Not getting paid to rep the new restaurant in what was formerly Tweed. My fault for looking at their menu while hungry (now that I come to think of it, it’s actually Kelly’s fault). So if I were eating dinner there right now, it’d be this. I’m SO hungry.

Palate opener: spicy Maple-Bacon peanuts and crispy pig ears; paired with Grapes Of Wrath (Woodford Reserve, muddled grapefruit and house brandied grapes, pamplemousse liqueur, aromatic bitters). Whet the appetite: roasted bone marrow with red onion jam, and a dry aged beef carpaccio with violet mustard; paired with Red River Maple (knob creek rye, sweet & dry vermouth, maple simple syrup, black walnut bitters, orange peel). Primi: half chilled lobster and fried Ipswich clams with lemon aioli, served with a crudo of fluke prepared with pine nuts, sea bean, breakfast radish and curry oil; paired with Hitachino White beer. Secondi: Bucatini pasta with peekytoe crab, sweet & hot peppers, garlic, parsley, pecorino romano; paired with a 2009 Columbia Riesling. Dessert: Mason jar vanilla cheesecake with balsamic-rhubarb jam; paired with a Salinas Valley (reposado, aperol, grapefruit, cinnamon syrup,lime, cinnamon-sugar rim).

The revolutionary fervor which gripped Europe in the early 20th century contributed an intensely political approach to science. Germany, Spain and Russia all faced massive upheavals in the social order, and an intense scrutiny went on over their entire populations to root out saboteurs, traitors and those that were politically ambiguous. To survive a revolution, one must continually express belief in the revolutionary ideal; those that could not were not considered part of the revolution and no mercy or sympathies should be or were directed their way. Scientists weren’t given any special consideration. They also had to prove their political worth, and their work was constantly used to both legitimize revolutionary ideals and goals and to support any policies or laws that would proceed from said ideals and goals. Science for science’s sake was rejected; everything must be in service to the people. Unfortunately, this political zealotry meant that a lot of fatuous scientific theories were pursued, observations and conclusions were changed based on who was to read the reports, and certain avenues of research were either pursued long after they should have been discarded or not pursued because they were politically unacceptable.

Unlike Spain and Russia, Germany had a long established and productive military science setup. By the 1930s, they had already developed a large number of highly advanced weapons programs, including V-rockets under Wernher von Braun (later employed by the Americans as project and operations director for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency); zeppelin, battleship and U-boat development; super-heavy Panzer tanks; airplane development (the Messerschmitt series featuring the first operational turbojet fighter/bomber and first and only rocket powered jet fighter); and other assorted weaponry. Some of these were developed by old family firms like the Krupps. This 400-year old clan began selling cannonry to Russia, Turkey and Prussia in the 1840s. They sold artillery, naval weaponry and U-boats to Germany during WWI; were forced to shut down after being considered war criminals by the Allies; and then collaborated with both the Weimar Republic and the Nazis in secretly rebuilding steel factories, designing tanks and other weaponry, and “practicing” via manufacturing those same weapons as consultants to other European powers. [Despite these successes, it was strange that German science could make any progress at all: the politicization of academia in Germany (and in both Spain and Russia) during the 1920s and 1930s meant that many skilled but politically unwanted individuals - Jews, foreign immigrants, Communists, other unsavory sociopolitical labels - were getting driven out of science faculties and academies and their contributions lost. In fact, Germany's nuclear weapons program was permanently stalled due to this sapping of manpower. The loss of manpower and a decision that a nuclear weapons program were not deserving of the remaining resources allowed much of their scientists to be drafted into the Wehrmacht when the invasion of Poland began in 1939.] Military technology advances were admirable in that they promoted real science, despite the increase to death and suffering they caused and the distraction they could provide in terms of allocation of resources away from other areas of scientific development. Any technology built around faulty conclusions and fuzzy logic naturally wouldn’t work; thus, they wouldn’t be worth the effort. Unfortunately, that wasn’t true of the biological, psychological and social sciences. These schools were used solely to support the dogmatic beliefs of whatever ruling party was seeking justifications.

RUSSIA

Trofim Lysenko.

