In Walking in Ruins, novelist and adventurous pedestrian Geoff Nicholson’s book about the on-foot exploration of England and America’s disused places, the author devotes a fascinating section to an Essex “secret nuclear bunker.” Rendered un-secret, and indeed unnecessary, by the end of the Cold War, the whole underground complex underwent conversion into a forlorn tourist attraction. “In some of the bunker’s smaller, emptier rooms, videos were being shown on chunky old TV sets, documentaries related to nuclear war and its survival,” Nicholson writes. “They included the notorious public information series Protect and Survive, twenty short episodes, basic animation, strangely ahead-of-its-time electronic music, and a voice-over by Patrick Allen, deeply unsympathetic and unreassuring, though you imagine he was supposed to be both. The titles in the series included ‘What to Put in Your Fallout Room’ and ‘Sanitation Care and Casualties.’ ”
“ ‘Stay at Home,’ ” Nicholson tells us, “reminded us that fallout ‘can settle anywhere, so no place in the United Kingdom is safer than any other,’ and my favorite single sentence comes from the episode ‘Refuges’: ‘If you live in a caravan or other building of lightweight construction with very little protection against fallout, your local authority will be able to advise you on what to do’ — and there was a cartoon image of a tiny caravan that looked like it might be blown away by a good sneeze, never mind a nuclear explosion.” The compilation above collects 51 minutes of these and other episodes of Protect and Survive, originally commissioned by the British government in the 1970s and meant for transmission only in the case of an imminent nuclear attack on the country. But episodes leaked, and the BBC proceeded to broadcast them absent that immediate threat, thereby ensuring the legacy of this Cold War media artifact beloved of irony-loving Britons — that is to say, Britons — across the country.
Ask filmgoers to name their favorite Stanley Kubrick pictures, and you’ll hear many of the same titles over and over again: Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange.These and the five other feature films Kubrick directed between 1960 and his death in 1999 hold permanent pride of place as some of the most enduring and influential works in the history of the form. His fourth picture, 1957’s Kirk Douglas-starring, World War I‑set Paths of Glory, has drawn a good share of critical acclaim, but nothing before it in his body of work has yet commanded the level of respect associated with Kubrick and his cinematic legacy.
In 1956, he’d made the noir The Killingon the cheap; the previous year, he’d made the noir Killer’s Kisson the cheaper. But before even those came Fear and Desire, Kubrick’s very first feature, an existential war movie produced in 1953 with money raised from his wealthy drugstore-owning uncle and proceeds from a job shooting second-unit on a documentary about the life of Abraham Lincoln. You can watch the whole film, which has fallen into the public domain, at the top of the post, or in a restored version, preceded by a brief 1966 interview with Kubrick, right here.
By the time of Fear and Desire, Kubrick had already logged a certain amount of filmmaking practice directing shorts. Still, he could never quite get over his own perception of the movie, which he made at age 24 fresh from his job as a photographer at Look magazine. He considered the film “a bumbling amateur film exercise” and “completely inept oddity.” He later, having burned the negative, sought to prevent its screening and distribution whenever possible. Yet it had its high-profile appreciators even at the time of release: “Its overall effect is entirely worthy of the sincere effort put into it,” said the New York Times; “Worth watching for those who want to discover high talent at the moment it appears,” said critic-scholar Mark Van Doren. Though far rougher than every film Kubrick would go on to make, Fear and Desire offers several moments that reveal him as the director we now know he would go on to become. Grantland’s Steven Hyden, in an article on the movie, quotes an attendee at one of its particularly disastrous preview screenings who remembers that “there were giggles in the wrong places, and it all seemed overdone and overwrought.” He also quotes Kubrick’s full reflection on the experience in a New York Times Magazine profile: “Pain is a good teacher.”
