Architecture of Cities: the World Chasing the Light

BY RICHARD SCHULMAN

 DECEMBER 29, 2023
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Entering London.

One day a prismatic pageantry of ghosts with like-minded souls stood at the threshold.

There was this photographer and the sway of Sir  Norman Foster’s London Millennium Bridge.

There was a nuanced wall of one thousand buildings from a century of British architectural design.

Dreams mingled with my realities: Before I could cross the threshold I had to understand how to navigate a history of fantasies: Standing upright as if to cascade across nations: The one-hundred-foot wave hailing from Nazaré was both forbidding and foreboding:  I watched as it seemed to be cresting inhabited by one-thousand eyes of Lampreys and Cods.

If I may inhabit James Thurber’s mind for one minute: in my eyes his “Mitty” my “Mitty” might have a darker disposition. In the most minute manner, Thurber realized what I have grown to embrace: my dreams become my realities. I had to get by the encumbrance of this wall, this wave in order to succeed.

Every year I read the English Romantic, Charles Lamb’s “New Year’s Eve”. It is the same as the year before: The words become more familiar: Like Lamb’s poem, my world remains the same. My days become more familiar: I dream that I battle every day to see something new: but in a new light:

One day I listened to Yusuf Lateef’s “Spartacus: Yusef Lateef – Love Theme From Spartacus – YouTube  It reminded me that I entered each city not with the power of Spartacus’ army but with hidden dreams and the power to discover great things.

Entering Tokyo.

Most days when I enter a new city or one revisited: London, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico, Barcelona or…

I feel like a hamster challenging life’s experiences: avec a hamster wheel: Round and round I go: I am lost in my mind and lost on every path I walk: The scariest part of my life as a photographer is that there is not a single map nor navigational system that can lead me to where I need to be: I feel my way through streets that have so many curves and misdirection it is as if I am accompanied by a mere white cane:  Lost and lost again: But my god, the things not on the itinerary that I have discovered: The streets to observe, the comforts that I know: A pub, a cafe, a street corner, the dress and attire of a massive amount of people: I will get me through my day.

There is a windfall from my idiosyncratic imaginations and dreams: some days may deliver the brilliance of a photograph I may have made: The windfall may be the tenor of a city I have discovered: The city I have known and not known: The greatest windfall may be to lose ones mind l real and imaginary streets: At this point it is only normal you might imagine an hysterical laugh that would shake Krakatoa before there was a Krakatoa.

I have never understood how photographers live thinking about the mechanical when our reality lives in our minds as a dream. There is always Game of Thrones’ “Winterfell” to keep one’s mind focused: The wall, the fortress that needs to be climbed to capture what the camera needs to see: To go beyond the moment and cross the threshold: to be present: “snippety-snap-snap”.

When I have crossed the imaginary bridge from let us say the Tate Modern to Saint Paul’s and the Festival Gardens where I am intended to be: I will stand: I will “twitch”:  I have arrived.

I am not a warrior, I am not a ”grunt” nor am I a sophisticated flâneur: I am merely a chaser: I chase the one structure: I may capture the single light that differentiates from all others.

Entering Dubai.

The Capture: London’s #HeronTower #KohnPedersenFox.

All photographs by Richard Schulman.

Richard Schulman is a photographer and writer. His books include Portraits of the New Architecture and Oxymoron & Pleonasmus. He lives in New York City.

The Winter Without Snow – A Wake-Up Call

BY RIVERA SUN

 DECEMBER 29, 2023
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

We all have our reasons for getting alarmed about the climate crisis. With bare ground at Christmas and no snow on the horizon, my neighbors just got theirs. This Northern Maine valley nestles against the border of Canada – and winter without snow is unfathomable.

Snowmobiling is a big deal around here. While most of Maine suffers its tourist season along with the blackflies and summer sunburns, my neck of our vast woods gets its annual rush of visitors when the snow starts flying.

They come to these northern reaches with their snowmobiles on trailers to go joyriding over our endless miles of trail system. There’s a breathless thrill to speeding over three feet of glorious snow at 30-80 mph.

But not this year. The local hospitality bookings plummeted with cancellations when 40°F pouring rain melted our paltry snow in mid-December. My neighbors stare forlornly at the bare ground and reluctantly concede to taking their four-wheelers out instead of the snowmobiles.

The weather forecast is freakishly sunny and the 1-2 inches hesitantly projected for the New Year won’t be nearly enough to snowmobile on. We might not even break out our shovels.

For context, on a ‘normal’ year, by the time the second week of January plunges to -20°F in the daytime, we keep warm by hurling the latest 6-inch snowfall up over the 4-foot embankments along the driveway. Bare ground at this time of year is head-spinning.

This is the climate crisis.

Just down the road, the older gentleman who adamantly argued with me at the post office, denying the reality of global warming, must be scratching his head. A disquieted wondering must be going through him as he stares at the greenish grass.

It’s okay to change your mind, I want to murmur to him. Millions of Americans are doing the same thing.

They’re seeing their relatives evacuate their homes as forest fires – intensified through drought – burn closer and closer. They’re worried about older friends in the extreme heat that gets worse each summer.

They’re sending money to church groups that help with flood relief when the 500-year floods strike twice in a decade. They’re looking at the faces of their children and grandchildren and realizing that the dire predictions of climate scientists are not an abstract future anymore.

It’s the reality that their most precious loved ones will face. What will his grandchildren live through?

Up by the beautiful lake, where the ice-fishing shacks are still lined up on the shore waiting for the ice to thicken up enough to drive on, the local politicians – who have been ignoring the climate crisis like ostriches with their heads in the sand – must be tossing and turning with unease. Is it too late to do something? What can they do?