Since Joseph Stalin had forcibly collectivized farms under politically sound but agriculturally inept overseers, butchered the kulaks (the former rich peasant owners of said farms, who happened to retain all the useful agriculture management knowledge) and then (merely) motivated the peasant workers with slave labor or death, it is no surprise that most farming regions in Russia turned out to be overwhelmingly underproductive after the Revolution. In search of a quick solution to massive famine, totalitarian state planners turned to Trofim Lysenko, the son of a peasant, who was the very model of a Communist biologist. His solutions to low food output seemed immensely practical: his usage of vernalization, wherein wheat seeds were exposed to high humidity and low temperature, seemed to increase yields as promised, and he introduced solutions to a multitude of issues with other craps and growing conditions in the USSR. Much of his so-called effectivity was due to the biased position he was in. Until 1964, his rejection of Mendelian genetics for “Michurinism” – which argued for the heritability of acquired characteristics with an emphasis on environmental factors – was accepted as Russian state science and supported by Premier Nikita Khruschev, who fancied himself an agricultural expert. In the meantime, most Soviet Mendelian geneticists were executed or sent to prison camps – their crime was merely to support what the Party termed “bourgeois pseudoscience” and Lysenko was to denounce biologists in general as “fly-lover and people-haters,” whose purpose was to purposely disable the Soviet economy. As a result, all the data Lysenko collected from farmers and other scientists tended to show what he wanted to see, as nobody wanted to risk being executed for failure to be loyal to state science. This turned out to be a triple whammy: the data they collected was useless; even if the data was sound, it would take generations to prove his theories incorrect; and all other theories were not pursued.

GERMANY

Soldiers carrying out Aktion T-4 in Trieste, Italy.

A question plaguing scientists since the early 20th century is how our genes relate to who we become. Lysenkoists tended to believe that human intervention could change natural selection, and the eugenics movement – popular around the world for much of the 1920s and 30s – argued that humans should self-select to promote “good” genes over others. Encouraged by the growth of eugenics in the United States during the early 1930s – California being the world leader in compulsory sterilization of mentally ill people and poor black people at the time – Germany began pursuing this pseudo-scientific theory to its natural conclusion. Adolf Hitler, as reflected by his positions in Mein Kampf, believed that Germany could only become strong by removing degenerate elements from within. He advocated systematically enforcing a eugenics program, known as “Lebensunwertes Leben” or “life unworthy of life,” which began in 1933 with the passing of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. This particular law forced doctors to register any cases of hereditary illness they came across. As Hitler was attempting to reform Germany into a country that reflected the pure Aryan ideal, self-selection would require suppression of any and all characteristics that would make them unworthy. The next step came in 1934, with the Law for Simplification of the Health System. Under its mandates, all Germans would have a centralized compiled history of their genetic and racial hygiene and allowed for denunciations leading to forced appearances at a Genetic Health Court. Couples hoping to marry were required to be analyzed for hereditary diseases and disallowed if one partner fell short. Those that did fall short were generally forced into sterilization; over 400,000 Germans were sterilized via this program by the end of Hitler’s Reich. The not-so-lucky ones – and these ones were still considered German, it must be pointed out – were butchered systematically under Aktion T-4. In 1940, the Reich Interior Ministry attempted to expand the genetic and racial history file for all individuals to include their education, political activity and any other information of use; this was based on a Hamburg program known as the “Health-Related Total Observation of Life.” The war, however, prevented the authorities from fully carrying this out across all of Germany and its occupied territories. Germany’s policy towards the “others” – those that weren’t German and thus had no place in German society – was clear. Prison camps and labor, and death. Russia was perhaps more straight-forward in their approach. They never adopted a formal eugenics movement, as it was perhaps decided that they needed no justification for killing individuals they didn’t want around.

SPAIN

Antonio Vallejo-Nagera.

While others focused on racial characteristics, Spanish scientists looked closer at the genetic pool to decipher social characteristics. Their main question was this: can we predict, based on genetic makeup and environmental factors, who will become a criminal, or have left or right-wing ideology, or who will be of a certain character type? The Spanish Civil War had pitted Franco’s Nationalists against Marxist Republicans, and the end of that war forced the authorities to contemplate suppressing any future revolt from Marxists. Would it not be better to be able to identify those that may become a problem and remove them from the population? Military psychiatrist and racial hygienist Antonio Vallejo-Nagera proposed to study POWs to determine the bio-psychological roots of Marxism. The aim was to figure out, in psychiatric, genetic, forensic and anthropologic terms, what it meant to be a Marxist and how that could be used to shape society away from such degenerates. The research was extended into a general statement on the human condition; namely, how imprisonment could affect individuals and if conversions were possible among the imprisoned. One of the most important centers of research was the asylum at Ciempozuelos, a former battleground of the Civil War, where studies were conducted by director Jose Maria Sacristan and later Vallejo-Nagera. Their analysis of the inmates was undertaken to prove a theory by Ernst Kretschmer that described three body types and their associated character dispositions. Kretschmer had proposed that endocrine secretions were the basis for human action, and thus criminality and future criminality could be discovered through analysis of internal chemical activity. The gist of the pseudo bio-psychology studies was that Marxism was a degenerate mental sickness that was intertwined with criminality and could possibly be identified in populations via analysis. Many of these studies were observed by Nazi scientists and politicians, who shared with Franco world Communism as a common enemy. It didn’t matter that these notions were rather farfetched and impossible to put into practice without imprisoning a large percentage of the population – but if it offered the state the opportunity to self-select its own citizens and eliminate all opposition as biologically criminal, then it was something worth doing. From a PR perspective, most people wouldn’t want criminals left on the street. Who better to get rid of them than a fatherly state?

