Because the Secret Service aren’t allowed into the Oval Office, they turned the floor into a giant, digital scale so that they can monitor where the President is at all times. 00
The Most Instagrammed Places of 2016
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iStock
If you snapped a selfie at Disney World—or any other Disney theme park—this year, you’re not alone. Mickey Mouse’s playland was the most Instagrammed place for 2016. (It is the happiest place on Earth, after all.) Here are the photo app’s other most popular spots for pics.
1. DISNEY THEME PARKS // WORLDWIDE
2. UNIVERSAL STUDIOS THEME PARKS // WORLDWIDE
3. CENTRAL PARK // NEW YORK
4. TIMES SQUARE // NEW YORK
5. EIFFEL TOWER // PARIS
6. LOUVRE MUSEUM // PARIS
7. LAS VEGAS STRIP // LAS VEGAS
8. SANTA MONICA PIER // SANTA MONICA
9. BROOKLYN BRIDGE // NEW YORK
10. VYSTAVKA DOSTIZHENIY NARODNOGO KHOZYAYSTVA (EXHIBITION OF ACHIEVEMENTS OF NATIONAL ECONOMY) // MOSCOW
11. SIAM PARAGON // BANGKOK
12. COLOSSEUM // ROME
13. MADISON SQUARE GARDEN // NEW YORK CITY
14. LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT // LOS ANGELES
15. TOWER BRIDGE // LONDON
16. BARCELONA CENTRE // BARCELONA
17. NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL // PARIS
18. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART // NEW YORK CITY
19. EMPIRE STATE BUILDING // NEW YORK CITY
20. NIAGARA FALLS // NEW YORK & CANADA
[h/t: Refinery29]
December 30, 2016 – 11:00am
10 Fantastic Facts About ‘Fantasia’
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YouTube
In the late 1930s, Walt Disney had an idea for an experimental film that was unlike anything he or anyone else had ever done. With the dream of combining classical musical and animation into one grand “concert feature,” Disney worked on getting the rights to the story of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and then he started to build a team to help bring his unconventional film to life. Fantasia released in select theaters in 1940, and now over 75 years later, it is still regarded as his masterpiece and one of the most important and ambitious animated features of all time. Here are 10 things that you probably didn’t know about the film that revolutionized the animation industry.
1. IT WAS THE FIRST FILM TO USE STEREOPHONIC SOUND.
The scope and soundstage of Fantasia were too grand for the standard theater setup of 1940, but instead of making a film that worked within the limitations of the technology, Disney and his team had to develop a way to upgrade theaters to match the concert experience of the film. According to A.P. Peck of Scientific American, a dozen or so theaters across the country had to upgrade their equipment to show Fantasia in what was called “Fantasound.” This involved installing more speakers around the room instead of the few that were typically placed behind the screen (the installation at the Broadway Theater in New York included 90 speakers), as well as new projectors and sound reproduction machines. The estimated cost for the upgrades was around $85,000 per theater, which is close to $1.5 million today when adjusted for inflation.
2. IT IS DISNEY’S LONGEST ANIMATED FEATURE.
For its general release and past restorations, Fantasia was cut to reduce its running time, but at two hours and six minutes, the film is still the longest animated feature the studio has ever made. It would have been even longer, but a ninth segment, Claire de Lune, was nixed during production. The segment was later re-scored and included in the comedy musical Make Mine Music.
3. WALT WANTED IT TO BE A 4D EXPERIENCE.
Transcendent sound was not the only idea that Disney had for his concert feature. Having assembled a classical music super squad helmed by Leopold Stokowski, Disney’s imagination was moving at full tilt. Technical suggestions that he contributed to the planning phase included ways to “stimulate the audience’s senses,” according to Disney historian Didier Ghez. Disney thought it would be a good idea to have fans blow perfume into the theater during The Nutcracker Suite, he wanted the smell of gunpowder to fill the room during The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and he and Stokowski both liked the idea of having a portion of the concert shown using 3D projection, which was limited to black-and-white imagery at the time.
4. IT WAS A COMMERCIAL FAILURE AT FIRST.
Fantasia is regarded as one of the highest grossing films of all time (when adjusted for inflation) with over $83 million at the box office, but it did not open to huge numbers. Because of the special equipment needed to show the film, the theatrical release was very small, as were the sales. What helped the film was its longevity. Fantasia ran for 49 consecutive weeks in New York and nearly as long in Los Angeles, which set an all-time record back in 1941. It also returned to theaters several times over the course of 50 years. The disappointing initial performance and the onset of World War II killed Disney’s dream of creating a sequel, which he had already starting planning for in his head.