In the 100-year-old farmhouse that has sheltered seven generations of potato farmers, the mother of three children and eight grandchildren is wrestling with the contradictions of our culture. She wants to preserve her farm and worried about low yields after a hot, rainy summer.

She just got back from visiting one of her far-flung kids at Christmas. They say flying is one of the worst things for the environment. If she wants to save the farm, will she have to give up visiting her kids?

You can almost hear similar thoughts rumbling through our valley: Is this normal? (No.) Should we do something? Petition public officials? Hold a protest? Let the kids go on school strike? What will make a difference? Does any of it really matter? (The answer to the last two questions is yes, by the way. Your actions now do make a difference and they do matter to the future of humanity.)

In 2024, we need to ask ourselves these kinds of uncomfortable – and sometimes downright terrifying – questions. What will we give up so that humanity and the planet can have a livable future? What kinds of change will we embrace with open arms so that our children can have a fighting chance of survival? What will we do today, tomorrow, and the next day to make a shift to a sustainable society?

There are sacrifices to be made, of course. Families are taking on debt to convert their houses to renewables. Utilities are investing in the switch. Companies have to go out on a limb to push their industry to change. We cannot sustain the level of air travel we currently enjoy. And yes, it is possible that we can’t justify the energy expense of pleasure-riding on snowmobiles.

But if giving up your snowmobile could ensure a future for your children, would you do it? I know I would.

On the other hand, there is a future – a beautiful one – waiting for us. It is healthy, clean, hopeful. And it’s already on its way.

That potato farming mother has a solar farm in one of her fields.

This year, those local politicians worked with our state rep to secure $35 million to restore fish habitat for endangered alewives, trout, and Atlantic salmon.

Even my climate-denying neighbor put in a heat pump last year, grumbling about the jacked-up price of oil.

We need to escalate these kinds of actions exponentially. There is something for all of us to do.

Maybe you are a local loan officer who can approve energy efficiency loans to homeowners.

Or a senior citizen with a retirement fund you can divest from fossil fuels.

Perhaps you are a company manager who could cut back on air travel for your industry.

Or an alumni of a university that could make the switch to renewable power.

You may serve on a church committee that could help people prioritize care of the Earth this year.

Or maybe you’re on a school board, town council, or county commission that could pass important climate measures.

There are countless actions that we can take. And we must take them. Now, not next year. Let The Winter Without Snow be a wake-up call for all of us. There isn’t a moment to waste.

Rivera Sun is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and other books, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network.

Hip Hop at 50: From Subculture to the Mainstream

BY AMY CODDIGTON

 DECEMBER 29, 2023

FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

As hip hop turns 50, many mainstream outlets have highlighted how it has utterly transformed U.S. popular culture. And they’re right: look around, and it’s hard to see or hear something that hasn’t been influenced by the young people of color who fashioned, developed, and championed hip hop culture. From Snoop Dogg hosting the Puppy Bowl to Kendrick Lamar winning the Pulitzer Prize, from the global popularity of K-pop boy band BTS’s rapped verses to country artists incorporating trap beats while maintaining some vocal twang, and from rap soundtracking almost every sports arena to breakdancing making its Olympic debut next year: hip hop isn’t so much part of today’s mainstream as it is the mainstream.

How exactly did this happen? How did this minority subcultural movement find its way out of the block and community center parties of the South Bronx and into the ears, eyes, and hearts of people across the United States? My book How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap and Race responds to these questions by looking at how one of hip hop’s musical elements, rap, came to be broadcast on U.S. commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the early 1980s, most commercial radio stations ignored rap, in large part because the genre had come to be synonymous with young, poor Black Americans. But in the late 1980s, previously cautious radio stations began to play the genre, turning LL Cool J, MC Hammer, Bell Biv Devoe, and —yes— Vanilla Ice, into household names. By the 1990s, rapping was everywhere, soundtracking feature films like The Addams Family and House Party, teaching viewers about conflict resolution on the show Kids Incorpo­rated, promoting household products like Sprite and Pillsbury in television advertisements, helping kids learn their multiplication tables on educational cassettes, and entertaining families when they sat down for game night.

Rap changed the commercial radio industry, as its multiracial and multiethnic appeal required those working at radio stations to rethink their programming practices. But the radio industry also changed rap, reframing the genre’s style and substance. For many stations that came to play the genre, rap couldn’t just be the voice of marginalized Black Americans. It also had to fit on their stations broadcasting the sound of young, hip, and majority-white America. Artists grappled with pressure to conform to the mostly white-controlled commercial radio industry’s musical preferences and struggled to maintain the genre’s identity as the radio industry took control of its main­streaming.

As we celebrate hip hop passing this milestone, it’s important to acknowledge the flipside of its mainstream success. While the mainstreaming of rap has put money into the hands of Black musicians and businesspeople, Greg Tate notes that it has failed to change the material realities of most Black Americans and has not “fully dismantled the prevalent, delimiting mythologies about Black intelligence, morality, and hierarchical place in America.” Instead, hip hop becoming mainstream meant that anyone, regardless of race, could profit from the genre, as the culture was quickly assimilated into the mostly white-owned profit-seeking media industries.

Rap can be revolutionary: it acts as a megaphone for marginalized artists to express their inimitable identities. But like all other popular music genres, it does this while selling records, and subsidizing the extractive music industries that were built on the unpaid labor of colonized people worldwide and Black musicians in the United States. Understanding just how hip hop became the mainstream force it is today helps us make sense of this duality, allowing us to comprehend just how rap became the most popular genre in the world without enacting substantive change to make that world more equitable.

Amy Coddington is an Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music and The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music. She is the author of How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race.