UNITED STATES

E.H. Harriman, the railroad baron.

Lest we forget, the US had its own issues with dealing with this question of purity and degeneration and perfection. Eugenics was immediately popular in the US after its academic introduction by Francis Galton in the 1880s. Connecticut was the first to pass a marriage eugenics law, preventing the marriage of epileptics or “feeble-minded” to any individuals. Indiana passed the first state compulsory sterilization eugenics law in 1907, targeted at the mentally ill and retarded. They were followed closely by California and Washington and then a flood of other states, and the Supreme Court was later to uphold constitutionality of states enacting such legislation. Many of the efforts to get such laws passed were supported by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kellogg Bros. (of cereal fame), the Harrimans (of railroad fame) and other rich benefactors. Some of these efforts went towards a “Eugenics Record Office” that, through their scientific analysis, concluded that the greater portion of “unfit” genes happened to come from poor people. What an insight! Margaret Sanger, the mother of the American birth control movement, was controversially supportive of eugenics: she happened to believe that the individual should be able to choose to sterilize herself in order to prevent “unwanted children from being born into a disadvantaged life,” but not that the state should be allowed to mandate it. Variations on that theme were taken up by women’s clubs – mostly rich, upper class women as members – who, sometimes contradictorily, loudly supported national eugenics legislation. North Carolina was perhaps the most aggressive place to enact eugenics law; all individuals with IQs under 70 could be forced to be legally sterilized, and these decisions could be made by social workers and not higher courts. That particular law was only struck down in 1977. It also said a lot about the early 20th century American mindset that testimony from eugenicists were vitally important in helping enact and motivate racially-defined legislation, including the Immigration Act of 1924. This, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, was the law that set immigration quotas based on the immigration numbers in 1890 before transferring to an even more draconian system that set an immigration cap of 150,000, no matter the circumstance. The philosophical backing of such legislation was to prevent dilution of American “old-stock” with “inferior stock” from the masses of Eastern European and Asian immigrants streaming into the country at that time. It is a depressing thought that Germany drew much inspiration from American efforts to control their racial and genetic stock. As they preferred to point out, it was all just science. Nothing against “those people,” but for the good of the nation.

Why are there less female performers at major music festivals? Coachella this year offers up 90% male-fronted bands, while the next general music festival I’ll be going to – Firefly, in Delaware – will be offering up 75% male-fronted bands. Pitchfork has similar numbers. The next dance music festival I’m going to, EDC in NY, is even worse: 95% are male-fronted acts. I don’t necessarily have the most well thought-out position here, but I do tend to think that society reinforces most assumptions we have about women in music.

The kids dropping out of school and playing in bands, to Hollywood, are basically all dudes. Unless they’re making a movie about Joan Jett. There are tons more internationally famous male acts than there are female acts, and that includes both bands led by females and bands made up of mostly females. I bring up the distinction because rock, a genre that social scientists have found to appeal more to males over the last few decades, has a great number of female-led bands while there are almost no all-female rock bands. Why is that? Is that a reflection of the mostly male fanbase? Is that merely the label producers prejudices showing? Or is it that there are less female rock musicians, and less female rock musicians willing to band together in all-female groups? Trivia: the first all-female rock album on a major label came out in 1970. David Bowie was to later say of Fanny that “they were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like m**f**s, they were just colossal and wonderful…” There was a mystical fake all-girl band called the Carrie Nations in “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” a sexploitation movie written by Roger Ebert also in 1970. Between those bands and the Donnas, how many all-female rock groups are there?

Even when there are female-led rock bands, they still tend to appeal to more males than females. Lacuna Coil, Evanescence, Garbage, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, etc. Where you start to get the audience number differences are when the rock acts start to become more pop-py, reflecting the female lean toward pop and soul music instead of rock – thus, you have Paramore and many more screaming female fans than male ones. I like Paramore, personally, though I think the Donnas rock way harder. Keep in mind that sociological observations regarding gender preferences are more indicative of society’s motivations and prejudices, rather than comments on any one individual’s own preferences.

