What came out when John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre, and Truman Capote collaborated? You wouldn’t expect a farcical, nearly improvised study in eccentricity, but here we have it. Beat the Devil, which you can watch above, simply confused audiences when it opened in 1953, but humanity has since — with, for better or for worse, the thoroughgoing senses of unseriousness and irony we’ve cultivated — come to appreciate it. This story of would-be uranium pirates stranded in an Italian port on their way to Kenya began, like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, as an adaptation of a high-minded, stone-faced novel, in this case an eponymous one by Claud Cockburn (father of the late Alexander Cockburn, author of, yes, The Nation’s “Beat the Devil” column). Also like Dr. Strangelove, it took a dose of absurdity somewhere in pre-production, turning from drama into comedy.
Bogart, not just one of the film’s stars but one of its major investors, thought he’d signed up for a Graham Greene-ish thriller but wound up in what many consider the first “camp” film. He must surely have come to understand the scope of his misapprehension by the time Truman Capote turned up on set, rewriting a whole new script — if the proud midcentury film industry would have dignified it with that term — on the fly, throwing together new and more ridiculous scenes each day. This and other unconventional production strategies have all become part of the body of Beat the Devil lore, which Roger Ebert examines in (speaking of ultimate validation) his “Great Movies” essay on the picture. He includes a telling quote from Huston, who supposedly told Jones, “Jennifer, they’ll remember you longer for Beat the Devil than for Song of Bernadette.” Adds Ebert: “True, but could Huston have guessed that they would remember him more for Beat the Devil than for Moby Dick?”
The Travels of Marco Polo—tales told by the Venetian explorer to Italian romance writer Rustichello da Pisa—purportedly describes in great detail Polo’s encounter with “The East,” a place in the medieval European mind as alien and fantastical as the interstellar realms of science fiction. Like other travel narratives of the period (notably the spurious Travels of Sir John Mandeville), Polo’s stories mixed accurate geographical and cultural information with folklore, myth, and Orientalist misapprehension. While the appearance of monsters and marvels seems capricious to the modern reader, these elements may have felt almost mundane to Polo’s contemporaries. Or maybe not. After all, the Italian title of Polo’s travelogue—Il Milione—may refer to Polo’s reputation as the teller of “a million” lies.
But let us leave the puzzles of authenticity to historians. As readers, we get lost in these fascinating romances because the worlds they describe are both so strange yet so unsettlingly familiar. Medieval travelogues like Polo’s open up the possibility of fairy kingdoms with outlandish customs thriving almost within reach. These tales of strange and unknown lands were, after all, prominent inspiration for C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. (Listen to the Chronicles of Narnia in a free audio format here).
For grown-up readers, no author better evokes the uncanny geopolitics of the medieval imagination than Italo Calvino, whose Invisible Cities imagines Polo’s supposed journey to the imperial seat of Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. In Calvino’s novel—more a collection of prose-poems—Polo regales Khan with his accounts of 55 exotic cities, while the busy emperor’s functionaries come and go. “At some point,” says author Eric Weiner, “you realize that Calvino is not talking about cities at all, not in the way we normally think of the word. Calvino’s cities—like all cities, really—are constructed not of steel and concrete but of ideas. Each city represents a thought experiment.”
Similar observations can be made of any of the author’s oddly enchanting allegorical fictions—Seamus Heaney called Calvino’s stories “fantastic displays” inspired by “symmetries and arithmetics.” In the audio above, you can hear the author read selections from several of his works, including Invisible Cities and Mr. Palomar, a work of “even more archness and architectural invention.” Do not be daunted by Calvino’s Italian. I find it very pleasing to listen to, even if I do not understand it all. But if you’d rather skip ahead to the English portion of his reading—recorded at the 92nd St. Y on March 31st, 1983—it begins at 8:40 where Calvino reads from a section of Invisible Cities called “Thin Cities.” In this excerpt, Polo tells Khan of a place called “Armilla”:
Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows […]
You can read the remainder of the “Armilla” section here, along with other selections from Invisible Cities. A portion of the text of Mr. Palomar is available here. Calvino’s reading is long—nearly an hour and a half—and very rewarding, both for the rich musicality of his accented English and the spellbinding charms of his philosophical fictions. And if you are so inspired, you may wish to read Calvino’s short essay “Why Read the Classics?” to which I often turn for a fuller grasp his wide-ranging literary inheritance.