5. IT CHANGED THE WAY MICKEY MOUSE WAS DRAWN.
Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse back in 1928. The character did evolve over the years from his first official appearance in Steamboat Willie, but Fantasia marked a pretty major change by artist Fred Moore. One of the adjustments that Moore made to the design of the character was to give him pupils for the first time, instead of the black ovals that once stood for his eyes. Moore is also credited with shortening Mickey’s nose and giving him his now-signature white gloves.
6. STOKOWSKI DIDN’T THINK THE MOUSE SHOULD BE THE LEAD.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment kicks off Fantasia, with Mickey in his iconic blue hat and red robe, but if Disney had listened to Stokowski, things would have been different. According to the book Walt Disney’s Fantasia by John Culhane, Stokowski wrote a letter to Disney suggesting that Mickey was not right for the Apprentice role. “What would you think of creating an entirely new personality for this film instead of Mickey? A personality that could represent you and me – in other words, someone that would represent in the mind and heart of everyone seeing the film their own personality, so that they would enter into all the drama and emotional changes of the film in a most intense matter.”
Stokowski continued by suggesting that a new character would contribute to the “worldwide popularity” of the film. His argument made sense, because the Mickey of the late 1930s was not the dominant force that he is today, but Disney obviously did not agree. Dopey (one of the Seven Dwarfs) was also considered for the part, but Disney didn’t like that idea either.
7. THE SORCERER CHARACTER WAS INSPIRED BY DISNEY HIMSELF.
According to Oh My Disney, the official Disney news and quiz site, silent film star Nigel De Brulier was the live model used when designing the sorcerer character for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but Disney was the inspiration. The team gave the character Walt’s signature eyebrow raise and named him Yen Sid, which is Disney spelled backwards.
8. PEOPLE WERE USED AS LIVE-ACTION REFERENCES.
Very few humans appear in Fantasia, but they were used extensively during production. Members from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo were hired as models for dancing ostriches, crocodiles, and demons. Artists also used people as models for centaurs in The Pastoral Symphony segment, though some have called that a mistake. “I look back at the centaurs, and I kick myself and could kick anybody else, because this was a case of lack of analysis,” animator Eric Larson said in an interview in 1979. “How much nicer an effect the picture would have gotten if we had studied circus horses and what they could do to music…Instead of that, Ken Anderson, myself, and a heavy-set story man named Don got out on a sound stage one night and the three of us carried baskets on our backs and we skipped around like centaurs, but we were skipping like human beings, not like horses.”
9. A CONTROVERSIAL CHARACTER WAS CUT FROM HOME VIDEO RELEASES.
The Disney company’s history is peppered with problematic depictions, and unfortunately the highly regarded Fantasia was no exception. The fifth segment of the film, called The Pastoral Symphony, features elements of Greek mythology. Among the centaurs and satyrs was a character known as Sunflower, a racist depiction of a Black girl in centaur form with big lips, dark skin, and hoop earrings. Sunflower was shown shining the hooves of the other centaurs and performing other subservient tasks. The character was later censored from prints of the film in the 1960s.
10. THE RESTORATION TOOK TWO YEARS TO COMPLETE.
Working with the original negatives that had been sitting in the vault since 1946, engineers at YCM Laboratories in California spent two years working to restore the film for its 50th anniversary release. According to an article in The New York Times from 1990, every other time that the film had been released post-1946, it had been from duplicates and not the master film. “In 1946, master-duplication technology was not really wonderful,” restoration expert Pete Comandini said. “So we’re talking about a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox.”
The restoration team had to work from two incompatible formats for the negatives. Restoration of Stokowski’s music alone was a six-month long process, and Disney sound engineers had to work from a copy of the soundtrack because the original had disappeared and “nobody knows what happened to it.” Even after the long process, not everyone was happy with the work that was done. “They mucked up a few things,” Disney art director Ken O’Connor told the Los Angeles Times. “The ice fairy cobwebs were made a brighter yellow, the torches in the ‘Ave Maria’ sequence are too orange, and two of my ostriches were cut off on the sides…But it’s certainly still enjoyable.”
December 30, 2016 – 10:00am
The Murder of Rasputin: The 100th Anniversary of a Mystery That Won’t Die
Image credit:
Wikimedia // Public Domain
On the morning of December 29, 1916, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was startled by a phone call that turned out to be yet another death threat. His daughter, Maria, later remembered that it put him in a bad mood for the rest of the day. That night, at 11 p.m., he gave her a final reminder before she went to sleep: He was going to the Yusupov Palace that evening to meet an aristocrat. It was the last time she saw him alive.
Two days later, a search party found a body trapped beneath the ice of the frozen Malaya Nevka River. It was Rasputin: missing an eye, bearing three bullet wounds and countless cuts and bruises. The most infamous man in Russia was dead, assassinated at age 47.