Most every dweller of a city with a robust public transit system comes to identify their boundaries with the lines, angles, and colors of its subway map. This is true of my hometown, Washington, DC, at least since the popular adoption of its Metro system in the 80s. It’s many times truer of my adopted city for ten years, New York, whose more than 100-year-old subway system has given urban historians enough material for lifelong study. The history of the NYC subway maps offers a specialized area for students of design, who must surely know the name Massimo Vignelli, the modernist designer who named the DC Metro and created the notorious 1972 NYC Transit map that, writes the MTA (Metro Transit Authority), “reimagined the MTA New York City Transit subway system as a neat grid of colored lines surrounded by a beige ocean.” The map will be familiar, and perhaps even a token of nostalgia, to New Yorkers from the era, who may also recall the complaints the MTA received for the map’s “geographic inaccuracies” and “aesthetic confusion.” Nonetheless, “design fans […] celebrated the map and made it a coveted souvenir of trips to New York. It later became part of the postwar design collection at the Museum of Modern Art.” In the video above, excerpted from the 2007 design documentary Helvetica, Vignelli revisits his transit map design (below), which he adopted from the London Underground map.
Vignelli, who passed away Tuesday at the age of 83, worked closely with his wife Leila on a wide range of design projects—his motto, “if you can design one thing, you can design everything.” A great many of those subway riders in 1972 may have disagreed. While previous and subsequent maps, including the current design, provide a geographically precise rendering of the five boroughs, with details of major avenues and parks and waterways in simple greens and blues, Vignelli’s map is formal and abstract, more art object than guidepost. As a newcomer to the city, I used my pocket-sized MTA map to guide me around on foot as well as by train (this was before smartphones, mind you), but this would be quite difficult if not impossible with the ’72 version. Yet in his reassessment of the design, Vignelli says that he should have stripped away even the few geographical references he did include because “the people couldn’t relate the geography with the stations.” For Vignelli, “there is no reason why this geography has to be literal, it could be completely abstract.” How this would better help riders navigate the hugely extensive system isn’t at all clear, but what is apparent is Vignelli’s commitment to form over utilitarian function. It’s a commitment that served him very well as a designer, though not, it seems, as a cartographer. For more on Vignelli’s design philosophy, see his 2012 interview with Big Think.
The work of William S. Burroughs can be by turns hilarious, opaque and profane – filled with images of drugs, insects and other oddities. Though it might be fascinating, if difficult, on the page, his work really comes alive when read aloud, preferably in Burroughs’s signature deadpan drawl. And if it’s accompanied by some trippy visuals, then, all the better.
The above video is exactly that. In 1994, animator Peter Hunt made this appropriately grotesque stop motion animated film, Ah Pook is Here, with audio taken from Burroughs’s 1990 album Dead City Radio. (You can read along to the video below.) John Cale provides the music. The winner of 10 international film awards, the short film has been archived in the Goethe Institut.
Ah Pook is Here started in 1970 as a collaboration with artist Malcolm McNeil. Originally it was slated to be a magazine comic strip but when the publication folded, Burroughs and McNeil decided to turn it into a book. Ah Pook is Here and Other Texts was finally published in 1979, though without McNeil’s illustrations. You can see them here.
When I become Death, Death is the seed from which I grow…
Itzama, spirit of early mist and showers.
Ixtaub, goddess of ropes and snares.
Ixchel, the spider web, catcher of morning dew.
Zooheekock, virgin fire patroness of infants.
Adziz, the master of cold.
Kockupocket, who works in fire.
Ixtahdoom, she who spits out precious stones.
Ixchunchan, the dangerous one.
Ah Pook, the destroyer.
Hiroshima, 1945, August 6, sixteen minutes past 8 AM.
Who really gave that order?
Answer: Control.
Answer: The Ugly American.
Answer: The instrument of Control.
Question: If Control’s control is absolute, why does Control need to control?
Answer: Control… needs time.
Question: Is Control controlled by its need to control?
Answer: Yes.
Why does Control need humans, as you call them?
Answer: Wait… wait! Time, a landing field. Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.
And what does Death need time for?
Answer: The answer is sooo simple. Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for Ah Pook’s sake.
Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for Ah Pook’s sweet sake, you stupid vulgar greedy ugly American death-sucker.
Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for Ah Pook’s sweet sake, you stupid vulgar greedy ugly American death-sucker… Like this.
