Action Speaks
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Paypal
  • Twitter
  • Youtube
  • Rss
  • Home
  • Listen
  • Attend Action Speaks
  • Archive
    • Past Radio Shows
      • 2004
      • 2005
      • 2006
      • 2007
      • 2008
      • 2009
      • 2010
      • 2011
      • 2012
    • Private Rights and Public Fights
    • What’s Eating Us?
    • Special Features
      • Scholar’s Essays
    • Amusment in America
  • 2013 Season
  • About Us
    • Who We Are
    • For Stations
    • FAQ
    • Internship
    • Engage
    • Donate

Air Con: Can we live without AC?

Posted on June 10, 2014 by ActionSpeaksRadio Producer in Action Speaks Blog

air conditioners, singapore, ac, technology

In Singapore, a sweltering swamp of a city, temporarily disguised as an international financial capital, there is a main boulevard lined on either sides by shopping malls. Fashionably dressed men and woman and bubble gum colored teens walk past, in and out. To enter and exit you never open a door. They are always open. Why? Because the air conditioning blasting from the stores and onto the street is a seduction, beckoning to passersby with the promise of artificially cool comfort while giving those of us who are not interested in shopping (at the moment anyway) the illusion that not too long ago, mosquitos, lizards and colorful plants were not actually the real occupants of this sticky consumer paradise.

In another city is a hot summer night. We can barely stand the clothes on our body. “Let’s go to a movie!”, someone suggests. Do we have keys? “Yes!” Do we have money? “Yes”…Do we have a sweater?…Whoops. Not until we are inside the theater do we realize that, no, we don’t have one and we spend the entire evening feeling as cold as the icy soda we’ve bought in our prior heat-induced delusion.

air conditioner, air conditioning, action speaks, underappreciated date, history

One summer, my wife and I rented a small apartment in Astoria, NY as she did an internship at MoMA. Astoria is a glorious mix of folks from all over the world and the apartment was right in the center of it all. We were ecstatic. The bedroom looked out into what you might called a ‘courtyard’ if you were a real estate agent but in actuality it was a small, enclosed outdoor space for garbage cans. There was no air circulation! I lay awake at night breathing the same air that I had taken in and expelled each night. I lay there unable to move without working up a sweat, unable to sleep in this blanket of staleness. A few days later, I put an air conditioner in and presto, my version of heaven appeared.

 

20130105_IRP001_0

Yes, we all have different, complex and contradictory feelings about air conditioners…about what they provide, what they cost, what they permit and what they disguise. But summer is here and the heat is, once again, creeping up on us. For this reason, I’ve decided to focus on the invention of the air conditioner as an under-appreciated date in history by showcasing this wonderful article, “How to live without air conditioning“ by Leon Nefakh in the Boston Globe.

In 1902, of the first modern electrical air conditioning unit was invented by Willis Carrier of Buffalo, NY to cool printing machinery as they ran. By 1945, the process of temperature control and cooling had been mass produced into portable air conditioning window units. Think of all that has come about as the result of this now universally deemed, at least in the United States, necessity. It opened up new regions to live, architects no longer had to consider wind flow, landscape architects no longer had to consider tree placement. And how about the disappearance of the porch? All cool? Well, maybe not…

- Marc Levitt, Host & Co-Executive Producer of Action Speaks Radio

air conditioner, air conditioning, architecture, heat, leon nefakh, marc levitt, summer, underappreciated date

Baby Blogs: An Underappreciated Date

Posted on May 28, 2014 by ActionSpeaksRadio Producer in Action Speaks Blog

IMAG1946

OK…I know I’ve written nothing in the last month or more. Why? Well, my wife just gave birth to twin boys and to tell you the truth, I’m really just treading water. It has been…an experience, to say the least.(But it gets better…or so everyone says…but shouldn’t you be worried about something labelled that way?) Having two babies enter your house at once is an enormous change and a bit surreal. In what world would you invite two people into your home who scream through the night, wreck havoc with your wife’s body and defecate often and everywhere? Has there ever been house guests so selfish?…and you never tell them to leave…well, mostly never. Camouflaged as ‘sweet innocents’ in those ever so cute ‘onesies’, these imps wait until you are finally sitting quietly eating whatever you’ve quickly managed to scrape together from the leftovers your kind friends have sympathetically left, until they give a blood curdling yell signaling that some gas passing through them is the equivalent of the end of history. Yes, two infant interior decorators have now made over our home with vibrating seats, cribs, changing tables, mobiles and a carriage and have kept us prisoners on top of it. So, instead of an original blog I found this one written by Nicholas Day, about an underappreciated baby date that changed America. Enjoy and please be quiet as you leave.

- Marc Levitt, Host & Co-Executive Producer

DSC_9800-tweaked

The First Baby Blogs, Over 100 Years Ago

By Nicholas Day

In 1914, a baby named Charlie Flood was born, and if you do not know his name, it is not because his infancy was uneventful: It is reported that, at the very least, some quicklime burned his face and a buttonhook snagged on his tongue.