A hundred years after his murder, the legend of Russia’s “Mad Monk” has only spread, inspiring films, books, operas, a disco song, and even his own beer, Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout. Described by early biographers as “The Saint Who Sinned” and “The Holy Devil,” he remains a difficult man to define. He spent less than a decade in public life, was barely literate, and published only two works. Even within the Russian Orthodox Church, the debate continues: Was Rasputin a charlatan, a holy man, the czarina’s secret lover, Satan himself, or just a simple Siberian peasant?
Above all, one question refuses to rest: What exactly happened to Rasputin in the early hours of December 30, 1916?
Library of Congress via Wikimedia // Public Domain
At the turn of the 20th century, Russia was the last absolute monarchy in Europe, and Czar Nicholas II had proven to be an unpopular ruler. Fearful of revolution and mired in corruption, the Romanovs also suffered from another significant problem: Czarevich Alexei, the young heir to the throne, had hemophilia, an incurable and then-deadly blood disease. When doctors failed to cure the boy, Nicholas II turned to alternative methods. Around 1906, he and the Czarina Alexandria were introduced to a Siberian holy man. Neither a monk nor a priest, but a peasant pilgrim turned preacher and faith healer, Rasputin made a good impression on the royal couple, and by 1910 was a regular at the Romanov court.
Although the czar, czarina, and even the royal doctors (begrudgingly) believed in Rasputin’s healing abilities, his proximity to the throne inspired suspicion and jealousy among the church, nobles, and the public. Rough in manners, fond of drinking, and prone to flirting and even sleeping with his married female followers, Rasputin’s brazen disregard for social norms caused some to speculate about his intentions. A few people even called him a heretic.
Soon, treasonous rumors began circulating that Rasputin was sleeping with the czarina, had fathered Alexei, and held total control over the czar. With World War I raging, Nicholas II’s departure for the front only increased the sense that it was Rasputin who was really ruling Russia. According to his self-confessed murderer, if the country and the czar were to be saved, Rasputin’s malevolent influence had to be erased—Rasputin had to die.
Prince Felix Yusupov—Rasputin’s self-confessed killer and the czar’s cousin—first published his account of the murder, Rasputin, while living in exile in France in 1927. According to his version of the evening, Yusupov walked Rasputin into the Moika Palace at a little after 1 a.m. Upstairs, Yusupov’s four accomplices—Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, conservative member of the Duma Vladimir Purishkevich, Dr. Stanislaw Lazovert, and army officer Sergei Sukhotin—lay in wait, passing the time listening to “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on a gramophone. Yusupov accounted for their noise by explaining that his wife had a few friends over, then led his victim down into the basement. He’d spent all day setting the scene, and had prepared two treats for Rasputin: a bottle of Madeira and several plates of pink petit fours—all laced with cyanide by Dr. Lazovert.
As Rasputin relaxed, eating multiple cakes and drinking three glasses of wine, Yusupov waited. And waited. The “Mad Monk” should have been dead in seconds, but the cyanide seemed to have no effect. Growing worried, Yusupov excused himself to the other room. He returned with a gun, promptly shooting Rasputin in the back. The other accomplices drove off to create the appearance that their victim had departed, leaving Yusupov and Purishkevich alone at the mansion with what appeared to be Rasputin’s corpse.
A strange impulse made Yusupov check the body again. The moment he touched Rasputin’s neck to feel for a pulse, Rasputin’s eyes snapped open. The Siberian leapt up, screaming, and attacked. But that wasn’t the worst part. As Yusupov wrote in 1953, “there was something appalling and monstrous in his diabolical refusal to die. I realized now who Rasputin really was … the reincarnation of Satan himself.”
To hear Yusupov tell it, Rasputin stumbled out of the cellar door into the snow. Purishkevich fired four shots before their victim finally collapsed in a snow bank. Yusupov fainted and had to be put to bed. When the others returned, the body was tied up, wrapped in a fur coat, thrown in a sack, and dumped off the Large Petrovsky Bridge into the river below. In the end, Yusupov said, it had been the first step to saving Russia.
As if Yusupov’s account of Rasputin’s seemingly superhuman strength wasn’t strange enough, another detail from the murder provided by Maria Rasputin and other authors goes farther. When Rasputin’s body was found, his hands were unbound, arms arranged over his head. In her book, My Father, Maria claimed this was proof Rasputin survived his injuries, freed himself in the river, and finally drowned while making the sign of the cross. Although Maria and Yusupov’s accounts had opposing motives, together they inspired the mythic perception of Rasputin as a man who was impossible to kill.
Despite the popularity of Yusupov and Maria’s stories, they have more than a few problems. According to the 1917 autopsy, Rasputin did not drown; he was killed by a bullet. (While accounts of the autopsy differ, according to the account cited by historian Douglas Smith in his new book Rasputin, there was no water in the Siberian’s lungs.) Although it might seem strange that Maria embellished the events of her father’s murder, she had motives to do so: Rasputin’s legend protected her father’s legacy, and by extension her livelihood. The image of his almost-saintly final moments helped turn her father into a martyr, as Rasputin is currently designated by an offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the same way, Yusupov’s story had its own audience in mind.
