You’d expect a bit of strangeness from David Cronenberg‘s student films, but for most of its short length, From the Drain, which he made in 1967 while attending the University of Toronto, seems to deliver strangeness of an unexpected kind. Playing more like Waiting for Godot than his later vivid-to-the point of harrowing pictures like Crash, Videodrome, or The Fly, this thirteen-minute black-and-white film, only Cronenberg’s second, presents us with two fellows seated, fully clothed, in a bathtub. The situation looks bizarre, and as soon as the players start talking, it reveals itself as even more bizarre than we’d thought: evidently, one of these men has mistaken the tub for “the Disabled War Veterans’ Recreation Center.” The conversation continues without its participants leaving their porcelain confines, making a certain kind of sense on the surface but none at all beneath. This feels almost like the realm of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which wouldn’t debut and begin exerting its vast influence on young comedic filmmakers until 1969.
We’d feel more secure in our laughter if we didn’t know who its director would go on to become. These days, when you watch anything by Cronenberg, perhaps the best-known living auteur of technological menace, “body horror,” and formless dread, you can rest reasonably assured that something will sooner or later go horribly, viscerally awry onscreen. So it comes to pass in From the Drain, whose title gives some suggestion as to the nature of the ultimate malevolence. Don’t let the hyper-farcical dialogue, the goofy performances, or the classical guitar soundtrack mislead you; here we definitely have a project by the king of unsettlement, though at a time when he presumably had yet to earn even the title of prince of unsettlement, a point from which he could look forward to decades of more advanced and much creepier visual effects. At this point in his career, however, with the bleak-looking Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars due out in the near future, he seems to need nothing so elaborate, still unsettling us, but preferring to do it subtly.
Yakov Smirnoff has the distinction of being the most famous Russian comic in America. He’s also the only Russian comic in America (ba-dum-dum). But seriously: In his mid-80s heyday, he had the market cornered on Soviet humor in the U.S. Whatever demand there was, Smirnoff supplied it, singlehandedly, as a fixture in ads, TV show and film appearances, comedy specials, late-night talk shows…. His was the only face of Russian humor anyone knew in the 80s (unless we’re counting Ivan Drago). Smirnoff even warranted a Family Guy reference, which pretty much cements his reputation as endlessly recyclable pop culture syndication fodder.
And yet, post-Soviet Russia, it’s hard to imagine there’s a place for Yakov Smirnoff, since corny jokes at the expense of end-stage Russian communism were not only his bread and butter, but his whole comedic menu, such that Marc Maron introduces Smirnoff as a guest on his WTF Podcast above with: “that guy, with his hook, that certainly isn’t relevant anymore. How does a guy like that survive?” Ouch. But what a hook it was, says Maron: a wonderstruck immigrant exclaiming “What a country!” as he took in each new capitalist marvel. He was like a real-life version of one of Andy Kaufman’s characters, or a pre-Borat Eastern European innocent abroad. The act carried him beyond his mid-eighties 15 minutes of fame and through a 20-year career entertaining middle-class Americans in Branson, Missouri.
But was there much demand for Smirnoff’s brand of humor even at his peak? If you didn’t have the great fortune of living through the 80s, you might be surprised at just how popular his sort of thing could be—“a Russian comic talking about how great America was.” But it wasn’t only Smirnoff’s persona that flattered our sense of economic, political, and moral superiority. A whole genre of Soviet jokes had a prominent place in the discourse, with knee-slappers about KGB surveillance and bread lines and other privations commonly tossed around at dinner parties. Even Ronald Reagan tried his hand at it, as you can see here. Reagan’s delivery was never my cup of tea, but you can also see Smirnoff do his impression of Reagan telling the same joke in the video at the top of the post.
And while revisiting Smirnoff’s not exactly meteoric rise to fame in the U.S. is fun for its own sake, what’s even more interesting are Smirnoff’s serious reminiscences of his time growing up and working as a comic in Russia. The serious Smirnoff is full of psychological insights (he has a masters degree in the subject from Penn) and sociological anecdotes about life under a repressive communist regime—though he never misses a chance for some of the old Smirnoff material, complete with his honking, donkey-like laughter.
For example, about twenty minutes into his WTF interview, Smirnoff discuss the serious subject of joke approval in the Soviet Union. That’s right, in all seriousness, he tells us, comics were required to submit their material to a Department of Jokes. Smirnoff also once spoke expansively on the subject in a 1985 Chicago Tribune piece on him at his peak.
