los Angeles, offers “one of the most comprehensive databases of medicinal folklore in the world,” Valentina Di Liscia writes at Hyperallergic. “The interactive, searchable website boasts hundreds of thousands of entries describing cures, rituals, and healing methods spanning more than 200 years and seven continents.” In countries like the United States, where healthcare is treated as a scarce commodity millions of people cannot afford, access to knowledge about effective, age-old natural wisdom has become critical. There may be no treatments for COVID-19 in the database, but there are likely traditional remedies, rituals, practices, treatments, ointments, etc. for just about every other illness one might encounter. The archive was curated over a period of more than thirty years by “a team of researchers at UCLA, working under the direction of Dr. Wayland Hand and then Dr. Michael Owen Jones,” the site notes in its brief history. The material from the collection, which was originally called the “archive of traditional medicine,” came from “data on healing from over 3,200 publications, six university archives, as well as first-hand and second-hand information from anthropological and folkloric fieldnotes.” In 2016, when Dr. Delgado Shorter took over as director of the program, he “reorganized it with an eye to social sharing and allowing for users to submit new data and comment on existing data,” notes UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture in an interview with Shorter, who describes the project’s aims thus:
This may seem like a delicate balancing act, between the scholarly, the folkloric, and the realms of rights, remuneration, and social power. The Archive strikes it with an ambitious set of tenets you can read here, including an emphasis on offering traditional and Indigenous healing practices “outside of often expensive allopathic and pharmaceutical approaches, and not as alternatives but as complementary modalities.” The archive states as one of its theoretical bases that health should be treated “as a social goal with social methods that affirm relationality and kinship.” Those wishing to get involved with the Archive as partners or advisory board members can learn how at their About page, which also features the following disclaimer: “Statements made on this website have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The information contained herein is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” Use the information wisely, at your own risk, in other words. To use the Archive of Healing, you will need to register with the site first. via Hyperallergic Related Content: 1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online Download 100,000+ Images From The History of Medicine, All Free Courtesy of The Wellcome Library Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Archive of Healing Is Now Online: UCLA’s Digital Database Provides Access to Thousands of Traditional & Alternative Healing Methods is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 2:00p | Meet Les Rallizes Dénudés, the Mysterious Japanese Psych-Rock Band Whose Influence Is Everywhere
In Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s bestselling novel The Shadow of the Wind, narrator Daniel Sempere spends his adolescence trying to solve the mystery of an obscure dead novelist. Fans of the book might see Daniel’s detective story in Grayson Haver Currin’s quest to learn more about Japanese psych rock band Les Rallizes Dénudés and its elusive founder Takashi Mizutani. The band has inspired devotion and endless fascination among their small cult following. But Currin’s investigations met with one after another dead end. Les Rallizes Dénudés is, he writes, “a band that’s existed behind a veil of secrecy for so long that it’s almost impossible to tell where facts end and where fantasy begins.” It does not help that many people’s first and last encounter with Les Rallizes Dénudés was Julian Cope’s 2007 Japrocksampler, a generous, even encyclopedic introduction to post-war Japanese rock and roll. The book played “a pivotal role in exposing American and English audiences to Les Rallizes Dénudés’ tantric guitar shrieks,” yet its meager chapter on the band is apparently riddled with inaccuracies, including the claim that the band never recorded in the studio in their entire 29-year existence. They did, in 1991, 24 years after they began playing stages in Tokyo.
So how did anyone hear about them if they didn’t make or promote albums? “Through bootlegs, bootlegs and more bootlegs,” Cope wrote. Here he does not exaggerate, but even where he does, “it’s in the service of truth,” Dangerous Minds argues, going on to summarize the “skeletal” biography Cope sketches out for the band:
Les Rallizes Dénudés is legendary for good reason, as you can learn in the Bandsplaining video at the top. One thing we do know about them is that a former bassist apparently hijacked an airplane for the Japanese Red Army Faction (then found asylum in North Korea), but “it’s actually not the most interesting thing about them.” Those who already know a certain kind of psychedelic rock may hear the dark, echoey drone of White Light/White Heat-era Velvet Underground and later bands like Brian Jonestown Massacre or Moon Duo, as well as the No Wave noise rock of Sonic Youth and hazy shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine.