I don’t say that there aren’t a lot of female rock fans: there are a huge number out there, but %-wise, the statistics still fall to the guys. It’s a little different in EDM, however. EDC has three female acts, including Nervo, Rebecca and Fiona and La Roux. Just 3 out of 81? But the female fans that will show up will be legion; that weird non-representation of the female gender in the artists but over-representation in the fans has to have some interesting sociological and psychological reason behind it. I imagine it has something to do with the industry being a lot more misogynistic, and the music focusing a lot more on sexuality. Rock music tends to be more aggressive and testosterone-filled, while dance music focuses more on movement and mass euphoria. That would tend to improve or reinforce female positive perception of their sexuality, and thus increase the number of female fans. Conversely, that pressure must be killer on the female DJs, who have to be hot sexual items while trying to spin in the DJ booth – not easy. Niki Belucci certainly got experience dealing with that from way before she stepped into a DJ booth. How about other genres? Well, I can’t see any dearth of female musicians or fans in pop, even though many of the greatest bands are never heard on top 40 stations… and so perhaps lack the numbers. Having 10k fans scattered around the world is not as fun as having 1 million fans in one city alone. Soul and R&B? Plenty of female artists that are amazing. They have a hard time making it big in rap and hiphop, as society – like in rock – seems to call those genres a man’s game… but have they heard Jean Grae or k.flay before? I have. Live too.

From personal experience, I know there are a ton of female musicians out there that the festivals could have pulled in… and some have, so plainly it’s just a few festivals that are, er, misbehaving. While I can’t get a major festival to be more fair about gender representation (or get people to decide to like more female bands), I can always adjust my own concertgoing and attitudes. Thankfully, I don’t need to: I see a lot of female artists every year! Not counting the major orchestral and opera concerts and musicals I have seen this year, I’ve seen 15 female or female-led bands out of 40 for a nice respectable 37.5%. Tomorrow, I’m seeing Bess Rogers, Lelia Broussard and Kristen Ford. I’m seeing Beth Hart and Paramore and those female DJs at EDC and Jess Klein. Then The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Ellie Goulding, Azealia Banks, Matt & Kim, Alabama Shakes, The Joy Formidable, Krewella, Amanda Palmer & the Grand Theft Orchestra, LP, Dragonette, Haim, Sister Sparrow & the Dirty Birds, Kopecky Family Band, Selah Sue, Blondfire, Chvrches, Delta Rae, Imaginary Cities, Trails and Ways, Icona Pop, Erykah Badu, Feist, Polica, Best Coast, Beach House, She & Him, Camera Obscura, Sandi Thom, Tegan and Sara, Miranda Lambert, Solange, Beyonce, Emeli Sande and Alunageorge during the summer. That’s a lot of women.

Ygritte: “I am a Wildling, tame me now. You’re my Direwolf and I’ll make you howl!” That is all.

The Electric Pancakes parody Jon Snow, Ygritte and Daenarys Targaryen from Game of Thrones.

Covering Elle Varner? HOT. Jenny Suk was on K-POP STAR 2. Can’t bring myself to watch some of these foreign singing shows (can barely watch clips from Idol and such) as some of the stuff they’re made to do is a total travesty. She actually does Gangnam Style on that show. I can’t bear to listen, though I’m sure she pulls it off with the usual slick sound.

Christ Church, the home church of George and Martha Washington on 2nd St in Old City, Philadelphia, was home to a philandering rector of some dramatic tendency in the years 1714-15. The Reverend Francis Phillips was extraordinarily popular during his first few months at Christ Church such that Robert Jenney, a visiting priest, could report back to the Bishop of London that Phillips had a “good character” and was so beloved that “it was impossible to dispossess him.” Still, controversy was destined to erupt.

Christ Church.

By February of 1715, Phillips was facing numerous suits for slander, attempted murder and debauchery. James Logan, the mayor of Philadelphia in 1723, noted at the time that Rev. Phillips was “taxed with scandalous expressions, boasting of undue intimacy with some woman of reputation.” Phillips’ tendency to talk out of hand regarding his sexual conquests caused him to be accused of slandering 3 Philadelphia ladies and propositioning a 4th. Among his supposed mistresses were the wife of William Trent, the Anglican provincial councilor; the daughter of John Moore, a customs collector and a co-founder of Christ Church; a Mrs. Newman; and Elizabeth Starkey, a servant of the Anglican minister in Chester with whom Philips was staying. To add to his troubles, he was also accused of administering arsenic to Starkey to get her to be quiet, and he was presented with another bill – returned with no answer – that specifically admonished him for “forgetting his sacerdotal vow”, aka neglecting his pastoral duty, through his acquaintance of offensive manner with one “Margaret S—.”

William Trent and John Moore had Phillips arrested at midnight on a Saturday and dragged to prison to face all these charges. Unfortunately for Phillips, the sheriff in charge happened to be Peter Evans, the aggrieved suitor for the unfaithful Ms. Moore. In revenge, Evans prevented Phillips from sending for bail money and forced him to stay in general lockup rather than in the undersheriff’s house, according to custom. It was a vindictive setup: slander cases typically had no bail set but mysteriously, Phillips’ bail was set at 3000 pounds, an unbelievably large sum. In indignation, Phillips called for a bill to be presented to the Mayor and Aldermen of Philadelphia for having “done him injustice” as “to have taken his servant Elizabeth S—.” And, presumably, for the injustice of imprisoning him.