How do we know these things a century later? From his baby blog. Wait—I mean, his baby book. A new accoutrement of parenthood, coming into existence just a few decades before Charlie Flood himself, baby books were where mothers—and they were almost always mothers—recorded the mundane, wondrous details of infancy. These books didn’t just prefigure the modern baby mania of the Internet, they also marked a significant moment: For likely the first time in history, it became common for a whole population to write down their random thoughts about their babies. The baby books, like baby blogs today, were a new genre that encouraged parents to pay more attention to every tiny detail of infancy.

baby books, history
“They are really early baby blogs,” says Janet Golden, a historian at Rutgers-Camden, who read the baby book of Charlie Flood and those of countless other babies in her research on the history of babies in modern America. Sometimes fancy bound volumes, often cheap, thin-papered pamphlets, baby books went mass market in America beginning in the 1910s, and only became more popular over the succeeding decades.

It’s not as if no one had taken notes on a baby before, of course. Some scientifically-minded parents (mostly fathers this time, including Darwin) kept detailed accounts. And the child study movement encouraged mothers, for the sake of scientific progress, to bloodlessly record every nervous twitch and bowel movement. But the parents who kept baby books were not doing research or refining the science of child care. They simply wanted to remember these wondrous beings in their midst.

kodak brownie camera, camera, kodakWhy did baby books appear around the turn of the 20th century? Well, partly because parents could finally count on their babies surviving. Sanitation improved, medicine got a (small) clue, and infant mortality rates dipped sharply. Not long before, many parents had set aside money in case they needed postmortem baby picture. Now parents were taking photos of their very much alive babies with Kodak Brownie cameras. “It’s a sign that, yes, they expect the baby to live,” Golden says. And so expectations shifted. “People become very concerned with education and the future,” Golden says. Incredibly, there are advertisements about saving for college as early as the 1920s.

These advertisements are the other reason for the appearance of baby books. The books began as a way for the upper class to record gifts of gold jewelry and silk dresses. But they were quickly down-marketed: Businesses discovered that babies are a wonderful excuse for consumption, and they helpfully padded the pages of baby books with advertisements for all manner of things that that no baby should be without. The buy-baby-buy phenomenon of modern consumer culture is not actually modern. It worked back then, too. The cheap-to-print baby books demonstrate, Golden says, “just how remarkably effective manufacturers, advertisers, insurance companies are in getting their brand names out there. Even poor families give the brand names: the Borden’s milk, the Carnation milk. They go out and buy baby clothes, because they’re ‘hygienic’ and ‘sterilized.’ You really bring people into consumer culture.”
arnold gessel, life magazine, baby books
As you see parents learning to parrot the language of expertise, you can observe the origins of how we think about babies today. The earliest baby books were obsessed with metrics: A good mother was supposed to measure and weigh her child constantly. “Baby books have advertisements for renting baby scales,” Golden says. “Or people go into town and borrow the butter scale and put the baby on it.” It was only after World War II that parents paid less attention to raw numbers and more attention to when their children point for the first time. Guided by the advice of Arnold Gesell, and then Spock, they unconsciously began to think in developmental terms, like us.
And they slowly became more safety-conscious, more paranoid. “There are some wonderful accounts in those early baby books of babies having accidents and getting injured, which parents in the pre-war period find very amusing,” Golden says. (See, epically, Charlie Flood.) In the post-war era, those vanished. “I’m not convinced that babies stopped bumped their heads, or falling out of high chairs, but culturally you’ve learned that you don’t record that—that becomes evidence of abuse.” Physical discipline was once so prominent that baby books had headings for “My First Discipline.” In 1908, a mother wrote of her month-old infant: “Baby received some discipline this morning. She refused to go to sleep before breakfast and also refused to be good.” By the post-war period, these entries also vanished.

You can also see the origins of the contemporary germophobic parent in early baby books. Advertisers were happy to inform mothers of the new and improved products to make mothering safer, cleaner, more sanitary. Parents could buy bibs that read, “Don’t Kiss Me.” Kissing, needless to say, spread germs.

book of baby mine, 1930
Which is not to say that the mothers in these books trembled before the experts. The popular 1930 Book of Baby Mine informed parents that “all young infants are extremely nervous so avoid exciting them, playing with them, or handling them too much.” But many mothers nonetheless wrote about playing with their babies—in direct contradiction to the advice given in the book they were writing in. Their disobedience is heartening. The history of child rearing tends to be written by the experts, but the baby books record the gap between what was prescribed and how mothers actually mothered. They’re not unlike blogs today: They let the writer express her defiance. As Golden says, “People will say, well, they say you shouldn’t spank your child, but I spank my child; they say you shouldn’t co-sleep but I co-sleep. Everyone has this sense that, yes, there’s an orthodoxy but I’m doing something a little different.”

Windows-Live-Writer-Remembering-Uncle_A63D-Pren kids 1926-8x6
They’re like blogs in another sense, too: They give us a record of the very first child. We know far less about the life of a second child; we know almost nothing about a third or fourth. Any parent today can identify with this problem; any iPhoto archive is evidence of it. As Golden says, “By the time the other ones come along, you just don’t have the energy. Rolling over just isn’t as exciting.”

baby, baby blogs, benjamin spock, charlie flood, janet golden, marc levitt, nicholas day, spock, twins

20th Anniversary of AS220’s Community Darkroom: Free Action Speaks Panel!