Wikimedia // Public Domain
When Yusupov published the first version of his “confession,” he was a refugee in Paris. His reputation as “The Man Who Killed Rasputin” was one of his few assets, and it proved so profitable that he became very protective of it. In 1932, while living in the U.S., Yusupov sued MGM for libel over the film Rasputin and The Empress, winning the sole right to call himself Rasputin’s killer. Not only did this lawsuit inspire the mandatory “this is a work of fiction” disclaimer that appears in every American film, it made Yusupov’s claim that he killed Rasputin a matter of legal record. However, even this is a lie. In his memoir, Yusupov admits that Vladimir Purishkevich fired the fatal shot—a fact confirmed in the other man’s account as well.
When one examines Yusupov’s account critically, it’s clear he remade himself the hero in a fantasy battle between good and evil. Comparing the original 1927 account and an updated version published in Yusupov’s memoir Lost Splendor (1953), Rasputin goes from being merely compared to the devil to being the actual biblical anti-Christ. Even the description of Rasputin’s “resurrection” appears to be a deliberate invention, borrowing elements from Dostoyevsky’s 1847 novella The Landlady.
By making Rasputin into a monster, Yusupov obscures the fact that he killed an unarmed guest in cold blood. Whatever guilt or shame this framing helped ease, some writers suspect it was also a smokescreen to hide the murder’s real motive. The argument goes, if Yusupov’s reasons (saving Russia from Rasputin’s malign influence) were really as pure as he claims, why did he keep lying to both investigators and the czarina—claiming he’d shot a dog to explain away bloodstains—long after he was the prime suspect?
A few days after Rasputin’s body was found, the Russian World newspaper ran The Story of the English Detectives, claiming English agents killed Rasputin for his anti-war influence on the czar. The story was so popular that Nicholas II met with the British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan that week, even naming the suspected agent—Oswald Rayner, a former British intelligence officer still living in Russia. In addition to his government ties, Rayner was also friends with Felix Yusupov from their student days at Oxford. Although intelligence reports the czar had received named Rayner as a secret, sixth, conspirator in Rasputin’s murder, whatever explanation Buchanan gave was convincing enough that Nicholas never asked about British involvement again.
Others, then and now, are less certain. The same day The Story of the English Detectives was published, one British agent in Russia wrote headquarters, requesting his superiors at what would become MI6 to confirm the story and provide a list of agents involved. Other oft-cited evidence for British involvement is the claim that Rasputin’s bullet wounds came from a Webley revolver—the standard sidearm for WWI British soldiers. This is far from certain, however: The autopsy could not identify the gun, and surviving photographs are too grainy to make definitive claims about powder burns on the corpse’s skin. Finally, there is the (unauthenticated) letter dated January 7, 1917, from a Captain Stephen Alley in Petrograd to another British officer, which reads: “Our objective has been achieved. Reaction to the demise of ‘Dark Forces’ has been well received.” The letter goes on to name Rayner specifically, saying he is “attending to loose ends.”
Rayner was in fact renting a room at 92 Moika at the time of the murder, and had been in contact with Yusupov. He was not, however, listed as an active agent in an official list dated December 24, 1916. Rayner could have been at the Moika Palace during the murder, and the only certain assertion would be his friendship with Yusupov. Perhaps the best evidence against British involvement, however, is the comment of the Saint Petersburg Police chief that the murderers showed the most “incompetent action” he’d seen in his entire career.
Wikimedia // Public Domain
Incompetence might answer more questions about Rasputin’s murder than spies or the supernatural. In the rush to ditch his body, the killers forgot to weigh the sack down. Instead, as Smith points out, the fur coat they’d wrapped Rasputin in worked like a natural flotation device, pulling his body up and trapping it under the frozen surface. According to the 1917 autopsy, the body’s various cuts were produced as the corpse dragged against the rough ice. This dragging may have even broken the ropes off Rasputin’s frozen, outstretched wrists.
Incompetence would also explain the last problem with Yusupov’s story. In their memoirs, both Yusupov and Purishkevich wrote about Rasputin’s apparent immunity to poison, which allegedly allowed him to consume the cyanide-laced wine and pastries. But no traces of cyanide were found in the 1917 autopsy. As early as 1934, author George Wilkes said in an issue of The British Medical Journal that Yusupov’s description left only one possibility: Rasputin was never given the cyanide. Wilkes wrote, “If Dr. Lazovert tried to poison Rasputin, he bungled his job.” Nearly 20 years later, Lazovert confirmed these suspicions. He confessed on his deathbed that last-minute conscience and his Hippocratic oath made him switch the powder for a harmless substance.
In the end, Rasputin’s killers got off lightly: Dmitri Pavlovich was sent to serve at the front, while Yusupov was put under house arrest at his Siberian country estate. Lazovert’s confession opens an interesting possibility, however. Did Yusupov, unaware of the missing poison, think he had witnessed Rasputin survive cyanide, planting the seed that inspired his later supernatural additions? If so, it would seem fitting—time and again, the reactions Rasputin received were based largely on others’ beliefs and expectations. Even in his own time, the myths that surrounded Rasputin eclipsed—and even sometimes created—the reality.
Sources:
Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs, by Douglas Smith. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2016.
The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin, by Alex de Jonge. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982.
My Father, by Maria Rasputin. Carol Publishing Group, 1970.
Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs, by Colin Wilson. Arthur Barker Ltd., 1964.
“Cyanide Poisoning: Rasputin’s Death,” by R. J. Brocklehurst and G. A. Wilkes. The British Medical Journal Vol. 2, No. 3838. Jul. 28, 1934. p. 184.
December 30, 2016 – 9:00am
In 1990, Art Went on Trial in Cincinnati—and Won
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RODRIGO ARANGUA/AFP/Getty Images
In 1990, for the first time ever, art went on trial.
It began in 1989 when artist Andres Serrano caught the ire of then-senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, with his artwork called “Piss Christ,” an image of a crucifix submerged in, well, you get the idea. The senator felt the piece of “art” was obscene. Soon after the Serrano debacle, acclaimed New York City photographer Robert Mapplethorpe found himself in the crosshairs of what would become a national debate far worse than “Piss Christ.”
Mapplethorpe’s retrospective photography show, “The Perfect Moment,” ran in Philadelphia from December 9, 1988 to January 29, 1989 (it was organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania), and traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art; both shows went smoothly. But when the exhibit was supposed to show at Washington D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art in July 1989, Helms used Mapplethorpe’s risqué black and white photographs of nude men and women in sometimes compromising situations as a means to spark a debate about public funding of the arts. To him, the photographs were flagrantly pornographic and not artful.
Helms didn’t like that the government-sponsored National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) had granted the ICA $30,000 to help fund the exhibit (the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the City of Philadelphia, and private donors also contributed), and Helms sent a letter to the NEA, signed by 36 senators, expressing their outrage over the exhibition. “The exhibit represented a greater tug and pull of liberal and conservative values of early 1990s America,” The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote in 2000. (Also in 1990, rap group 2 Live Crew went on trial for their album As Nasty As They Want to Be, which was found to be obscene—the first time a U.S. court labeled an album as such.)
Buckling under the pressure from Helms and conservative religious organization American Family Association, the Corcoran canceled the exhibit, which caused a brouhaha of national proportions. Should taxpayer dollars be used to fund the arts? Where’s the line between obscenity and art?
Mapplethorpe didn’t live to see his art come under the microscope, as he died of complications related to HIV/AIDS on March 9, 1989. He was a gay man whose photographs encapsulated homosexuals, and in the late ’80s/early ’90s, that was much more divisive subject matter. The photos were hard to look at, but they weren’t insipid like Playboy centerfolds. “The Perfect Moment” contained three portfolios: X, Y, Z. The first one focused on homosexual sadomasochism; Y was filled with pictures of provocative flowers; and Z featured nude portraits of African American men.
In April of 1990, the exhibit was scheduled to show in Cincinnati, Ohio, a city so conservative that it was often referred to as “the most anti-gay city in America.” Citizens for Community Values demanded Cincinnatians not attend the exhibit, but when the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) unveiled “The Perfect Moment” on April 7, all hell broke loose.
At the time, Dennis Barrie was the director of the museum. During a preview night on April 6, more than 4000 museum members showed up to see the photos. “I thought we dodged a bullet,” Barrie told Smithsonian Magazine in 2015 about the preview night. “But it was the next day, when we technically opened to the public, that the vice squad decided to come in.”
The Cincinnati Enquirer detailed the snowball effect of April 7:
“At 9 in the morning, the doors opened and the grand jurors were amongst the first to come through. By 2:30 that afternoon, the grand jury announced the indictments. At 2:50, the Cincinnati Police arrived with a search warrant and cleared out the patrons.”
Hamilton County Sheriff Simon Leis was on the scene and immediately declared the photos to be “smut.” “This was beyond pornography,” Leis told the Enquirer in March 2015. “When you put a fist up a person’s rectum, what do you call that? That is not art.”
There were four criminal indictments: two against the museum and two against Barrie for “pandering obscenity and illegal use of a minor in nudity oriented materials.” Seven photos, in particular, incited the indictments: five photos of men performing various acts of BDSM, and two photos involving naked children. Never before had a museum and its director been criminally charged for obscenity because of a public art exhibition.