During this time, he had some remarkable support from his male congregants. Upon hearing that their beloved minister was in jail that Sunday morning – and presumably upset at missing out on salacious sermons by a priestly Lothario – a mob of 300 men and boys surrounded the jail demanding Phillips’ release. Once Phillips had been released, the mob spent the next two days attacking and destroying the houses of the two initial accusers. Infuriated at this outcome, “Peter Evans, gentleman” challenged Phillips to a duel for infringing on his social privileges concerning a “gentlewoman that I have a profound respect for.” Phillips ignored the challenge and Evans was later indicted for unlawful duelling.

This particular episode in Pennsylvania history wasn’t only about the debaucheries. In fact, it was merely the distraction in a far more important fight over power in the colony. As there was no Anglican bishop in Pennsylvania at the time, the vestry was allowed to assert its right to choose a minister; their choice was Phillips. The men who brought up the suit against Phillips were seeking revenge against being cuckolded or otherwise offended, but luckily (or unluckily) enough, they also happened to be political rivals to Pennsylvania Governor Charles Gookin, who saw an opening. By defending the vestry’s right to choose their minister, Gookin saw himself as fulfilling his role as defender of the Anglican Church in the colony. This position would also net him points toward remaining governor when and if the colony was sold to the British crown. Not surprisingly, the richer congregants of Christ Church were offended that the colonial authorities would try to force themselves into religion; they did not want a political pontiff. This divided the congregation: the poorer congregants tended to side with Gookin and Phillips, and the richer congregants against.

Despite public support, Phillips was still brought to trial, found guilty and fined twenty pounds. At this point, Governor Gookin stepped in and declared “nulle prosequis,” meaning that the state had an unwillingness to prosecute and thus the fine and all charges against Phillips were dropped. Gookin’s opponents were angered by this and proceeded to hold a no-confidence vote against Phillips. At the local courthouse, they voted Phillips to “have acted scandalously” and requested that the Bishop of London “purge the Church of so bad a member and rid us of so scandalous a Brother.” To curry favor, they specifically exempted the Church from wrongdoing by claiming that “tares will grow with the wheat.” Christ’s church, the figurative head of the Christian religion and the physical Philadelphia church, was considered to be “one that had a devil.” And the devil must be removed.

Phillips’ defenders were not amused, but there was little to be done. The church itself had been whittled away as people moved to services run by rival Anglican priests in the area, and Phillips didn’t have much of a congregation left to boast to. The Bishop of London finally replied in October 1715, demanding that Phillips be recalled. Upon his return, the errant priest disappeared into anonymity. Gookin didn’t fare much better; he warred with the church for years and was unable to solidify any sort of control over the Anglican church in Pennsylvania. He was finally replaced in 1717 by Sir William Keith, who took Gookin’s stand one further and tried to completely overrule the vestry in all matters. After that, Christ Church leaders were never to contemplate any role for the political authorities with church governance.

Due to the federal Comstock Act of 1873, it was illegal for Americans to disseminate “obscene, lewd and/or lascivious” materials through the post. The law was motivated by two things: a moralizing response to the flood of pornographic material generated during the Civil War, and a religiously sponsored backlash against contraception and abortion. Thus, no birth control or abortion information OR devices could be disseminated through the post, regardless if it was educational or for disease-fighting purposes. This particular law was echoed fairly quickly by state legislatures all over the country. For over four decades, Americans were kept in the dark and were ill-educated vis-a-vis sexual health. During World War I, the United States had the embarrassing distinction of being the only Allied nation to send their servicemen to war without condoms; they later had to deal with a rash (literally) of STD outbreaks, among other public health disasters. In 1918, the Margaret Sanger trial and later appeal found that contraceptive devices were only legal if promoted for the purpose of curing or preventing disease. It wasn’t until 18 years later, in 1936, that contraceptive devices for the purposes of birth control were finally legalized. The case that sparked that decision involved the mailing of Japanese contraceptive devices to the United States, as no US company was willing to legally produce or distribute any such products due to the overbearing nature of the law. There were US companies that did create similar products, but these were marketed as “feminine hygiene” products and ended up being much, much more unsafe – like the Lysol douche, which involved inserting liquid disinfectant into the vaginal area. Another three decades later, some of the last of the state contraception Comstock laws were finally brought down by the US Supreme Court – in Connecticut and Massachusetts, both Catholic voter strongholds. That decision only covered contraception within marriage; a 1972 decision finally covered unmarried individuals as well.

Of all the sections of the Comstock Act, only the directives surrounding “obscene” materials still remain and are in effect today. The standard definition of “obscene” is now derived from the Miller test, which considers a work obscene if “community standards” would consider the work prurient; and if the work is patently offensive according to state law; and if the work lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. The problem with the test is that community standards can differ wildly across the country, making it difficult for any content producer or product manufacturer to comply in every area they sell in. The Ninth Circuit stepped in on a case of pornography violating obscenity laws and concluded that due to the infinite reach of the product via the Internet, a “national community standard” should instead be devised and followed. No one has yet implemented a search for agreement on a definition of what this “national community standard” would look like, nor specified how such an agreement would be found. Perhaps an average of community standards, to be fair… but how do you average standards? Until that is decided – and hopefully not soon, as there are many more pressing items to consider – the vagaries of an “I know it when I see it” definition of obscenity cannot be considered acceptable in a legal setting unless we are willing to submit to cultural dictatorship by powerful social issue groups.

Where it gets more dangerous is when more science and practicality-based items are labeled as “obscene” or “pornographic.” Birth control devices and abortion information were considered obscene in 1873, and to some degree, they are still seen as such today by many conservative and religious groups. Several states, including a bizarre bill currently being proposed in Ohio, have tried to pass modern-day Comstock laws that are replacements of the early 20th century ones that had been passed and overturned. The worst of them seek to ban teachers from distributing any contraception information, focus completely on abstinence education and fine or jail individuals and institutions that pass on “unapproved” sexual health education to their students. This would suggest that many of these states are regressing to the moral and scientific understanding they had in 1873, and are forgetting that an increase in draconian sexual health laws usually leads to more teen pregnancies and more backroom abortions, leading to more deaths or unwanted babies – both drains on our social institutions and tax funds.

This diatribe seeks to make a point that is hardly new but is continually provoked by the daily details of legislative attempts to backtrack our way to ignorance. We are supposed to live in a progressive society that relies on facts and science to help make our lives more free and more efficient within the constraints of living in close proximity to each other in a social structure. Preventing people from being properly educated equates to prevention of proper decision making; one can’t make an informed choice without all the information. Furthermore, the outcome of ignorant decision making tends to mean a much higher expense for the entire social structure. Thus, we are both made less free and less efficient with every moralizing rule being placed on the books. It is up to the individual to decide if they want to have sex and how they do it, and it reflects badly on those who seek to watch, limit and rule how that is done – it is a kind of pornography itself, on a grander scale.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde, “Lady Windermere’s Fan”

Oscar Wilde.

Wilde produced the debut of Lady Windermere’s Fan at the St. James Theatre in London on February 22, 1892. A biting satire of social mores, the play concerned a lady who finds out her husband has been possibly having an affair with another woman – a woman who later turns out to be the lady’s mother and the blackmailer of her husband, who decides to throw away her reputation to save her daughter’s reputation. The dark goings-on of society backrooms and the instigation of family loyalty in crises were thick and juicy issues that were ripe for exploration by theater and film companies worldwide.

Hong Shen.

The Wilde play was brought to China in 1924 as “The Young Lady’s Fan,” by Hong Shen, a young Chinese dramatist who had trained at Harvard University and the Copley theater in Boston. Shen adapted, directed and starred in a Chinese-language version that he eventually turned into a film version just four years later.

Bai Hong, who as the third member of the Bright Moon Song and Dance Troupe, “invented” Chinese pop music. Her music was later banned by the Communists for representing decadent American cultural imperialism. She appeared in a 1939 version of Shen’s adaptation of “Lady Windermere’s Fan.”

In 1921, while still studying in the States, Shen was outraged by “The First Born” and “The Red Lantern,” ignorant Hollywood movies that portrayed Chinese as opium-smoking, brothel-mongering and otherwise bizarre and objectionable stereotypes, with many of the Asian roles going to whites in yellowface. To combat these racist Western representations of Asians in film, he started up the Changcheng (Great Wall) Motion Picture Manufacturing Company with other Chinese expats. Their only productions were short films introducing Chinese costume and the first Chinese martial arts film to open in the United States. However, the company was not wealthy enough to afford a large-scale national outing, so it decided to move to China and jumpstart the film industry there in 1924. The movies they later churned out were extremely literate and enjoyed by the intelligentsia but found little foothold with the majority of the country. They, like many indie studios, were not commercial enough.

Still from “The First Born,” with Miles Mander and Madeleine Carroll.

Shen himself, upon his return to China in 1922, proceeded to take up the cause of Chinese theater and film as well. He took up a theater professorship in Shanghai and then coined the term “huaju,” to name and separate the newly-developed niche of Western-style stage dramas from the traditional Chinese operatic productions. Shen wrote the first full screenplay for a Chinese film production (and earned the nickname the “father of the Chinese screenplay”); previously, Chinese films had been largely improvised from hazily written story outlines.

Harold Lloyd.

In 1929, Shen initiated what is probably the first Western movie ban in China: comedy superstar – and only second to Charlie Chaplin – Harold Lloyd’s first talkie, “Welcome, Danger” involved portrayals of Chinese gangsters as ruthless and subhuman, prompting Shen to start first a riot at the performance and then a literary riot wherein all the prominent figures of the drama, journalism and education world wrote to the Chinese central government with promises of dark consequences if the film were not banned. In revenge, the theater sued Shen for loss of income from the performance. At the trial, Shen used the courtroom as a soapbox from which to address cultural aggression. As the whispers moved across China and US film studios began to blanch at the possible loss of an international market – and yes, this was in 1929 – Paramount Pictures decided to throw in the towel and publicly express apologies for “daring to insult your honorable country.”

While imprisoned on immigration charges at Ellis Island in 1941 – 15 years after he had moved to the States – Chinese actor, novelist, poet and playwright Hsi Tseng Tsiang wrote a letter to famed progressive artist Rockwell Kent on a roll of toilet paper, explaining conditions in the prison.

“Everything is fine and gay but the locked door, guard and uniform.” – from the toilet paper letter.

Tsiang was awaiting immigration status review under the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which mandated annual immigration quotas to 2% of the number of people from that country in the United States in 1890. A bad review would have meant expulsion back to China, which was undergoing considerable turmoil under a Communist revolution. As a former aide to Sun Yat-Sen’s secretary, Tsiang possibly considered a move back to Mao’s China as bad for his health.

His wit: “the cover of a book is more of a book than the book is a book.”

“I wish your taste would be like mine… we could just be sixty-nine.” – from The Hanging on Union Square.

Normally, the review process would have motivated individuals to display their respectability and social utility; that would behoove those who wanted to stay. But Tsiang was the dilettante all over: his scatological outcry against prison conditions and his long career in written and performance art that were insubordinate, sexually radical and provocatively obscene were purposeful. To his defense came the American Civil Liberties Union. Tsiang stayed.

Hsi Tseng Tsiang.

“Statue, turn your ass! Let us pass!” – Tsiang poem, quoted by other Ellis Island inmates.

Ellis Island wasn’t his first time defending his status. His initial entry into the United States was only allowed under an exception to the racist National Origins Act of 1924 that let students stay; otherwise, he would have been banned from immigration, like most other Chinese that attempted. For the next two decades, his policial activism and affiliations meant constant harassment by the federal government.

“With our paper bullets, we shall change the direction of the wind.” – from China Red.

Tsiang was unrepentantly leftist and a lifelong member of the Communist party, with much of his poetry appearing in the Daily Worker, the American Communist newspaper. The US officially backed Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang in China, but Tsiang constantly spoke out against them – such that the Los Angeles Times labeled him the “leader of the radicals” in 1928. That year, he also wrote a poem that denounced Japanese imperalism and urged Chinese workers to unite in a mass revolt.

“When the sky with blood is red, we all will have our bread!” – from Shantung.

Tsiang was one of the first Asian American authors and had a prolific output. As a novelist, he wrote three works including one that he self-published and proclaimed as an American Epic. They were all motivated by his desire to change the world; indeed, the Everyman hero of his last novel drops his quest to save himself in favor of bettering the human condition.

“No existing literary approaches suited Tsiang’s spectacularly expansive vision of how the world should be, and this might explain why he ranged so freely from sentimental, epistolary novels to militantly leftist poetry, plays, and music to bitterly ironic, experimental novels.” – Tsiang biographer, Hua Hsu.

From 1943 to his death in 1971, he had another career as a film actor, playing bit stereotypically Asian roles in over 38 movies. One of his first roles was in 1946 classic Tokyo Rose; his last, in the TV show Gunsmoke. Some of the money from his film acting gigs was used to pay for his own stage adaptation of Hamlet, which he performed on Friday nights for a dozen years in a dance studio over a bus depot in Hollywood.

His headstone, from Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles.

“John Barrymore is the only Hamlet who projected emotion. The rest, not right. Laurence Olivier? He plays himself, not Hamlet.” – from an interview in the Milwaukee Journal, March 23, 1954.

Starting in the Fifties, his hour-long version of the Bard’s classic replaced Yorick’s skull with a tin-can, used bells to mark scenes (like in classic Chinese drama) and was sparse with scenery; he performed solo in front of a black curtain, with only a chair and a spotlight as company. His performance was informed by his study of Shakespeare with Ashley Thorndike while atending Columbia University. He wasn’t just projecting the Bard: he often inserted anti-capitalist rants into Hamlet’s soliloquies.

“Shakespeare meant for this to happen: for his play to change with the challenge of time.” – from an interview in the Los Angeles Mirror, August 23, 1955.

His work also affected other artists who had aspirations to a social conscience. Composer Ruth Crawford Seeger set “Chinaman, Laundryman” (about the the experience of Chinese-American laundry workers) and “Sacco, Vanzetti” (about the trial of two Italian American suspected anarchists) to music, premiering the latter at Carnegie Hall on March 6, 1933, and the former at the Mellon Gallery (which had opened just the year before) in Philadelphia on March 27, 1933. These works were done in a dissonant style, heavily influenced by Alexander Scriabin and her composer husband, Charles Seeger. Her famous stepson, Pete Seeger, set his poem “Lenin! Who’s That Guy?” to music, publishing it in the 1934 collection “Workers Song Books.”

Ruth Crawford-Seeger and Charles Seeger.

On a side note: the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 relied on numbers from the 1890 census and was in use until immigration law reform in 1965. However, the original data from the 1890 census that would have been used to calculate the quotas was destroyed by government order in 1934, the same year that a permanent National Archives was set up – which would have been mandated to save such records.

“On Saturday, a federal court in New York ruled in summary judgment within the case of Capitol Records v. ReDigi. The court decided that no, users do not have the right to resell digital music files, as doing so violates existing copyright law.”

Essentially, the decision defends current first sale rights rules which allows for resale of material items that, upon transfer to a new owner, prevents the initial owner from accessing that item. Thus, complete ownership is transferred. In digital content, however, the file transferred can easily be copied by the original owner. This means that it is almost impossible to assure that ownership is completely transferred.

The decision doesn’t do much to clarify what ownership really means vis-a-vis digital content. If we can be said to own digital content, it should be similar to rights we hold as material content owners. We are currently free to do as we wish with material content in our possession: give it to whomever we wish and resell it as we wish. That isn’t true with digital content. We can’t resell digital content. Thus, what we bought essentially has no value for us – the court just decided that.

Some even more draconian reading of copyright law would suggest that creating copies and distribution to other devices or to other users – even without a value exchange – should be made illegal. On the face, it’s easy to see why distributing millions of free copies would be a lose-lose for the copyright owners and for the digital ecenomy. Unfortunately, the free use of such a reading would also mean that everyone on the planet would be guilty of a violation of that view of copyright law.

Common storage maneuvers including defragmentation, reorganization of drive index systems and merely changing folder names are completely consistent with users maintaining just one version of that content, and not attempting to create multiple copies… but it’s the same single copy being copied over and over and thus not the original piece of content. Ownership is based on the original content being transferred from owner to owner; in digital content, this is impossible as the original content never survives in its original form.

Even more disturbing is what the copyright quandary means for 3D printing. If material content is reproduced, then the “owner” faces the same limbo as the owner of digital content. The courts, with the mandatory assistance of the public, must redefine what ownership actually means, or soon, it will have no meaning whatsoever.

A logical but highly unpleasant solution is to license all content. That is what many digital content providers do, currently… almost all digital content sales are actually licenses, not transfers of ownership. You are given an exclusive right to view content once and the rules regarding manipulation are clear. They can also inactivate the license at any time, and appeals would be petty, bureaucratic and arduous. Even other limitations – like one must be connected to the Internet at all times, or licensing must be validated per use via webservers that are often discontinued when the copyright owners lose interest – destroy what little right the consumer has to the items they rented. The end result of requiring licensing for everything is that we would own nothing and rent everything. But even here, it’s not treated as licenses for material goods are – if our digital content gets damaged, the licenses rarely allow us to receive another copy of that content. Instead, we are considered SOL.

The only thing worse than owning nothing is not owning yourself, a position indeed possible given current patent law and licensing rules. Gene patents owned by corporate entities worldwide now cover 100% of the human genome. If they were to enforce their patent, it is feasible that – without court interference and protection of the individual – corporations would own us and we’d have to purchase a license to exist as we are. And, like digital content, we are constantly new copies of the original content; the original “us” doesn’t exist for more than a moment in time.

The higher courts are currently burdened with grand items like abortion and gay marriage… but the time is rapidly approaching when we will need them to pay attention to the digital world. It’s not only digital ownership, but privacy, consent, freedom… do any of these exist, really, online? Or are consumers merely trespassers on the World Wide Web?

And to start this post off, we have another installment of sad country songs. This one, by Kacey Musgraves, is probably not the most romantic song you’ve ever heard. But it’s so honest that it probably means more than all those other pretty love songs. It is what it is.

Philadelphia’s Ben Folds. Hopefully that’s a compliment? I’ll be seeing these guys at Milkboy in not too long.

More wistful love songs I’m seeing Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors on a double bill with NeedToBreathe in May.

Australian rapper Urthboy with chanteuse Jane Tyrrell.

Magnificent. I’m not too convinced she’d be amazing live but whatever, this song by Sky Ferreira is pretty awesome.

Creepy chain-gang or witch-dunking folk rock number from Delta Rae.

Slick song from Robin Thicke.

Get pumped. Madeon!!!