Heads up: For the next 24 hours, all Blu-rays and DVDs are 50% off at Criterion.com with promo code MADFOX! Includes films by Wes Anderson, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Kurosawa and many more. Don’t dilly dally. It looks like some of the films are selling out fast.
Let’s test our agriculture math skills with a little dairy industry story problem:
If an 8‑ounce glass of whole milk provides 149 calories, 8 grams of protein, 276 milligrams of calcium, 8 grams of fat, 4.5 grams of saturated fat and 24 milligrams of cholesterol, and a cup of two-percent milk has 120 calories, 5 grams of fat, 3 grams of saturated fat and 20 milligrams of cholesterol, what kind of music will result in an overall milk production increase of 3%?
Huh. Based on the concert tees of the boys I grew up around in Indiana, I would have guessed Rush or Guns N’ Roses. (Maybe there was some Barry Manilow going on behind closed barn doors?)
Actually, research shows that bovine musical preference, like that of aerobics instructors, hinges less on any specific artist than on beats per minute.
…I hope they didn’t spend too much on this study. Upon reflection, isn’t it just common sense that noise-sensitive herd animals attached to machines via their udders would choose a mellow groove over death metal or psychobilly?
(Poor Bananarama. It must’ve stung when the University of Leicester’s team told the world that 1,000 Holstein Friesian cattle liked listening to nothing at all better than their 1986 Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, “Venus.”)
Should the above tune ever grow old (doubtful) there’s always Shakespeare. According to NPR, a theatrical reading of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” proved popular, milk-wise, with an audience of UK cows. And Modern Farmerhas honored Lou Reed by including one of his compositions (no, not “Metal Machine Music, Part 1”) in their recent Playlist To Milk By:
If you head over to the Huy Fong Foods web site, they’ll tell you that Sriracha, their ever-popular Thai condiment, is “made from sun ripen chilies which are ground into a smooth paste along with garlic and packaged in a convenient squeeze bottle.” It’s the chilies that make your mouth burn when you pour that Sriracha onto your eggs or burgers, or in your soup and, yes, cocktails. But if you want to get scientific about things, it’s actually the capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin — the two compounds inside the hot peppers — that set your mouth aflame. All of this, and more, gets covered by this new video, The Chemistry of Sriracha, from the American Chemical Society. It’s part of their video series, Reactions, that examines the chemistry of everyday things.
On Sunday, 23 February 2014, Alice Herz-Sommer, thought to be the oldest Holocaust survivor, died in London. She has been an inspiration to many people as the story of her life is shown in the Oscar-nominated documentary called “The Lady in Number 6″ (the video above is the official trailer).
Alice was born in Prague – then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – in 1903. She started playing the piano as a child and took lessons with Conrad Ansorge, a student of Liszt. At 16, she attended the master class at Prague’s prestigious German musical academy. Later, Alice became a respected concert pianist in Prague. Through her family, she also knew Franz Kafka. All of this changed when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Along with other Jews living in Prague, Alice was initially forced to live in Prague’s ghetto before being deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, along with her five-year-old son Raphael. Eventually her whole family, including her husband, cellist Leopold Sommer, and her mother, was sent to Auschwitz, Treblinka and Dachau, where they were killed.
Alice and her son survived Theresienstadt because the Nazis used this particular concentration camp to show the world how “well” the inmates were treated. A propaganda film by the Nazis was shot and a delegation from the Danish and International Red Cross was shown around in 1943. To boost morale, Alice and many other imprisoned musicians regularly performed for the inmates. Despite the unimaginable living conditions, Alice and her son survived. They moved to Israel after the war, where she taught music. In 1986, she moved to London. Her son died in 2001 (obituary here).
The way Alice dealt with those horrible times is particularly inspiring. She says about the role of music: “I felt that this is the only thing which helps me to have hope … it’s a sort of religion actually. Music is … is God. In difficult times you feel it, especially when you are suffering.” When asked by German journalists if she hated Germans, she replied: “I never hate, and I will never hate. Hatred brings only hatred.”
Extra material:
Art Therapy Blog has a transcript of the trailer, memorable quotes by Alice and two BBC Radio interviews with her.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
Edgar Allan Poe isn’t read much as an essayist, which is too bad. His essays reveal a quick and ironic cast of mind where his dark poetry and stories often mark him as a single-minded hypersensitive, “like a peony just past bloom.” Where Poe the poet can be lugubrious, Poe the essayist is brisk, incisive, and, well… kinda catty. Take the following aphoristic witticisms from his 1846 “A Few Words on Etiquette”:
Never use the term genteel — it is only to be found in the mouths of those who have it nowhere else.
Green spectacles are an abomination, fitted only for students of divinity.
Almost every defect of face may be concealed by a judicious use and arrangement of hair.
Are these casual bon mots or serious prescriptions? Why not both? An editor at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore notes that the etiquette essay “bears much the same humorous tone and mixture of genuine and satirical commentary as Poe’s essay ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ from 6 years earlier.” Indeed, in that earlier critical work on interior design, Poe makes confident judgments, leaps from point to point with delightfully specific examples, and employs a mix of levity and gravity.
Poe begins “The Philosophy of Furniture” with “a somewhat Coleridegy assertion” from Hegel then launches into a pitiless critique of various national styles. His last point—“The Yankees alone are preposterous”—is the basis for what follows, a disquisition on the sad state of American interior design, brought about by “an aristocracy of dollars” in which “the display of wealth” takes the place of heraldry. His critique recalls (and perhaps alludes to) English poet Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington,” whose satirical target makes such a tasteless mess of his villa that his neighbors cry out “What sums are thrown away!”
In Poe’s case, the offending estate is “what is termed in the United States, a well-furnished apartment.” He decries the injudicious use of curtains, the poor display of carpets (“the soul of the apartment”), and the problem “of gas and of glass.” Poe deliciously details the decorating habits of a parvenu American aristocracy, whose defects are discernable by even the “veriest bumpkin.” But he offers more than snark. “Like any good critic,” writes The Smithsonian, “Poe doesn’t just condemn, he offers solutions.” In the final, lengthy paragraph of “The Philosophy of Furniture,” Poe turns his talent for vivid description to a portrait of his perfect boudoir. Above, you can see a 1959 recreation of Poe’s “small and not, ostentatious chamber with whose decorations no fault can be found.” But this may be redundant. Poe furnishes us with sufficient fine detail that we can better create his ideal room in our imagination. See the excerpts below, and read Poe’s complete essay here.
The proprietor lies asleep on a sofa — the weather is cool — the time is near midnight: I will make a sketch of the room ere he awakes. It is oblong — some thirty feet in length and twenty-five in breadth — a shape affording the best (ordinary) opportunities for the adjustment of furniture. It has but one door — by no means a wide one — which is at one end of the parallelogram, and but two windows, which are at the other. These latter are large, reaching down to the floor — have deep recesses — and open on an Italian veranda. Their panes are of a crimson-tinted glass, set in rose-wood framings, more massive than usual. They are curtained within the recess, by a thick silver tissue adapted to the shape of the window, and hanging loosely in small volumes. Without the recess are curtains of an exceedingly rich crimson silk, fringed with a deep network of gold, and lined with silver tissue, which is the material of the exterior blind. There are no cornices; but the folds of the whole fabric (which are sharp rather than massive, and have an airy appearance), issue from beneath a broad entablature of rich gilt-work, which encircles the room at the junction of the ceiling and walls […]
The carpet — of Saxony material — is quite half an inch thick, and is of the same crimson ground, relieved simply by the appearance of a gold cord (like that festooning the curtains) slightly relieved above the surface of the ground, and thrown upon it in such a manner as to form a succession of short irregular curves — one occasionally overlaying the other. The walls are prepared with a glossy paper of a silver gray tint, spotted with small Arabesque devices of a fainter hue of the prevalent crimson. Many paintings relieve the expanse of paper. These are chiefly landscapes of an imaginative cast — such as the fairy grottoes of Stanfield, or the lake of the Dismal Swamp of Chapman. There are, nevertheless, three or four female heads, of an ethereal beauty — portraits in the manner of Sully. The tone of each picture is warm, but dark […]
Two large low sofas of rosewood and crimson silk, gold-flowered, form the only seats, with the exception of two light conversation chairs, also of rose-wood. There is a pianoforte (rose-wood, also), without cover, and thrown open. An octagonal table, formed altogether of the richest gold-threaded marble, is placed near one of the sofas. This is also without cover — the drapery of the curtains has been thought sufficient.. Four large and gorgeous Sevres vases, in which bloom a profusion of sweet and vivid flowers, occupy the slightly rounded angles of the room. A tall candelabrum, bearing a small antique lamp with highly perfumed oil, is standing near the head of my sleeping friend. Some light and graceful hanging shelves, with golden edges and crimson silk cords with gold tassels, sustain two or three hundred magnificently bound books. Beyond these things, there is no furniture, if we except an Argand lamp, with a plain crimson-tinted ground glass shade, which depends from the lofty vaulted ceiling by a single slender gold chain, and throws a tranquil but magical radiance over all.
Again, the Edgar Allan Poe Society editor helpfully notes that “Poe, in this article, has adopted an intentionally humorous tone.” Should we take this seriously or treat is as Poe-ean satire? Why not both?
Imagine Vice President Joe Biden being on the receiving end of a vociferous attack in the press by former Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner. Now, picture Biden demanding satisfaction, and taking the morning off from his vice presidential duties to settle things man-to-man, and Geithner winding up in a coma. As unbelievable as this episode may seem today, this kind of affair played out some 200 years ago on a much grander scale when Vice President Aaron Burr fatally shot Alexander Hamilton during a duel. The Burr-Hamilton confrontation remains an infamous black mark on American politics. Burr, serving as VP in Thomas Jefferson’s administration, is widely seen as a villain for murdering Hamilton. Hamilton, for his part, is beloved as one of the Founding Fathers and a vocal champion of the U.S. Constitution. For our non-American readers, this adulation translates to his face now gracing the $10 bill.
But were things really so simple? Dana O’Keefe, the filmmaker behind Aaron Burr, Part 2, answers with a resounding no. “History is a contest, not unlike a duel. I ended his life. But he ruined mine. I won the duel, but I lost my place in history,” Burr declares in the opening monologue of O’Keefe’s 8‑minute short, and it is precisely Burr’s place in history that the film seeks to address. In O’Keefe’s modern retelling, Burr emerges as an unfairly maligned figure, whose bravery in battle has been overshadowed by the incompetence of superiors such as Generals George Washington and Richard Montgomery. It’s effective. Mixing archival footage of original documents with re-enactments and present day shots, O’Keefe creates a gritty, sometimes witty, hardboiled feel to Burr’s story, and viewers begin to sympathize with the disparaged figure. To the sounds of tracks like Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode” and some creative use of iPhones, O’Keefe dispels the idea that Burr shot Hamilton first. Rather, Burr is the honorable party, and Hamilton is the scoundrel. It’s well worth a watch.
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