The band’s echoing vocals and swirling, wailing peals of fuzzed-out guitar “foreshadowed the next five decades of underground rock,” the Bandsplaining video notes. This seems to be the case whether the musicians inspired by Les Rallizes Dénudés had ever heard their music directly. Japanese underground music “only began reaching Western ears in the early 90s,” writes Alan Cummings, a University of London professor of Japanese translation, drama, culture, and history, and a foremost Western authority on Japanese psych rock. When the music first reached listeners outside Japan, however, it wasn’t Les Rallizes Dénudés they first heard.
Cummings, who saw Les Rallizes Dénudés live in Japan, wrote “what might be the first English piece to ever mention the band” ten years later in 1999 in a Wire article on underground Japanese rock. “What is or was a rallize, and why it should be naked,” he remarked of their nonsensical French name, “remains unknown,” like most everything else about them. This was by design. As one musician living in Tokyo put it, their ubiquitous obscurity was “part of the Les Rallizes Dénudés strategy.”
Les Rallizes Dénudés are so obscure in Japan, they don’t receive a mention in the follow-up article Cummings wrote for the Wire in 2013, in which he surveys the underground Japanese rock scene once again. He also admits to being part of a mystification of Japanese subcultures and adopting an attitude of “fantasy and projection” that he traces back to the 19th century. In the case of Les Rallizes Dénudés, however, fantasy and projection are often all we have to work with in the story of a band whose sound is everywhere but whose former associates and members, including Mizutani himself, don’t wish to be found. As Currin writes, “People not only talk about Mizutani as a folk legend; they talk about people who simply know him as such.”
Thanks to YouTube and the prevalence of camcorders at Les Rallizes Dénudés shows, hours of footage of the band performing live can be viewed online, available to people outside the small community of cassette and VHS tapers and traders who kept their legend alive. See some of that footage above, including an hour and a half long “documentary” that consists of nothing but the band’s hypnotic jams. Related Content: Discover the Ambient Music of Hiroshi Yoshimura, the Pioneering Japanese Composer Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene Hear Enchanting Mixes of Japanese Pop, Jazz, Funk, Disco, Soul, and R&B from the 70s and 80s Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Meet Les Rallizes Dénudés, the Mysterious Japanese Psych-Rock Band Whose Influence Is Everywhere is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 7:00p | When the Indiana Bell Building Was Rotated 90° While Everyone Worked Inside in 1930 (by Kurt Vonnegut’s Architect Dad)
These days, when a company finds itself in need of more space than its current building affords, it moves to a bigger one, expands the one it has, or does a full teardown-and-rebuild. But considering only these options shows a certain failure of imagination, as underscored by the video above: a brief summary of how the Indiana Bell Telephone Company added a second building alongside its Indianapolis headquarters — but only after hoisting up the latter and pivoting it 90 degrees on its side. “This was no small task,” says the video’s narrator, “as the eight-story, steel-frame-and-brick building measured about 100 by 135 feet, and weighed 11,000 tons.” But between October 20th and November 14th, 1930, the company did indeed manage to turn and shift the entire structure as planned, “and the move caused no service outages, and all 600 workers within the building still reported to work every day.” This necessitated lengthening and making flexible all its utility cables and pipes, then lifting it a quarter-inch with jacks and placing it on rollers. “Every six strokes of the jacks would shift the building three-eighths of an inch, moving it fifteen inches per hour.” As for Indiana Bell’s employees, they entered and left their slowly pivoting workplace “using a movable passenger walkway that moved with the building.” To Kurt Vonnegut Jr., then eight years old, all this must have been an impressive sight indeed.
The young novelist-to-be must have seen it not just because he was born and raised in Indianapolis, a fact he referenced throughout his life, but because his father was the project’s lead architect. Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. followed in the footsteps of his own father Bernard Vonnegut, designer of Das Deutsche Haus, today known as the Athenaeum, which the National Register of Historic Places designates as “the best preserved and most elaborate building associated with the German American community of Indianapolis.” This German legacy would prove rather more complicated for the most famous Vonnegut of them all, imprisoned in Dresden as he was during World War II. The darkness of his experience manifests in his work, not least his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five; but so, one imagines, does the near-fantastical practicality of 1930s Indianapolis. Related Content: A New Kurt Vonnegut Museum Opens in Indianapolis … Right in Time for Banned Books Week See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Comparison of the Same Streets & Landmarks Free Online Engineering Courses Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. When the Indiana Bell Building Was Rotated 90° While Everyone Worked Inside in 1930 (by Kurt Vonnegut’s Architect Dad) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| << Previous Day |
2021/04/01 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |