If you watch History Channel for any stretch of time, you’ll see the lengths TV producers will go to in an attempt to get us to understand what it was like to live in a moment of history. This remarkable audio recording does more in 23 seconds than those producers could hope to do in all of its hours of broadcast.

As far as ‘classy’ moves go, the decision to play Beethoven’s Funeral March is right up there. As you listen to the Philharmonic play, it’s worth remembering that moments before Leinsdorf made the announcement, the musicians found out that the president had died when the sheet music hit their stands. This is the sound of their emotions registering.

My parents’ generation often said that everyone remembers where they were when they found out that JFK was assassinated. Me? I was at the Boston Philharmonic.

The post JFK at the Boston Philharmonic appeared first on The Good Blog.

Susan Sontag said, about photography, that ‘one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past’. Thanks to the New York City Municipal Archives, we can all possess a piece of New York. In 2012, it launched an online database of over 870,000 photos from its collection of over 2.2 million images of New York during the 20^th century (there are audio records here, but more on that later).

The thing that makes the great cities great is not just different people co-existing in the same time and space. It’s also the fact that different times co-exist in the same space. This is what Walter Benjamin, the great German critic exiled in Paris during the 1930s, meant when he described the past, present and future of that city as a continuum. Benjamin would’ve lost his mind over this  Database.

The past is not a foreign country; it is the air we breathe and sometimes choke on. These photos show that when we stroll through Washington Square Park, or across the Brooklyn Bridge, or down the Bowery, we are walking back through time. Humans are great like that – not only can we say that WE BUILT ALL OF THIS! but we can also defy the laws of physics.

Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work like that. Because though the light is the same, and the sidewalks are the same, and the farmers’ markets and the beards are certainly the same, we are different. Take, for example, the old Penn Station. Or the 1938 photo of the Lower Manhattan skyline at night. Take its Twin Towers–shaped hole that doesn’t even know yet that it’s a hole. Things looked the same after 9-11 and very, very different. Changing cityscapes remind us that absence is a presence, like dark matter or black holes. But the outline of what we’ve lost is traced by what remains and what continues. And that is all the tragedy and all the glory of human history.

Some of the Archive’s images will offend. Others will delight. Still others will lull you into a micronap. But together they testify that New York City – like everyone anywhere – is an infinite text.  And that while our histories are sometimes written in monumental gestures, mostly they are just a collection of tiny moments like the ones captured here. For example:

The 1899 death certificate of Henry Hale Bliss, the first person in America to be killed by a car

 Dizzy Gillespie, in a tam-o-shanter, on the steps of City Hall

Mug shots of ‘Wolf’, a child of great gravitas in tiny suit and hat

Antoiniette Bufo, young girl with bangs (1937)

A fingerprint on a knife, 1916

The Sanitation Department baseball team

A book binder named Ralph

So stop here and take up – and take heart in – the Department of Records’ invitation to “return frequently as new content will be added on a regular basis”.

The post The New York City Municipal Archives appeared first on The Good Blog.

Sure, we picked this clip, but we could have picked any one of about a hundred old commercials for coffee over the decades from various companies that have one simple premise: if you make bad coffee, you are a bad wife.

The benchmarks of good versus bad coffee are entirely set by husbands who are never wrong regardless of how repugnant they are. And the consequences of bad coffee? Your husband will come to admire the coffee of other women (in this case the girls in the office), which is code for ‘your husband will have an affair and it will be your fault, you bad-coffee-making dud wife’.

A particularly cold place in hell should be reserved for the executives who thought it was ok for husbands to lament that they preferred their mothers’ coffee over their wives’ coffee. Yeah? Well go and make babies with your mothers.

The post A wife’s worst enemy is coffee and therefore herself appeared first on The Good Blog.

US Presidential elections are just about the most complicated storytelling exercises humans have yet devised. As a result, they are often reduced to simpler narrative questions like ‘who won the debate?’ despite the fact that, most of the time, debates actually do little to determine the outcome of the election.

Notable exceptions include the night that Richard Nixon broke out in a flop sweat so severe viewers began to suspect that he’d hidden a body under his lectern (not entirely implausible, it turns out) and this doozy between President George H.W. Bush, young upstart/prolific pantsmachine Bill Clinton and incredibly well animated cartoon character Ross Perot.

When a nation’s economy heads south, most people find themselves thinking ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this, but I sure hope the folks at the top do’.  In the space of four minutes, Bush manages to seamlessly reinforce the suspicion that he doesn’t and Clinton gives every indication that he does. Ross Perot remains silent, so everyone gets what they want.

There are a few reasons why Clinton’s is about the best debate response you’ll ever see.

Firstly, when Clinton says he’s been touring around the country talking to people for 13 months, he may as well say ‘I’ve been hanging out in your head for 13 months, experiencing your thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes and dreams’.

Secondly, while all elections are a choice, he sets the exact parameters of what that choice is. In this case the choice is between ‘everything the other guy believes which is bullshit’ and ‘I’m an omniscient Elvis Presley from Arkansas, Georgetown, Oxford and Yale’.

And finally when Clinton says “this decision better be about what kind of economic theory you want” he somehow manages to tell the American people that, despite its complexities and the ramifications for the entire nation, he trusts them to make that decision. Sweet mercy, does this man know how to make a lady feel appreciated.

If you want some indication of how well Clinton is doing, just enjoy the Bush41 mouth-breathing moment at 3:45. If you watch closely, you can see the exact moment his mind moves from wondering if this debate is going as badly as he thinks to wondering if he remembers the number of a good removalist.

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