T.S. Eliot Reads Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats & Other Classic Poems (75 Minutes, 1955)

in Poetry | July 22nd, 2014

eliot cats readNot only did T.S. Eliot draw the cov­er for the first edi­tion of his Old Pos­sum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats, fea­tured yes­ter­day, he even read it aloud for the audio­book edi­tion. You may think the time of the audio­book, now a pop­u­lar form on dig­i­tal audio devices every­where, must have begun long after the time of Eliot had already end­ed. (Eliot died in 1965.) But as we know from hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured their mid-1970s albums of Leonard Nimoy read­ing Ray Brad­bury, the record label Caed­mon posi­tioned them­selves well ahead of the audio­book game. Using record­ings made from read­ings giv­en in Lon­don in 1955, Caed­mon man­aged to release albums of Eliot speak­ing his own work aloud. Today we offer you T.S. Eliot Reads T.S. Eliot, made avail­able via Spo­ti­fy. The 18 tracks, run­ning some 75 min­utes, most­ly fea­tures Eliot read­ing from Old Pos­sum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats. But he also recites a hand­ful of oth­er clas­sic poems. (If you need Spo­ti­fy, you can down­load the soft­ware here):

Oth­er audio edi­tions of Old Pos­sum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats (some includ­ing a score) would come out lat­er, but, for many Eliot enthu­si­asts, noth­ing else can quite match hear­ing the man him­self intro­duce the likes of Rum Tum Tug­ger, Mr. Mistof­felees, and Busto­pher Jones. Lis­ten­ers in most geo­gra­phies should be able to access the Spo­ti­fy playlist. But if you live in Cana­da and South Africa (where some read­ers have report­ed prob­lems) we can rec­om­mend that you lis­ten (or re-lis­ten) to Eliot’s read­ings of his mod­ernist mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, plus his Four Quar­tets. And if, by chance, you feel like hear­ing Eliot’s verse but not Eliot’s voice, how about let­ting Bob Dylan take over read­ing duties?

Eliot’s read­ing of Old Pos­sum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed con­tent:

T.S. Eliot Illus­trates His Let­ters and Draws a Cov­er for Old Possum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats

Lis­ten to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Mas­ter­piece, the Four Quar­tets

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Mod­ernist Poem The Waste Land

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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The New Yorker Web Site is Entirely Free This Summer (Until It Goes Behind a Paywall This Fall)

in Magazines, Media | July 22nd, 2014

newyorker-logo

Yes­ter­day, The New York­er mag­a­zine pub­lished “A Note to Read­ers,” announc­ing the new strat­e­gy behind its web site. The site now has a dif­fer­ent look and feel. It will also be gov­erned by a new set of eco­nom­ics, which will include putting the entire site behind a pay­wall. The edi­tors write, “in the fall, we [will] move to a sec­ond phase, imple­ment­ing an eas­i­er-to-use, log­i­cal, metered pay­wall. Sub­scribers will con­tin­ue to have access to every­thing; non-sub­scribers will be able to read a lim­it­ed num­ber of pieces—and then it’s up to them to sub­scribe. You’ve like­ly seen this sys­tem elsewhere—at the Times, for instance—and we will do all we can to make it work seam­less­ly.”

But, until then, the site won’t be half open (as it has been dur­ing recent years). It’ll be entire­ly open. Again, the edi­tors write: “Begin­ning this week, absolute­ly every­thing new that we publish—the work in the print mag­a­zine and the work pub­lished online only—will be unlocked. All of it, for every­one. Call it a sum­mer-long free-for-all. Non-sub­scribers will get a chance to explore The New York­er ful­ly and freely, just as sub­scribers always have.”

What should you read while The New York­er is open? I’d focus on the old stuff, which will pre­sum­ably get locked up too. Here are a few quick sug­ges­tions: Tru­man Capote’s In Cold Blood seri­al­ized in the pages of the mag­a­zine in 1965; J.D. Salinger’s Jan­u­ary 1948 pub­li­ca­tion of his endur­ing short sto­ry “A Per­fect Day for a Banana Fish;” and, of course, Han­nah Arendt’s orig­i­nal arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil”?  If you have prob­lems read­ing the text (in the lat­ter two cas­es), be sure to click the pages to zoom in.

via Gal­l­ey­Cat

 