The fallout was fast and furious. Protestors lined the streets outside of the museum, both in support of the artwork and in support of the city’s decision to put Barrie on trial. The exhibit didn’t close, but the museum only allowed patrons aged 18 and older in and placed Portfolio X behind a curtain. But the controversy also generated more interest in the show and Mapplethorpe’s work; an estimated 80,000 people came to see the photos.
Almost six months later, on September 24, 1990, the trial began. Defense attorney H. Louis Sirkin helped pick the eight jurors—four women and four men—to decide the fate of the museum and art itself. His tactic was, “You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to come to the museum,” he told Smithsonian. Judge F. David J. Albanese wouldn’t allow all 175 photos in as evidence; the jury only saw the seven photos in question. He told the jury to use a three-prong test of obscenity (Miller vs. California) in looking at the photos, including, “The appeal to the prurient interest must be the main and principal appeal of the picture.” A lot was at stake besides whether the jurors thought Mapplethorpe’s works were obscene or not: If found guilty, the museum would have to pay $10,000 in fines and Barrie would spend a year in a jail.
On October 5, 1990, the jury made its landmark decision: Not guilty. Barrie and the CAC were acquitted of all charges, and on that day, art prevailed.
“I’m absolutely convinced that if we lost that case in Cincinnati, the NEA would have been gone,” Sirkin told The Washington Post in 2015. “This is a great day for this city, a great day for America,” Barrie told the Enquirer. “[The jurors] knew what freedom was all about … I’m glad the system does work.” In 2000, James Woods played Barrie in a Golden Globe-winning Showtime movie called Dirty Pictures, about the Mapplethorpe exhibition.
For the 25th anniversary of “The Perfect Moment,” the CAC hosted a two-day symposium in 2015, featuring panels with Barrie and current museum director Raphaela Platow. Last year, CAC revisited some of Mapplethorpe’s work with “After the Moment: Revisiting Robert Mapplethorpe” and earlier this year, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles hosted “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium.”
“The Perfect Moment” set a powerful precedent: No museum has been put on trial since.
December 30, 2016 – 8:00am
Morning Cup of Links: Large Hadron Collider Discoveries
Image credit:
Getty Images
5 Discoveries Made by the Large Hadron Collider (So Far). Physicists think there’s a lot more on the horizon.
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Leia Organa: A Critical Obituary. A rundown of the Star Wars character’s extensive career as a Rebel warrior.
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12 Stories From Around The World That Show What Really Happened In 2016. Some you might not have heard of until now.
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The Actors Who’ve Played Batman. Eight men have given the Caped Crusader eight different spins.
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Guy Who Harassed Leslie Jones and Got Banned From Twitter Now Has a Six-Figure Book Deal. A case of bad behavior paying off spectacularly.
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Why Sarah Paulson stole the show in 2016. In The People Vs. OJ Simpson, she perfectly conveyed the real struggles of a woman in a high-profile profession.
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Even Small Changes In Global Temperatures Can Have Disastrous Consequences For Birds. Their yearly migration patterns are linked to temperature.
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Everything you need to know about New Year’s Eve champagne. It’s the wine that shouts “celebration!”
December 30, 2016 – 5:00am
Domino’s Debuts a “Wipeable” Onesie to Protect Your Clothes From Pizza Stains
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Getty Images
Domino’s knows you love your pizza. They also know that you enjoy your pizza with all of the grace and dignity of a barnyard animal. Luckily, according to Adweek, the pizza giant has a solution for customers in the UK: an adult onesie with a stain-proof velveteen fabric that the company is calling “the world’s first ‘wipeable’ onesie.” So no longer does a slice of pizza falling cheese-down on your lap mean the end of that new pair of pants you just bought.
For £25 (about $30), customers can head to Domino’s shops and pick up one of these decorative onesies to sport while scarfing down pie after pie through the new year. The company knows the holiday is its busiest day, predicting up to 2.6 million slices will be consumed before midnight on New Year’s Eve. While the idea of wearing a glorified smock to eat pizza might seem a bit undignified, research shows that 73 percent of the British population changes into their pajamas the moment they get home each evening anyway, so this is really a match made in cheese-covered heaven.
Domino’s Pizza designs ‘no stains’ onesie https://t.co/UffhbT404Q
— Manchester Network (@manchester_net) December 29, 2016
The prototype for the onesie was created by fashion designer Charlotte Denn in just about 13 hours. The blue and pepperoni onesie also comes with extra large pockets on the legs to store drinks and any other necessities to help you get through pizza night. Domino’s isn’t just putting this onesie out to keep adults free of pizza sauce; for every outfit sold, the company will match it with a donation to charities like the Teenage Cancer Trust.
[h/t: Adweek]
December 30, 2016 – 1:00am
Why Are There 24 Hours in a Day?
This thing all things devours;
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats mountain down.