Yep. There’s a Department of Jokes. Actually, the Ministry of Culture has a very big department of humor. I’m serious now. Once a year they censor your material, and then you have to stay with what they have approved. You can‘t improvise or do anything like that. You write out your material and mail it to them, and they send it back to you with corrections. After that, you stay with it for a year.
It is perhaps for this reason that comics in Soviet Russia borrowed liberally from each other, rarely did original material, and never, ever improvised. Says Smirnoff: “I would do some original material, but that would be unusual. Also, it was OK for comedians to borrow—if one of the big comedians went on television and did a monolog, next day 10 or 20 other comedians would do the same thing in clubs. That wasn’t considered stealing.”
It also turns out that serious Yakov Smirnoff explains the comic stylings of his persona, the cornball character:
It was old jokes, more vaudeville type of humor. More like English-style comedy. Or like Henny Youngman. One-liners or stories that have been told over and over again but they’re still funny. No improvisation comedy. You don’t improvise. You don’t tell stories about yourself the way American comics do.
So it turns out that a lot of those bad jokes about Russia at the tail end of the Cold War actually descended from the source. Take this one from Smirnoff:
A funeral procession is going by, and they’re walking a goat behind the coffin. A guy comes over and says, “Why are you walking a goat behind the coffin?” The other guys says, “That goat killed my mother-in-law.” The first guy says, “Can I borrow this goat for a week?” The second guy says, “You see all these people in the procession? They’re all waiting. Get in line.”
See? It’s a joke about standing in line! Also, about mothers-in-law, which must be a truly universal subject. Find more of Smirnoff’s insights into Soviet humor and joke censorship at the full Chicago Tribune interview piece and on Maron’s WTF podcast.
In Everything is a Remix, digital filmmaker Kirby Ferguson has created a four-part serialized ode to remixing as innovation. Ferguson sees all artistic pursuits as derivative of their predecessors to some degree, and in parts 1 and 2, he methodically demonstrates how creative endeavors considered revolutionary in their fields are often highly reliant on the groundwork laid by their forerunners. It’s all about “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Heavy metal pioneers Led Zeppelin were thoroughly indebted to the blues, borrowing liberally from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” on “Lemon Song,” while Star Wars’shots can be matched, with a surprisingly high degree of correspondence, to scenes from Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa films.
Ferguson believes that all creation is the result of copying, transformation, and combination, and the series’ third and fourth installments show Apple to be the ideal example of this process. Xerox had initially developed the scroll bar, pop-up menus, and the desktop-inspired interface. Apple, however, copied Xerox’s work, transformed the interface by simplifying the user experience, and combined the computer with the idea of a home appliance, yielding its iconic Macintosh model. It was Apple’s lower price point and focus on everyday usability that made the Macintosh vastly more popular.
In the most recent addition to the Everything is a Remix series, above, Ferguson returns to Apple, and uses its iPhone as a standalone case study in innovation. Apart from the sizeable engineering problem of creating a viable multi-touch screen, Apple was forced into uncharted waters in phone design by removing the iPhone’s keypad and replacing it with screen area. To make the novel device seem accessible to consumers, Apple incorporated elements of old technologies: users saw a reel to reel tape deck in the podcast app, heard typewriter clicks when they entered text, and flipped virtual pages in iBooks. Ferguson demonstrates that it is precisely the coupling of the iPhone’s peculiar new touch screen with familiar visuals and interfaces that allowed Apple to woo a leading share of customers to its phone.
The most interesting development arrived by 2010, when multi-touch screens had become a smartphone standard, and Apple was forced to innovate in different ways. No longer needing to familiarize users with the technology, the company was free to work solely within the medium, which allowed the latest iteration of its mobile operating system, iOS 7, to have dramatically fewer features grounded in real-world design. Instead of looking for material inspiration in tapes and typewriters, Apple assessed its competitors and integrated their phones’ best attributes into iOS 7. This new iOS borrowed its control center and pull-down notifications features from the Android operating system, while its multitasking paid homage to Windows, Android, and perhaps even Palm Pre phones. The visuals, too, were dramatically simpler, flatter, and less realistic, in line with a style that’s become largely associated with the Windows phone. All in all, just another example of remixing as innovation.