We have a new type of rule now. Not one man rule, or rule of aristocracy, or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who’ve reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
As we mourn Maya Angelou on the day after her death, it’s heartening to remember that she lived several more lifetimes than most in her 86 years, some filled with pain and struggle, some with great joy. While generally known as a poet, writer, teacher, actress, and activist, Angelou actually got her start in the public eye as a Calypso dancer and singer, even appearing in a film, Calypso Heat Wave and releasing an album, Miss Calypso, both in 1957. It’s said that Billie Holiday told Angelou in 1958, “you’re going to be famous but it won’t be for singing,” She was right of course, but Angelou retained the air of a performer as a reader of her work.
Above, see her deliver an animated reading of her famous poem, “Still I Rise,” which references many of her past lives, including lines that seem to allude to her Miss Calypso days: “Does my sexiness upset you? / Does it come as a surprise / That I dance like I’ve got diamonds / At the meeting of my thighs?” The stanza is indicative of another quality among the many she enumerates, “sassiness.” But she begins the reading on a more sober note, with a statement about human resilience, the ability to get up and face the day, despite the fears we all live with. “Wherever that abides in a human being,” she says, “there is the nobleness of the human spirit.”
That resilience, the transcendence of painful personal and ancestral histories, was the great theme of Angelou’s work, whether in poems like “Still I Rise” or her revealing 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, also the title of a poem from her 1983 collection Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?. While the caged bird is a very personal symbol for Angelou, her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning,” which you can see her read above at Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration, speaks to the whole human species in elemental terms. Again she twines themes of transcending painful and bloody histories with those of the “nobleness of the human spirit.” The speaker of the poem is the earth itself, who addresses each of us as “a bordered country / Delicate and strangely made proud.” “History,” she writes in much-quoted lines from the poem’s ninth stanza, “despite its wrenching pain / Cannot be unlived, but if faced / With courage, need not be lived again.” For all the pain Angelou herself endured and faced with courage, it’s a sentiment she earned the right to proclaim. Her celebration of not only the particular African-American struggle, but also its part in the universal human struggle for dignity and purpose stands as her enduring legacy. She ends the poem where she begins her reading of “Still I Rise” above, with a call for us to treat each other with care and respect, to not be “wedded forever / To fear, yoked eternally / To brutishness”:
Here, on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, and into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope –
Good morning.
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Speaking at the Savoy Hotel in London, physicist Stephen Hawking told a crowd: “Ever since the dawn of civilisation, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable.” “They have craved understanding of the underlying order in the world. The World Cup is no different.” Using what he calls “General Logistic Regression Modelling,” Hawking has studied the 45 World Cup matches the English soccer team has played since 1966 (the last time the team won the tournament), and he has identified the conditions that could lead England to another victory in the World Cup this summer. Wearing red uniforms, playing with a 4–3‑3 formation, and having a European referee–they’re historically a plus. So is playing in cooler temperatures, at lower altitudes, with kick off happening around 3pm. Hawking also reveals the best way to score in a penalty shootout. That’s covered, too, in the video above.
This weekend, AMC aired episode 7 of Mad Men’s final season. The show will now take a break, until episodes 8–14 hit the airwaves early next year. Before you turn your attention elsewhere, you may want to spend some time with the Paris Review’s big interview with Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men. The interview covers a lot of ground.
We learn that Weiner is a particular fan of John Cheever. “[W]ith John Cheever, I recognized myself in the voice of the narrator.” “Cheever holds my attention more than any other writer. He is in every aspect of Mad Men, starting with the fact that Don lives in Ossining on Bullet Park Road.” (Find the Paris Review’s 1976 interview with Cheever here.)
We also discover that Weiner studied poetry in college with Christopher Reeve’s father, Frank Reeve, and there were a couple of years when Weiner considered T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land “the most interesting thing in the world.”
Then the conversation turns to Mad Men, where Weiner reveals what’s at the heart of the show: “I’ve always said this is a show about becoming white. That’s the definition of success in America—becoming a WASP. A WASP male.” “Don Draper knows he’s poor, very much in the model of [Lee] Iacocca or [Sam] Walton, who came out of the Great Depression, out of really humble beginnings. Or like Conrad Hilton, on the show. These men don’t take no for an answer, they build these big businesses, these empires, but really it’s all based on failure, insecurity, and an identity modeled on some abstract ideal of white power.”
