Watch Harry Shearer’s Faithful Recreation of Nixon’s Resignation

in Comedy, History, Politics, Television | November 3rd, 2014

What role do these gifted performers have in common?

Langella and Sir Anthony resurrected the 37th president within the framework of carefully crafted screenplays. Shearer’s approach is just as actorly, but his material isn’t exactly scripted. Instead, he and Nixon scholar Stanley Kutler pieced it together from unofficial banter on the 3,700 hours of audiotape Nixon secretly recorded while in office, supplementing with notes by those who were there.

The result is Nixon’s The One, a fly-on-the-wall web series in which virtuoso improviser Shearer sticks scrupulously to the script, recreating every pause and awkward chuckle. Compare Shearer’s lead up to Nixon’s televised resignation above, to the real thing, below.

It’s uncomfortable, uncanny, dissociative, and strangely human.

The only false note is Shearer’s glaringly obvious prosthetic nose, though given the professional, period-accurate set, this may have been a deliberate choice. Despite his insistence on authenticity, a biopic is clearly not what creator Shearer had in mind.

He’s been in training for this project for close to half a century, long before the idea itself was hatched. His first turn as Nixon came as a young, make-up free member of the L.A. comedy group, the Credibility Gap.

The next was on Sunday Best, a 1991 mid-season replacement on NBC. “I did a sketch I don’t think ever aired,” he told the Wall Street Journal, “Nixon as a guest on an infomercial demonstrating a magical teeth-whitening preparation.”

Le Show, Shearer’s extremely funny radio show, provided a forum for yet another ridiculous exercise at Tricky Dick’s expense.

The one-time political science major has elected to play it straight with this verbatim, long form labor of love, in order let the weird, unintentional comedy of Richard Nixon shine through. Find all the videos in the Nixon’s the One series here.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She embarrassed her parents on a childhood tour of the Nixon White House uncharacteristically boisterous demands to see Tricky Dick and a queasy stomach that healed itself in time for a visit to a Lafayette Square hot dog vendor. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Lenny Bruce: Hear the Performances That Got Him Arrested (NSFW)

in Comedy | November 3rd, 2014

Lenny Bruce: what comedian today — or countercultural public speaker of any kind — doesn’t name him as an influence? But history has remembered the cutting-edge funnyman of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s as not just an influential figure, but something of a martyr to that quintessentially American cause of free speech. One need only read the story of Bruce’s many legal troubles, a succinct version of which you can find at The Trials of Lenny Bruce Homepage, to understand that the authorities of the mid-20th century interpreted that cause quite differently than we do now. Doug Linder, the author of that piece, describes Bruce’s fall from the peak of his career — a 1959 appearance on national television (introduced by Steve Allen as “the most shocking comedian of our time, a young man who is skyrocketing to fame”), a packed house at Carnegie Hall two years later — to his early death, five years on, after the ravages of bankruptcy, drugs, and courtrooms.

What happened to this promising comedic luminary? All too many comedians flame out due to addiction and financial issues, but Bruce had the considerable burden of running afoul, again and again, of “obscenity” laws: at a San Francisco jazz club, at West Hollywood’s famous Troubadour, at Los Angeles’ Unicorn, in Chicago, and so on. Bruce may have thought himself safe in the comparatively un-Puritan setting of Greenwich Village, but even there, on the fateful night of March 31, 1964, a CIA agent sat in the audience of one of his performances and diligently collected evidence against him. An arrest, arduous, high-profile trial, and conviction followed. Though New York’s highest court would reverse this conviction in 1970, the damage had long since been done, and Bruce himself had died four years earlier.

You can hear the daring material that condemned Bruce above, from the out-of-print album What I Was Arrested For: The Performances that Got Lenny Bruce Busted. (His routine “To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb,” which especially ticked off the investigators, appears just above.) Fifty years after the trial, would any of this “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure drama, play, exhibition, or entertainment,” as the law says, “tend to the corruption of the morals of youth and others”? As All Music Guide’s Sean Carruthers writes of the album, which first came out in 1969 and again in 1975, “It’s amazing what just a few years can accomplish in terms of changing social values — by the time this was re-released, there wasn’t really a whole lot here that would get people too upset.” And so, in perhaps the most telling testament to the ultimate victory of Lenny Bruce, that 20th-century Socrates, the world has become safe for any one of us to publicly utter words like — well, better to hear them straight from the sage of obscenity’s mouth, right?

Lenny Bruce Riffs and Rants on Injustice and Hypocrisy in One of His Final Performances (NSFW)

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Celebrate The Day of the Dead with The Classic Skeleton Art of José Guadalupe Posada

in Art, Religion | November 2nd, 2014

In Mexico on November 2, mortality is approached with music and laughter.

“On the Day of the Dead, when the spirits come back to us,” explains the Dr. Vigil character in the 1984 film of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, “the road from heaven must be made easy, and not slippery with tears.”

The souls of the dead are welcomed back with offerings of food and drink. Skulls and frolicking skeletons, often dressed in full costume, are depicted on alters, food and elsewhere — a playful reminder that all of us, despite our vanities, will one day turn to dust.

The origins of the Day of the Dead and its basic motifs can be traced back 3000 years, to the Aztecs, but the satirical skeletons of its present-day iconography bear the strong influence of one man who died 101 years ago: the printmaker and draughtsman José Guadalupe Posada.

Posada was an obscure newspaper illustrator when he settled in Mexico City in 1888 and began working for a company that published graphic flyers designed to bring the news of the day to a largely illiterate public. Posada’s engravings soon caught on.

“Long drawn to the sensational,” writes Jesse Cordes Selbin at the Henry Ransom Center, “Posada’s interest centered on such fantastic and unsavory aspects of life as murders, robberies, bullfights, political scandals, and illicit love affairs. While his political work alternately satirized President Porfirio Díaz and lauded the populist revolutionary leaders Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Madero, for the most part his prints successfully struck the fine line between hard-hitting and light-hearted, resonating widely throughout Mexico.”

Despite their humble purpose, Posada’s engravings were a major influence on the development of 20th century Mexican art. Octavio Paz described his technique as “a minimum of lines and a maximum of expression.” In his introduction to Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, Paz writes, “By birthright Posada belongs to a manner that has left its stamp on the twentieth century: Expressionism. Unlike the majority of Expressionist artists, however, Posada never took himself too seriously.”

Others, however, did. The muralists who flourished in post-revolutionary Mexico revered Posada. Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, in particular, praised him as an inspirational figure. In his autobiography, Orozco writes:

Posada used to work in full view, behind the shop windows, and on my way to school and back, four times a day, I would stop and spend a few enchanted minutes in watching him, and sometimes I even ventured to enter the shop and snatch up a bit of the metal shavings that fell from the minimum-coated metal plate as the master’s graver passed over it. This was the push that first set my imagination in motion and impelled me to cover paper with my earliest little figures; this was my awakening to the existence of the art of painting.

The most influential of Posada’s works were his Calaveras, meaning “skulls,” or, by extension, “skeletons.” Perhaps the most famous work from the series is Calavera Catrina (above), a zinc etching completed in about 1910. It depicts a woman of the social class known as the Catrins (from a Spanish word meaning “over-elegant”), a group who denied their Maya heritage and thought of themselves only as European.

In 1947 Diego Rivera paid homage to Posada by placing him at the center of his panoramic Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central with a full-length version of the Calavera Catrina on his arm, while Rivera himself, depicted as a young boy, stands on the other side holding her bony hand. For more of Posada’s Calaveras, scroll down.

The Folk Dance Beyond the Grave:

Another zinc etching from around 1910, El Jarabe en ultratumba (“The Folk Dance Beyond the Grave”) depicts a merry group of skeletons eating, drinking, making music and dancing the traditional jarabe. The reproduction is from the posthumous 1930 monograph Las Obras de José Guadalupe Posada, Grabador Mexicano.

Calavera from Oaxaca:

Calavera Oaxaqueña (“Calavera from Oaxaca”) was first published on a broadside in 1910. It shows a proud-looking skeleton dressed as a charro, running past a crowd of skeletons with a blood-stained knife in his hand.

Calavera of Don Quixote:

In this etching made sometime between 1910 and Posada’s death in 1913, Don Quixote rides into battle wearing an upside-down barber’s basin he imagines to be the legendary helmet of Mambrino, a solid-gold relic said to make its wearer invulnerable. He vanquishes every foe. “This is the calavera of Don Quixote,” says the caption on the original broadside publication, “the first-class one, the matchless one, the gigantic one.”

Click on the images above to view them in a larger format. You can view more prints by Posada at MoMA and The Public Domain Review.

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by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Walter Benjamin’s Radio Plays for Kids (1929–1932)

in Philosophy, Radio | November 1st, 2014

Image by Walter Benjamin Archiv, via Wikimedia Commons

Many novelists and poets—from Oscar Wilde to Neil Gaiman—have excelled at reaching adults as well as kids, but it’s incredibly rare to find an academic who can do so. Two of the few exceptions that come to mind are the ever popular C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, both well-respected Oxford scholars and more-than-able children’s authors. We can add to that short list a rather unexpected name—that of Walter Benjamin: apocalyptic Marxist theorist and literary critic, student of mystical Judaism and Kabbalah, mentor and friend to Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, and Herman Hesse, and children’s radio host. During the years 1927 and 1933, while working on his monumental, and unfinished, Arcades Project and teaching at the University of Heidelberg, Benjamin also maintained a lively presence as a broadcaster, where “he found himself,” Critical Theory tells us, “writing on a variety of topics for… all ages, including children and adolescents.”

Benjamin’s youth and adult programming has been collected by Verso press in a new book entitled Radio Benjamin, which “brings together some of his most accessible” thinking. “Fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture,” writes Verso, Benjamin “wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio.” Between 1929 and 1932, he delivered around 30 broadcasts he called “Enlightenment for Children” (Aufklärung für Kinder), many of which you can hear read in the original German by Harald Wiesner at Ubuweb (German speakers, listen to an episode above). These, Ubuweb informs us, focused on “introducing the youth to various, some of them classical, natural catastrophes, for instance the Lisbon earthquake of the 1750’s that so shook the optimism of Voltaire and the century.”

Another of Benjamin’s subjects was “various episodes of lawlessness, fraud and deceit, much of it recent.” During one such broadcast, “The Bootleggers,” Benjamin wonders aloud rhetorically, “should children even hear these kinds of stories? Stories of swindlers and miscreants who break the law trying to make a pile of dough, and often succeed?” He admits, “It’s a legitimate question.” He then goes on to elucidate “the laws and grand intentions that create the backdrop for the stories in which alcohol smugglers are heroes” and tells, in fascinating detail, a few “little tales” of said heroes.

Benjamin, writes Critical Theory, played the role of “a German Ira Glass for teens,” with a kind of pop sociology that also taught lessons about language, philosophy, and class prejudice. In another episode, “Berlin Dialect,” he “celebrates ‘Berlinish,” a crude dialect of the working class that was ditched as Berliners sought to become more ‘refined.’” “Berlinish is a language that comes from work,” he explained, “It developed not from writers or scholars, but rather from the locker room and the card table, on the bus and at the pawn shop, at sporting arenas and in factories.”

The typescripts of Benjamin’s radio plays for children were seized by the Gestapo after his suicide in 1940 and “only escaped destruction by bureaucratic error.” They were only published in German in 1985. The high theorist himself apparently looked down upon this work but, Verso writes, these “plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode… channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience.” As such, these radio broadcasts may—as Jeffrey Mehlman argues in Walter Benjamin for Children—help us better understand “one of this century’s most suggestive and perplexing critics.”

via Critical Theory

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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J.K. Rowling Publishes New Harry Potter Story About the Malevolent Dolores Umbridge

in Literature, Sci Fi | November 1st, 2014

Although J.K. Rowling wrote the final book in the Harry Potter series in 2007, she continues to give Potter fans an occasional fix, publishing short works that add a little more color and detail to the Harry Potter story. Ardent fans know that Rowling wrote a short Prequel in 2008. Also, earlier this year, she began writing new stories about the 2014 Quidditch World Cup Finals for Pottermore, the website for all things Harry Potter. She later followed with a story that takes the form of an article published in The Daily Prophet (“Dumbledore’s Army Reunites at Quidditch World Cup Final”), which gives us the first glimpse of the adult Harry Potter.

Now, on Halloween, we get “The Story of Dolores Jane Umbridge” — a short fictional essay that gives us a more complete personal portrait of the character that readers found so easy to dislike. In the essay [SPOILER ALERT], we learn that Umbridge was, gasp, a half blood, who had demonstrated a certain capacity for wickedness at a young age: “Even at seventeen, Dolores was judgemental, prejudiced and sadistic, although her conscientious attitude, her saccharine manner towards her superiors, and the ruthlessness and stealth with which she took credit for other people’s work soon gained her advancement.”

Rowling then appends some personal comments to the story, explaining the origins of the Umbridge character. She writes:

Once, long ago, I took instruction in a certain skill or subject (I am being vague as vague can be, for reasons that are about to become obvious), and in doing so, came into contact with a teacher or instructor whom I disliked intensely on sight.

The woman in question returned my antipathy with interest. Why we took against each other so instantly, heartily and (on my side, at least) irrationally, I honestly cannot say. What sticks in my mind is her pronounced taste for twee accessories. I particularly recall a tiny little plastic bow slide, pale lemon in colour that she wore in her short curly hair.… [H]er tendency to wear frills where (I felt) frills had no business to be, and to carry undersized handbags, again as though they had been borrowed from a child’s dressing-up box, jarred, I felt, with a personality that I found the reverse of sweet, innocent and ingenuous.

To learn more about the fictional and non-fictional sides of Dolores Umbridge, read Rowling’s new piece here.

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Charles & Ray Eames’ Short Film on the Mexican Day of the Dead (1957)

in Film | October 31st, 2014

As much fun as Americans have on Halloween, we could learn a thing or two from the Mexicans. Their Día de los Muertos, the celebration of which spans October 31 to November 2, gets more elaborate, more serious, and somehow more jovial at the same time. The robust Mexican culture of Los Angeles, where I live, assures us a range of Día de los Muertos festivities each and every year, most impressively the well-known cross-cultural blow-out at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. But I passed my most memorable Día de los Muertos on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México where, the year I went, they’d put together an entire field of shrines to the dead, normal enough for the holiday, but that time around they’d decided to theme them all after Jorge Luis Borges stories. (An Argentine, yes, but this has become a Latin American holiday.) Every so often, the power went out — Mexico City, remember — plunging the thousands of us there amid the hundreds of representations of “The Aleph,” “Funes the Memorious,” and, appropriately, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” into periodic darkness.

As much as I would recommend such an experience, maybe you wouldn’t want to make it your introduction to the Mexican Day of the Dead. Maybe you’d prefer this short film from famed designers (and, perhaps not coincidentally, Angelenos) Charles and Ray Eames, a film that paints a portrait of Día de los Muertos through its icons and artifacts just as their acclaimed Powers of Ten painted a portrait of Earth at every scale. “In Mexico,” explains its narrator, “an intimate acceptance of death extends far back into pre-Hispanic times. In the Aztec culture which preceded the coming of the Spaniards, death shows itself again and again — a familiar image. These ancient things of this land were joined over the centuries with the Spanish celebration of All Souls. Together they form a universal festival of many facets and many dimensions — the Day of the Dead.” Through its cempasúchitl flowers, its sugar skulls, and, yes, its angel-guiding rockets, The Day of the Dead examines just what this endlessly fascinating holiday has, over the centuries, come to mean.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Happy Halloween! Louis Armstrong Performs Skeleton in the Closet (1936)

in Film, Museums, Music | October 31st, 2014

Should you happen to be in the vicinity of Corona, Queens this Halloween afternoon, the Louis Armstrong House Museum will be welcoming trick-or-treaters ’til 6pm. (Fun-sized Snickers be damned! Go anyway, just to see “To Jack Bradley, the ‘Greatest’ Photo Taker,” a collection of candid, private moments captured by the friend Satchmo described as his “white son.”)

If pre-existing engagements prevent you from haunting Corona today, virtual chills await you, above, with “The Skeleton In The Closet,” Armstrong’s show-stopping number from 1936’s Pennies From Heaven. (That masked man on the drums is frequent collaborator Lionel Hampton.)

The vintage Halloween content is a real treat. Gimme ghosts, goblins, and an “old deserted mansion on an old forgotten road” over psycho gore or depressed prefab sexiness any day, not just October 31.

Pennies From Heaven was Armstrong’s first major screen appearance. At the insistence of star Bing Crosby, his turn as a mathematically-challenged bandleader snagged him a main title credit, a first for an African-American actor appearing opposite whites.

The role itself is not a pillar of race advancement, but Ricky Riccardi, the Armstrong House’s Archivist notes that Armstrong remained fond of the work, reenacting an entire scene from memory when he and Crosby appeared as guests on the David Frost Show in 1971.

Riccardi subjects “The Skeleton in the Closet” to a close musical and performance analysis on his Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong blog, a major source of year round goodies for Armstrong fans.

Rattle your bones!

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Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Springsteen’s Favorite Books & Reading List

in Books, Music | October 31st, 2014

Image by Michele Lucon, via Wikimedia Commons

Bruce Springsteen will make his debut as a children’s author next Tuesday, with the release of Outlaw Pete. In advance of that literary event, The New York Times interviewed Springsteen about the books on his reading list and his literary tastes. They ask:

What books are currently on your night stand?

I just finished “Moby-Dick,” which scared me off for a long time due to the hype of its difficulty. I found it to be a beautiful boy’s adventure story and not that difficult to read. Warning: You will learn more about whales than you have ever wished to know. On the other hand, I never wanted it to end. Also, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” by Gabriel García Márquez. It simply touched on so many aspects of human love.

Who is your favorite novelist of all time, and your favorite novelist writing today?

I like the Russians, the Chekhov short stories, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I never read any of them until the past four years, and found them to be thoroughly psychologically modern. Personal favorites: “The Brothers Karamazov” and, of course, “Anna Karenina.”

Current favorites: Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Richard Ford. It’s hard to beat “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “Sabbath’s Theater.” Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” remains a watermark in my reading. It’s the combination of Faulkner and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns that gives the book its spark for me. I love the way Richard Ford writes about New Jersey. “The Sportswriter,” “Independence Day” and “The Lay of the Land” are all set on my stomping grounds and, besides being poignant and hilarious, nail the Jersey Shore perfectly.

The rest of the interview touches on his favorite New Jersey writer (had to ask that); the writers who most inspired his songwriting (spoiler alert, Flannery O’Connor is one of them); his favorite book about music; the unexpected books on his shelves (hello Bertrand Russell’s “The History of Western Philosophy”); and much more. Read the interview in its entirety here, and also see today’s Times piece on the new, open-access, academic journal about Springsteen. It’s called Boss.

Note, you can find most of the classic books he mentions in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Harry Shearer’s Faithful Recreation of Nixon’s Resignation

Lenny Bruce: Hear the Performances That Got Him Arrested (NSFW)

Celebrate The Day of the Dead with The Classic Skeleton Art of José Guadalupe Posada

Walter Benjamin’s Radio Plays for Kids (1929–1932)

J.K. Rowling Publishes New Harry Potter Story About the Malevolent Dolores Umbridge

Charles & Ray Eames’ Short Film on the Mexican Day of the Dead (1957)

Happy Halloween! Louis Armstrong Performs Skeleton in the Closet (1936)

Springsteen’s Favorite Books & Reading List

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