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Stephen Fry Explains the Rules of Cricket in 10 Animated Videos

in Animation, Sports | July 21st, 2014

Found­ed in Lon­don in 1787, The Maryle­bone Crick­et Club (MCC) began pub­lish­ing The Laws of Crick­et in 1788, and lat­er became the gov­ern­ing body of the game. More than two cen­turies lat­er, the MCC has passed gov­ern­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties to The Inter­na­tion­al Crick­et Coun­cil. But it still pub­lish­es The Laws of Crick­et and helps young play­ers and casu­al fans learn more about the bat-and-ball game that dates back to ear­ly 16th-cen­tu­ry Eng­land, if not before. And let’s face it, if you did­n’t grow up in a coun­try that fig­ured into the British Empire, you can prob­a­bly use a primer. Or maybe 10 ani­mat­ed ones nar­rat­ed by actor, writer, crick­et lover and occa­sion­al umpire Stephen Fry. Click the play but­ton on the video above, and you can watch the col­lec­tion of ani­ma­tions, cov­er­ing every­thing from what hap­pens when a “wick­et is down” to when the “bats­man is out his ground.” When you’re done, you can enjoy some oth­er Fry nar­ra­tions we’ve fea­tured in blog posts past. See the “relat­eds” below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry Reads Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Sto­ry “The Hap­py Prince”

Stephen Fry Intro­duces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Com­put­ing in a Short Ani­mat­ed Video

Stephen Fry Reads the Leg­endary British Ship­ping Fore­cast

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Sun Ra’s Full Lecture & Reading List From His 1971 UC Berkeley Course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos”

in Music, Philosophy, UC Berkeley | July 21st, 2014

A pio­neer of “Afro­fu­tur­ism,” band­leader Sun Ra emerged from a tra­di­tion­al swing scene in Alaba­ma, tour­ing the coun­try in his teens as a mem­ber of his high school biol­o­gy teacher’s big band. While attend­ing Alaba­ma Agri­cul­tur­al and Mechan­i­cal Uni­ver­si­ty, he had an out-of-body expe­ri­ence dur­ing which he was trans­port­ed into out­er space. As biog­ra­ph­er John Szwed records him say­ing, “my whole body changed into some­thing else. I land­ed on a plan­et that I iden­ti­fied as Sat­urn.” While there, aliens with “lit­tle anten­na on each ear. A lit­tle anten­na on each eye” instruct­ed him to drop out of col­lege and speak through his music. And that’s just what he did, chang­ing his name from Her­man Blount and nev­er look­ing back.

Whether you believe that sto­ry, whether Sun Ra believes it, or whether his entire per­sona is a the­atri­cal put-on should make no dif­fer­ence. Because Sun Ra would be a vision­ary either way. Com­bin­ing Afro­cen­tric sci­ence fic­tion, eso­teric and occult phi­los­o­phy, Egyp­tol­ogy, and, with his “Arkestra,” his own brand of free jazz-futur­ism that has no equal on earth, the man is tru­ly sui gener­is. In 1971, he served as artist-in-res­i­dence at UC Berke­ley and offered a spring semes­ter lec­ture, African-Amer­i­can Stud­ies 198, also known as “Sun Ra 171,” “The Black Man in the Uni­verse,” or “The Black man in the Cos­mos.” The course fea­tured read­ings from—to name just a few—theosophist Madame Blavatsky, French philoso­pher Con­stan­tin Fran­cois de Chas­se­boeuf, black Amer­i­can writer and poet Hen­ry Dumas, and “God,” whom the cos­mic jazz the­o­rist report­ed­ly list­ed as the author of The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (oth­er­wise known as the King James Bible).

Now we have the rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to hear a full lec­ture from that class, thanks to Ubu.com. Lis­ten to Sun Ra spin his intri­cate, bizarrely oth­er­world­ly the­o­ries, drawn from his per­son­al phi­los­o­phy, pecu­liar ety­molo­gies, and idio­syn­crat­ic read­ings of reli­gious texts. Hear­ing him speak is a lit­tle like hear­ing him play, so be pre­pared for a lot of free asso­ci­a­tion and jar­ring, unex­pect­ed jux­ta­po­si­tions. Szwed describes a “typ­i­cal lec­ture” below:

Sun Ra wrote bib­li­cal quotes on the board and then ‘per­mu­tat­ed’ them—rewrote and trans­formed their let­ters and syn­tax into new equa­tions of mean­ing, while mem­bers of the Arkestra passed through the room, pre­vent­ing any­one from tap­ing the class. His lec­ture sub­jects includ­ed Neo­pla­ton­ic doc­trines; the appli­ca­tion of ancient his­to­ry and reli­gious texts to racial prob­lems; pol­lu­tion and war; and a rad­i­cal rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible in light of Egyp­tol­ogy.

Luck­i­ly for us, some sly stu­dent cap­tured one of those lec­tures on tape.

For more of Pro­fes­sor Ra’s spaced out pre­sen­ta­tion, see the Helsin­ki inter­view above, also from 1971. And if you decide you need your own edu­ca­tion in “Sun Ra 171,” see the full read­ing list from his Berke­ley course below, cour­tesy of the blog New Day.

The Egypt­ian Book of the Dead

Radix

Alexan­der His­lop: Two Baby­lons

The Theo­soph­i­cal works of Madame Blavatsky

The Book of Oah­spe

Hen­ry Dumas: Ark of Bones

Hen­ry Dumas: Poet­ry for My Peo­ple eds. Hale Charfield & Eugene Red­mond, Car­bon­dale: South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty Press 1971

Black Fire: An Anthol­o­gy of Afro-Amer­i­can Writ­ing, eds. Leroi Jones & Lar­ry Neal, New York: William Mor­row 1968

David Liv­ingston: Mis­sion­ary Trav­els

Theodore P. Ford: God Wills the Negro

Rut­ledge: God’s Chil­dren

Sty­lus, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1971), Tem­ple Uni­ver­si­ty

John S. Wil­son: Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It’s At, Unit­ed States Infor­ma­tion Agency

Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochan­nan: Black Man of the Nile and His Fam­i­ly, Alk­ibu Ian Books 1972

Con­stan­tin Fran­cois de Chas­se­boeuf, Comte de Vol­ney: The Ruins, or, Med­i­ta­tion on the Rev­o­lu­tions of Empires, and the Law of Nature, Lon­don: Pio­neer Press 1921

The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (Ra’s descrip­tion; = The King James Bible)

Pjotr Demi­anovitch Ous­pen­sky: A New Mod­el of the Uni­verse. Prin­ci­ples of the Psy­cho­log­i­cal Method in Its Appli­ca­tion to Prob­lems of Sci­ence, Reli­gion and Art, New York: Knopf 1956

Fred­er­ick Bod­mer: The Loom of Lan­guage. An Approach to the Mas­tery of Many Lan­guages, ed. Lancelot Hog­ben, New York: Nor­ton & Co. 1944

Black­ie’s Ety­mol­o­gy

Count­less oth­er free cours­es from UC Berke­ley can be found in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds and audio cour­tesy of Sen­si­tive Skin Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Her­bie Han­cock Presents the Pres­ti­gious Nor­ton Lec­tures at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty: Watch Online

Son­ic Youth Gui­tarist Thurston Moore Teach­es a Poet­ry Work­shop at Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty: See His Class Notes (2011)

Space Jazz, a Son­ic Sci-Fi Opera by L. Ron Hub­bard, Fea­tur­ing Chick Corea (1983)

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

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Wearable Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Manuscripts & Turned Them into Clothes

in Design, History, Letters, Life | July 21st, 2014

I like old news­pa­per, smooth­ing it out to read about what was hap­pen­ing on the day an old­er rel­a­tive packed away the good crys­tal or some oth­er frag­ile tchotchke.

Trav­el­ing in India, I dug how the snacks I pur­chased to eat on the train came wrapped in old book pages. When my trav­el­ing com­pan­ion real­ized he had lost his jour­nal, there was com­fort in know­ing that it would be rein­car­nat­ed as cones to hold deli­cious chana jor garam.

Tak­ing a thrift store frame apart, I was thrilled to dis­cov­er that behind the pre­vi­ous own­ers kit­tens in a bas­ket print lurked a home­made Moth­er’s Day card from the 40’s and a cal­en­dar page that not­ed the date some­one named David quit drink­ing. (I sent it along to Found Mag­a­zine.)

What I would­n’t give to stum­ble upon a dress lined with a 13th-cen­tu­ry man­u­script. Or a bishop’s miter stiff­ened with racy 13th-cen­tu­ry Norse love poet­ry!

Appar­ent­ly, it’s a rich tra­di­tion, putting old pages to good use, once they start feel­ing like they’ve out­lived their intend­ed pur­pose. The bish­op like­ly did­n’t know the specifics on the mate­r­i­al that made his hat stand up. I’ll bet the  sis­ters of the Ger­man Cis­ter­cian con­vent where the dress above orig­i­nat­ed were more con­cerned with the out­ward appear­ance of the gar­ments they were stitch­ing for their wood­en stat­ues than the not-for-dis­play lin­ing.

As Dutch art his­to­ri­an Erik Kwakkel explains on his medieval­frag­ments blog, the inven­tion of the Guten­berg press demot­ed scads of hand­writ­ten text to more pro­le­tar­i­an pur­pose. Ulti­mate­ly, it’s not as grim as it sounds:

the dis­mem­bered books were to have a sec­ond life: they became trav­el­ers in time, stow­aways… with great and impor­tant sto­ries to tell. Indeed, sto­ries that may oth­er­wise not have sur­vived, giv­en that clas­si­cal and medieval texts fre­quent­ly only come down to us in frag­men­tary form. The ear­ly his­to­ry of the Bible as a book could not be writ­ten if we were to throw out frag­ment evi­dence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

Dutch Book From 1692 Doc­u­ments Every Col­or Under the Sun: A Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­ors

Archive of Hand­writ­ten Recipes (1600 – 1960) Will Teach You How to Stew a Calf’s Head and More

The British Library Puts Online 1,200 Lit­er­ary Trea­sures From Great Roman­tic & Vic­to­ri­an Writ­ers

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

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T.S. Eliot Illustrates His Letters and Draws a Cover for Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

in Books, Letters | July 21st, 2014

Old-Possum-cover

Like so many poets, Thomas Stearns Eliot could write a fine let­ter. Unlike quite so many poets, he could also illus­trate those fine let­ters with an amus­ing pic­ture or two. The T.S. Eliot Soci­ety’s web site has sev­er­al exam­ples of what the author of “The Waste Land” could do when he got think­ing visu­al­ly as well as tex­tu­al­ly. At the top of the post, we have a cov­er he drew for a book of his own, Old Pos­sum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats, a well-known work of Eliot’s in its own right but also indi­rect­ly known and loved by mil­lions as the basis of Andrew Lloyd Web­ber’s musi­cal Cats. Well before this satir­i­cal feline mate­r­i­al attained such grand embell­ish­ment for and far-reach­ing fame on the stage, it took its first, hum­ble pub­lic form in 1939. Had you bought Old Pos­sum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats then, you would have bought the one above, with Eliot’s hand-drawn cov­er. (It runs $37,000 now.) The very next year, a new edi­tion came out ful­ly illus­trat­ed by Nicholas Bent­ley. The inim­itable Edward Gorey took his turn with the 1982 edi­tion, and the lat­est, pub­lished in 2009, fea­tures the art of Ger­man illus­tra­tor Axel Schef­fler.

Eliot-illustrated-letter

Above and below, you can see a cou­ple more sur­viv­ing exam­ples of what Eliot could do with pen and ink, albeit not in a con­text nec­es­sar­i­ly intend­ed for pub­li­ca­tion. While Eliot’s actu­al hand­writ­ing may not make for easy read­ing, even if you can read the Ger­man in which he some­times wrote, his draw­ings vivid­ly dis­play his impres­sions of the peo­ple pre­sum­ably men­tioned in the text. I’d have tak­en such pains, too, if I had the expec­ta­tion some 20th-cen­tu­ry men of let­ters seemed to that their col­lect­ed cor­re­spon­dence would even­tu­al­ly see print. Yet Eliot him­self went back and forth about it, “torn over whether to allow pub­lic access to his pri­vate let­ters after his death,” writes Salon’s Kera Bolonik. “ ‘I don’t like read­ing oth­er people’s pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence in print, and I do not want oth­er peo­ple to read mine,’ he said in 1927. But six years lat­er, he admit­ted he had an ‘inerad­i­ca­ble’ desire for his let­ters to reach a wider audi­ence. ‘We want to con­fess our­selves in writ­ing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have writ­ten’ ” — or see what we have drawn.

Eliot-illustrated-letter-4

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Mas­ter­piece, the Four Quar­tets

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Mod­ernist Poem The Waste Land

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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Why Tattoos Are Permanent? New TED Ed Video Explains with Animation

in Art, Life, Science | July 20th, 2014

For the last three decades my right ankle has been the site of a deeply botched tat­too. It was sup­posed to be a yin yang, but with every pass­ing year, it looks more and more like a can­cer­ous mole. The drunk­en Viet­nam Vet who admin­is­tered it bare­ly glanced at the design tak­ing shape on my once vir­gin skin as he chat­ted with a pal. I was too intim­i­dat­ed to say, “Um…is it just me or are you fill­ing in the white cir­cle?” (I con­vinced myself that he knew what he was doing, and the ink would recede as it healed. Need­less to say…)

My pathet­ic, lit­tle yin-ya’ is an embar­rass­ment in an era of intri­cate four-col­or sleeves and souped up rock­a­bil­ly gor­geous­ness, but I con­fess, I’ve grown fond of it. The fact that I have an out-of-bal­ance sym­bol for bal­ance per­ma­nent­ly engraved onto my body is far more appro­pri­ate than the poor­ly grasped  flash art could have been. It’ll be with me til the day I die.

Longer, actu­al­ly, to judge by the dec­o­ra­tive mark­ings of an 8000 ‑year-old Peru­vian mum­my.

I feel for­tu­nate to have devel­oped ten­der feel­ings for my bush league mod­i­fi­ca­tion. Clau­dia Aguir­re’s TED-Ed les­son “What Makes Tat­toos Per­ma­nent,” above, does not make an easy case for removal.

In the words of your grand­ma, don’t embell­ish your birth­day suit with any old junk.

Your gang affil­i­a­tion may feel like a for­ev­er-thing now, but what if you decide to switch gangs in a few years? Eras­ing those mem­o­ries can be painful. Ask John­ny “Winona For­ev­er” Depp.

Dol­phins may strike you as peace­ful, spir­i­tu­al crea­tures, but I’ll bet there are ways to appre­ci­ate them that don’t involve hav­ing one punc­tured through your epi­der­mis at 50–3000 micro-wounds per minute. 

Choose wise­ly! If you’re veer­ing toward a Tas­man­ian dev­il or a rose, do your­self a favor and browse the Muse­um of Online Muse­ums. Feel a kin­ship with any­thing there? Good! Once you’ve fig­ured out how to best fea­ture it on your hide, take Aguir­re’s anato­my-based quiz. See if it’s true that you’ll be barred from bur­ial in a Jew­ish ceme­tery. Your tat­too artist will like­ly be impressed that you cared enough to do some research. Watch a cou­ple of episodes of the Smith­so­ni­an’s Tat­too Odyssey for good mea­sure.

Then lay in a tube of Prepa­ra­tion H, and pre­pare to love what­ev­er you wind up with. It’s a lot eas­i­er than the pain of regret.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Get Ancient Advice on Los­ing Weight, Sober­ing Up, Remov­ing a Tat­too & More at Ask The Past

TED ED Ani­ma­tion Gives You a Glimpse of What Life Was Like for Teenagers in Ancient Rome

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is up to her eye­balls in Bye Bye Birdie and so should you be. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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In Dark PSA, Director Richard Linklater Suggests Radical Steps for Dealing with Texters in Cinemas

in Comedy | July 20th, 2014

At the Alamo Draft­house cin­e­mas, they don’t mess around. They tell you right on their web site, “We have a zero-tol­er­ance pol­i­cy towards talk­ing and tex­ting dur­ing the movie. If you talk or text, you will receive one warn­ing. If it hap­pens again, you will be kicked out with­out a refund.” And they appar­ent­ly mean it. Want some proof? Here’s Exhib­it A — a clip that mocks a cus­tomer who appar­ent­ly got kicked out of their “crap­py” the­ater in Austin, Texas for tex­ting. Then there’s Exhib­it B above — a sar­don­ic Alamo Draft­house video fea­tur­ing indie film­mak­er Richard Lin­klater sug­gest­ing rad­i­cal steps for deal­ing with the type of peo­ple found in Exhib­it A. It’s all a bit of dark humor (of course). But here’s some­thing that’s not a joke. You can watch Lin­klater’s break­through 1991 film, Slack­er, free online. You can also hear the Texas native talk about his new film Boy­hood on Fresh Air here.

Part­ing words: Don’t mess with Texas, par­tic­u­lar­ly film­mak­ers in Texas.

via Gawk­er/@Sheerly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Free Online: Richard Linklater’s Slack­er, the Clas­sic Gen‑X Indie Film

An Anti, Anti-Smok­ing Announce­ment from John Waters

David Lynch’s Unlike­ly Com­mer­cial for a Home Preg­nan­cy Test (1997)

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