The gross and ever-increasing degree of economic inequality in the United States has become a phenomenon that even the country’s elites can no longer ignore since the explosive publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. The book’s highly technical marshaling of data speaks primarily to economists and secondarily to liberal policymakers. Piketty’s calls for redistribution have lead to charges of “Marxism” from the other end of the political spectrum—due to some inevitable degree to the book’s provocative title. Yet in the reckoning of actual Marxist Slavoj Žižek, the French economist is still “a good Keynsian” who believes that “capitalism is ultimately the only game in town.” While the Marxist left may critique Piketty’s policy recommendations for their reliance on state capitalism, another fierce leftist thinker—Žižek’s sometime intellectual rival Noam Chomsky—might critique them for their acquiescence to state power.
Chomsky’s role as a public intellectual has placed him at the forefront of the left-anarchist fight against neoliberal political economy and the U.S. foreign and domestic policies that drive it. Whether those policies come from nominally liberal or conservative administrations, Chomsky asserts time and again that they ultimately serve the needs of elites at the expense of masses of people at home and abroad who pay the very dear cost of perpetual wars over resources and markets. In his 2013 book On Anarchism, Chomsky leaves little room for equivocation in his assessment of the role elites play in maintaining a state apparatus that suppresses popular movements:
If it is plausible that ideology will in general serve as a mask for self-interest, then it is a natural presumption that intellectuals, in interpreting history or formulating policy, will tend to adopt an elitist position, condemning popular movements and mass participation in decision making, and emphasizing rather the necessity for supervision by those who possess the knowledge and understanding that is required (so they claim) to manage society and control social change.
This excerpt is but one minute example of Chomsky’s fiercely independent stance against abuse of power in all its forms and his tireless advocacy for popular social movements. As Henry Giroux writes in a recent assessment of Chomsky’s voluminous body of work, what his many diverse books share is “a luminous theoretical, political, and forensic analysis of the functioning of the current global power structure, new and old modes of oppressive authority, and the ways in which neoliberal economic and social policies have produced more savage forms of global domination and corporate sovereignty.” And while he can sound like a doomsayer, Chomsky’s work also offers “the possibility of political and economic alternatives” and “a fresh language for a collective sense of agency and resistance.”
Today we offer a collection of Chomsky’s political books and interviews free to read online, courtesy of Znet. While these texts come from the 1990s, it’s surprising how fresh and relevant they still sound today. Chomsky’s granular parsing of economic, social, and military operations explains the engineering of the economic situation Piketty details, one ever more characterized by the title of a Chomsky interview, “The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many.” See links to nine books below. To read, click on links to either the “Content Overview” or “Table of Contents.” The books can also be found in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (1989): Based on the Massey Lectures, delivered in Canada in November 1988, Necessary Illusions argues that, far from performing a watchdog role, the “free press” serves the needs of those in power.
Deterring Democracy (1991): Chomsky details the major shift in global politics that has left the United States unchallenged as the preeminent military power even as its economic might has declined drastically in the face of competition from Germany and Japan. Deterring Democracy points to the potentially catastrophic consequences of this new imbalance, and reveals a world in which the United States exploits its advantage ruthlessly to enforce its national interests — from Nicaragua to the Philippines, Panama to the Middle East.
Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993): Analyzing Haiti, Latin America, Cuba, Indonesia, and even pockets of the Third World developing in the United States, Noam Chomsky draws parallels between the genocide of colonial times and the murder and exploitation associated with modern-day imperialism.
What Uncle Sam Really Wants (1993): A brilliant distillation of the real motivations behind U.S. foreign policy, compiled from talks and interviews completed between 1986 and 1991, with particular attention to Central America. [Note: If you have problems accessing this text, you can read it via this PDF.]
The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (1994): A fascinating state-of-the-world report from the man the New York Times called “arguably the most important intellectual alive.”
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