Gollum may have said it best: Time comes for us all. But our reckoning of time is far less objective and a lot more human. Why do we divide our days into 24 hours and not, say, 10?
Find out in the above Big Questions video from host Craig Benzine, who offers a brief history of time, conjectures about ancient Egyptian modes of transportation, and even manages to squeeze in the word sexagesimal.
December 30, 2016 – 12:00am
9 Ways Christmas Trees Are Reused After the Holidays
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Theo Wargo // Getty
You don’t need a calendar to tell you when the holidays have ended—just take a look outside to see if rows of skimpy, dried-out Christmas trees are lining the curb. Each year, roughly 33 million live Christmas trees are purchased in North America, many of which end up rotting in landfills once the new year arrives. But making our days merry and bright isn’t the only thing a felled evergreen is good for. Here are some ways Christmas trees continue to serve a purpose long after their decorations have been packed away.
1. THEY’RE USED AS LUMBER FOR HOMES.
The tree that’s erected in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center each November is arguably the most iconic Christmas display there is. It’s also one of the largest, reaching up to 100 feet tall and often weighing more than 10 tons. That’s a lot of lumber, and luckily, Habitat for Humanity makes sure it’s put to good use. Every year since 2007, Rockefeller Center has donated its tree to Habit for Humanity International after taking it down on January 9. From there, the festive behemoth (usually a Norway Spruce) is divided into sections in the plaza before it’s shipped to a mill in New Jersey for additional sawing. It’s eventually made into 2-by-4 and 2-by-6 beams used in construction projects around the country. Homes in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Morris, New Jersey, and Philadelphia all contain pieces of what was once the world’s most famous Christmas tree in their walls.
2. THEY’RE MADE INTO UNDERWATER ECOSYSTEMS.
If you were to walk along the bottom of Lake Havasu between Arizona and California long enough, you’d eventually come across the site of a Christmas tree graveyard. What may be a creepy scene to holiday lovers is a lush utopia for fish—the branches of the spruces, firs, and pines provide a hiding place from predators and attract food for the fish to nibble on.
The 875-acre artificial reef resting on the lakebed consists of PVC pipe, cinder blocks, concrete sewer pipe, brush, and thousands of Christmas trees weighed down with sandbags. Decades of decomposed plant matter have built up a healthy layer of moss and algae around the non-degradable structures. This green coating attracts insects, which in turn attract fish looking for a snack. The end of the holiday season marks the introduction of 500 new trees to the reef, each of which will take about five or six years to break down completely.
3. THEY’RE USED TO BUILD SAND DUNES.
Spend a day on the beach in summertime and Christmas trees will likely be far from your mind—but on at least one beach along the East Coast, there are thousands of abandoned conifers buried in the sand. That’s because Bradley Beach, New Jersey depends on recycled Christmas trees to build its sand dunes. Discarded trees are laid out on the beach and held in place between two parallel fences. Sand that blows in from shore gets caught in the branches, eventually packing into a full sand dune over the course of several seasons. Unlike piles that have been pushed together with bulldozers, sand dunes that are allowed to build naturally over time provide a more stable barrier against storm surges. When the time is right, the town plants dune grass to give the structures even more stability, with the vegetation’s hairy roots anchoring trees in the sand.
4. THEY PROVIDE ENRICHMENT TO ZOO ANIMALS.
An elephant plays with a Christmas tree at a zoo in Germany. Image credit: Odd Andersen // Getty Images
In the wild, many animals encounter plant life that changes with the seasons. The Oakland Zoo in California hopes to simulate this seasonal variety in captivity with annual Christmas tree donations. Each year, a local Christmas tree lot hands over whatever’s left of their inventory at the end of the season. The zoo’s residents are more than happy to take the trees that others didn’t want—zebras munch on the needles, squirrel monkeys swing from branch to branch, and otters play games of “smell and seek” with treats hidden in the trees by zookeepers. Oakland’s zoo isn’t the only one to take advantage of the surplus of trees at the end of year. The Staten Island Zoo, the North Georgia Zoo, the Linton Zoological Gardens in the UK all accept tree donations.
5. THEY HELP RESTORE MARSHLAND.
Christmas trees are a key tool in the fight to save Louisiana’s marshland. The state loses 25 to 35 miles of coastal wetlands a year to advancing ocean tides, and one thrifty way to prevent further damage is by building fences around the marsh’s perimeter. Since the Santa Saves the Marsh project began in 1986, over 1.5 million Christmas trees have been used for this purpose. Following the holiday season, bundles of timber collected from around the country are flown in via a helicopter on loan from the Army National Guard and dropped into the wetlands below. These trees are used to stuff pre-built wooden pens surrounding the bayou. Today, more than eight miles of Christmas tree fencing lines the vulnerable habitat, and it’s already proven valuable: When Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana’s southern coast in 2005, the shoreline behind the barricade was better protected.