To watch Ferguson’s complete series on remixing as a form of creativity and innovation, as well as more of his work, head to our previous post Everything is a Remix.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
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Fellow riders failing to observe proper commuter etiquette ranks high on the pet peeves list of habitual subway users worldwide. While passengers playing music loud enough for other commuters to hear would be inconceivable in Osaka, Japan, most straphangers wouldn’t bat an eye at iPods blasting in New York. Meanwhile, New Yorkers have their own spin on subway etiquette. Gothamist, a New York City blog, frequently posts photographic violations of the unspoken riders’ code of conduct; documented gaffes include bringing a Christmas tree on the subway and carrying a surfboard the wrong way.
To prevent such faux pas from ruining the subway-riding experiences of Parisian commuters, France’s public transport operator (the RATP) has decided to nip such gauche behavior in the bud by issuing a short illustrated manual on subway manners. The Savoir Vivre Guide For The Modern Traveller, available here, is a quaint 1950s-style primer that provides much-needed pointers for hapless foreigners and rural French visitors alike. Its 12 guidelines, five of which are illustrated here, are a distillation of some 2000 tips that the RATP received in its crowdsourced etiquette campaign. For the sake of your reading pleasure and travelling know-how, we’ve included a number of the illustrations and tips below:
“Those No Smoking signs aren’t contemporary art — they mean no smoking”
(C’est comprendre que l’énorme cigarette barrée sur le quai n’est pas une œuvre d’art contemporain, mais une interdiction de fumer)
“Be considerate when using your cellphone”
(French readers will enjoy the pun: C’est ne pas faire de son portable un insupportable)
“Don’t be a creep and stare at people”
(C’est ne pas fixer une passagère avec insistance, quand bien même elle aurait les yeux revolver)
“On hot days, make like the emperor penguin — keep your arms low, and hold on to the bottom of the pole.”
(C’est les jours de grosse chaleur, tel le manchot empereur, bien garder les bras le long du corps et prendre sa meilleure prise en bas du poteau, pas tout en haut)
While Terkel is famous for interviewing everyday people for his oral histories of the Depression, work, and World War II, and his radio show featured its fair share of students, domestic workers, and veterans, this particular archive is full of big names: Actress and comedian Lily Tomlin. Literary theorist Edward Said. Actor and activist Sidney Poitier.
Currently, there are about twenty audio files available, and the archive promises more to come, pending digitization and the clearing of rights. (Let’s hope they hurry up! Some of the placeholder entries for not-yet-available interviews—Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Arthur C. Clarke—are most tantalizing.)
The one downside to this archive is that you can’t download the interviews—a potential drawback for addicted podcast fans. However, if you have a smartphone and a good data connection, it’s simple enough to listen to the files straight from your phone’s Chrome browser.
Above you can listen to Terkel interview a young Bob Dylan in 1963. The remaining parts of the interview can be found here. Note: The Dylan interview isn’t actually in the Pop Up archive. But it is another one of Terkel’s legendary interviews. So we wanted to add it to the mix.
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.
The Odyssey, one of Homer’s two great epics, narrates Odysseus’ long, strange trip home after the Trojan war. During their ten-year journey, Odysseus and his men had to overcome divine and natural forces, from battering storms and winds to difficult encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Laestrygones, the witch-goddess Circe and the rest. And they took a most circuitous route, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, moving first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sicily, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again.
If you’re looking for an easy way to visualize all of the twists and turns in The Odyssey, then we’d recommend spending some time with the interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer. “Odysseus’ Journey” breaks down Odysseus’ voyage into 14 key scenes and locates them on a modern map designed by Esri, a company that creates GIS mapping software.
Meanwhile, if you’re interested in the whole concept of ancient travel, I’d suggest revisiting one of our previous posts: Play Caesar: Travel Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Interactive Map. It tells you all about ORBIS, a geospatial network model, that lets you simulate journeys in Ancient Roman. You pick the points of origin and destination for a trip, and ORBIS will reconstruct the duration and financial cost of making the ancient journey. Pretty cool stuff.
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Why? Because “Alexander kept pushing forward. He didn’t want to have to go home and be dominated by his mother.” The same impulse drove Tyson to box his way out of Brownsville, Brooklyn. That’s all covered in his autobiography.
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