Posted on April 8, 2014 by ActionSpeaksRadio Producer in Action Speaks Blog

Fundraiser, As220, Paul Krot Community Dark Room, Dark Room, Media Arts

This month, AS220’s Paul Krot Community Darkroom is celebrating it’s 20th anniversary! The Darkroom has a long history at AS220 as one of the first programs to spring up in the newly renovated Empire Street building. Established in August 1994 it has included  both digital and traditional photography and offered educational programming to the community, including students and AS220 Youth members. It is actually the only publicly accessible darkroom in Rhode Island!

All month long, AS220 Media Arts has been hosting various events and celebrations. At Action Speaks we are proud to do our part to shed light on this wonderful community resource. On Wednesday, April 16th at 7pm we will be hosting a panel discussion, “Photographing the Edge: Documentary Photography Now” at Aurora (old Roots Café), 276 Westminster Street. As always, the panel is free and open to the public!

We also invite you to a pre-panel Cocktail Party Fundraiser before the panel at Aurora, from 5:30-7pm featuring photographers, Huascar Robles, Miguel Rosario, and Mary Beth Meehan, and music by Jesus Andujar. You will be able to meet the photographers and hear the inside story of their work while helping sustain programming and resources for the Darkroom. Tickets are $100 each or $150 for two and all proceeds benefit the Darkroom. Click here to reserve a ticket>

PANELISTS/PHOTOGRAPHERS INCLUDE:

“Hope in Haiti” Huascar Robles

Huáscar Robles is a journalist, photographer and critic who tackles topics of culture, urbanism and politics. Besides being a correspondent after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake for various media outlets, he produced “The Invisible Coast”, a short documentary on Haitian immigrants in Puerto Rico. He is a columnist for Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Día and has published articles and photographs in Chicago Tribune’s Hoy, Acts of Witness and other media in United States, Puerto Rico and Brazil. He is a 2009 Urban Media Fellow of the Institute for Justice and Journalism and a 2009 Ochberg Fellow of Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. He currently works on his first book on Haiti’s five-year after analysis and will commence Graduate Studies at New York University. Huáscar Robles was also AS220’s Artist in Residence in May 2011. During his artistic residency, he created a series of black and white darkroom photography on Rhode Island’s Latino community, titled “El país bajo mi piel: Culture, Memory, and Resistance”, which became part of the permanent collection of the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Miguel_Rosario_cinco_latinos

“Cinco Latinos” – Miguel Rosario

Miguel Rosario is a photographer and educator who has been a long-time AS220 community member. He launched his photographic career and passion through AS220 Youth and the Paul Krot Community Darkroom. He has been a dedicated mentor and Photography Instructor at AS220 Youth, AS220’s youth program focusing on teens under the custody and care of The State of Rhode Island’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Miguel Rosario’s photography capture daily life in the Dominican Republic. it’s people, identity, and culture. Routines, nostalgia, and immigration are recurring themes in his subject matter. His work is a sensible glimpse at the heart of the Dominican experience. Miguel Rosario was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and spent part of his childhood between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. As a photographer, he travels between Providence and the Dominican Republic, where the changes in his childhood town of Monción have inspired him to document the growth of Dominican culture through his photography.

“City of Champions: A Portraits of Brockton, MA” – Mary Beth Mehan

Mary Beth Meehan is a Providence-based photographer whose current projects deal with immigration, culture, and community. Her goal is to create a connection with the people of those communities, whose identities are often obscured by economics, politics, and race. Meehan’s work has been exhibited and published widely, including in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Washington Post; has been honored by Pictures of the Year International and The National Conference for Community and Justice; and was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. She is currently working on a second long-term project entitled City of Champions: A Portrait of Brockton, Massachusetts, which responds to her changing, post-industrial hometown. That work earned her a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship Merit Award in 2009, and also received financial support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.  Meehan teaches Documentary Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and is director of the Documenting Cultural Communities program at the International Charter School in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

We hope you can join us!

anniversary, as220, as220 media arts, as220 youth, aurora, community, darkroom, fundraiser, huascar robles, mary beth meehan, miguel rosario, paul krot, photography
  • ‹
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • ›
  • »

About Action Speaks

Action Speaks is a series of contemporary topic-driven panel discussions centered around “Underappreciated Dates that Changed America.” For 17 years, we have provided a live venue for fellow citizens to engage in thoughtful discussions about history, culture and current events. The panels are hosted by Marc Levitt, recorded, edited and broadcast online and on radio stations around the US.

Markos Moulitsas’ Underappreciated Date

Recorded in Providence, Rhode Island, during Netroots conference in June 2012 by Marc Levitt

Contact

  • info@actionspeaksradio.org
    • Facebook
    • Paypal
    • Twitter
    • Youtube
    • Rss

Sponsors

sponsors

© 2012 Action Speaks Radio