6. THEY’RE USED AS AN ENERGY SOURCE.
Christmas trees likely aren’t the alternative fuel source of the future, but that hasn’t stopped Burlington, Vermont from ringing every watt of energy they can get from their seasonal haul. The Joseph C. McNeil Wood and Yard Waste Depot collects hundreds of unwanted trees from households and Christmas tree lots at the end of each holiday season. That organic waste gets fed to a wood chipper, and part of the mulch that comes out is sent to the local power plant where it’s tossed into a boiler. The heat generated from the boiler evaporates water into steam that’s used to power the turbine in the plant’s generator. Each tree that’s incinerated amounts to about 36 cents worth of energy for the town.
The Merry Mulch Project isn’t able to produce enough fuel to keep the plant running on 100-percent Christmas tree power (for that, the boiler would need to be fed the equivalent of 100 trees per second), but luckily, Burlington uses other renewable resources like wind and water to keep the city running throughout the year.
7. THEY’RE MADE INTO PATHS FOR HIKING TRAILS.
It’s hard to go for a hike through Dunbar Cave State Park in Tennessee without trampling on ghosts of Christmas past—all of the mulch used to cushion their trails is made from old Christmas trees. A thousand trees are mulched by the park as part of their annual Trees to Trails program and laid along pathways by volunteers. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, Friends of Dunbar Cave board member David Boen said they stick to Christmas trees exclusively because “by definition they don’t have any invasive species or seeds.” In addition to making them easier to walk on, mulch also protects trails from damaging water run-off.
8. THEY’RE TRANSFORMED INTO ART.
Since 2012, artist Michael Neff has installed a seasonal art project in New York City. “The Suspended Forest” started with a handful of forgotten Christmas trees hung illegally beneath an overpass in Williamsburg. The most recent iteration included 40 floating trees harvested from sidewalks and tree lots after Christmas. They were on display in a warehouse in Queens through the month of January (this time around, Neff had actually received permission to put them there). He hopes to keep bringing the exhibit back to New York and potentially re-imagine it for different cities in the future.
9. THEY PROVIDE FREE MULCH TO GARDENERS.
If a Christmas tree doesn’t end up hanging in a warehouse, decomposing on a lakebed, or providing festive scenery for a landfill, it’s most likely turned into mulch. Plenty of towns pulverize their discarded Christmas trees for use in parks and public spaces, but San Diego does something a little different with theirs. For decades the Miramar Greenery has invited city residents to pick up free mulch and compost for use on private property. After dropping off unwanted trees at locations around town or dumping them on the curb, families can visit the Greenery later in the year to collect the mulch they helped contribute to. In a single year, the recycling program can make mulch out of nearly 1000 trees, making the city’s Christmas trees the gifts that keep on giving.
December 29, 2016 – 6:00pm
Are These Tiny Robots the Solution to the World’s Bee Problem?
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Bees, in case you hadn’t heard, are dying off at an alarming rate—which is a huge problem when you consider the vital part they play in the world’s ecosystems. Bees account for 80 percent of all insect crop pollination, but beekeepers in the United States estimate that between April 2015 and April 2016, they lost 44 percent of their honeybee population. The situation is so dire that engineers from Poland aren’t willing to wait and see if the bee population recovers; they’re already creating a replacement.
The B-Droid is a project led by Rafał Dalewski of the Warsaw University of Technology’s Faculty of Power and Aeronautical Engineering, and its aim is to pollinate plants robotically. This is the fourth year of the project’s existence, and in that time the B-Droid robot has gone through multiple upgrades. The first model operated on wheels with a computer and cameras mounted on it to scope out any nearby flowers to pollinate. Since that time the B-Droid has evolved into a quadcopter drone that is able to move from flower to flower taking pollen samples. To accomplish pollination, the B-Droid moves in on a flower, brushes it for pollen, then moves on to the next plant, repeating the cycle as many times as necessary.
“[The latest quadcopter] is controlled by a system of external cameras and a ground station computer,” Dalewski told Digital Trends. “When cameras and [the] ground station provide information about flowers’ position, a route is planned and the quadcopter is launched and directed by the system toward a flower. When it reaches one flower and collects pollen, it flies to another and another, until it reaches all flowers in a dedicated area.”
The quadcopter model is still a work in progress, as it can only stay airborne for a few minutes at a time right now, but the wheeled B-Droid has already shown success pollinating strawberries and garlic. This past summer, it yielded 165 garlic seeds in one experiment. The seeds were also 6 percent heavier, indicating a higher quality seed than the alternative.
The dream of a drone army pollinating the world’s plants may still be a few years off. In the meantime, here are some ways you can help save the existing bee population right now.
[h/t Co.Exist]
December 29, 2016 – 4:30pm