At some point in your life, no doubt, you’ve thought that you have done something so many times that you could do it with your eyes closed — be it change a diaper, make coffee, drive to work or perform a minor surgical procedure. Not that this would necessarily be a good idea (especially that last one) but there’s something about repetition, routine and muscle memory that makes a task so familiar that sight seems superfluous.
In 1947, LIFE Magazine asked some of the most famous cartoonists around to draw their comic strip characters blindfolded. The results are fascinating, looking a bit like the outcome of a clinical test on artists before and after taking illicit substances. (See our previous post: Artist Draws Nine Portraits on LSD During 1950s Research Experiment.)
Chic Young’s blindfolded version of Dagwood Bumstead is all dynamic lines and spirals, looking a bit like a doodle from an Italian Futurist. Chester Gould’s blind attempt at Dick Tracy’s chiseled profile looks not all that different from the sighted version. And Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon has all the elements there — the flinty eyes, the wavy hair – but it’s all jumbled together.
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. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily. The Veeptopus store is here.
If anyone could make toilet humor funny past the age of 14, it was Monty Python. Mining equally the halls of academia and the grade school yard, there was no register too high or too low for the masterful British satirists. And when it came time for them to release their second film in 1975—Arthurian spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail—the troop fought in vain to reach an audience of all ages. Unlike today’s many ratings gradations, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) then had a very simple classification system: AA for 14 and over, and A for ages 5–14. Hoping to increase the film’s audience, producer Mark Forstater wrote the letter above to fellow producer Michael White a few days after a Twickenham screening attended by BBFC member Tony Kerpel, who suggested a few cuts to bring the film an A rating.
In the letter, Forstater lists Kerpel’s recommendations:
Lose as many shits as possible
Take Jesus Christ out, if possible
Lose “I fart in your general direction”
Lose “the oral sex”
Lose “oh, fuck off”
Lose “We make castanets out of your testicles”
Two of these lines you no doubt recognize as uttered by the obnoxious mocking French guard the Grail questers encounter on their journey. Played by John Cleese, the Frenchman gets some of the best lines in the film, including the offending “fart” and “testicles” bits (at 2:15 and 6:05 in the clip above). Forstater must have had a keen sense of just how funny—therefore how necessary—these lines were. In his suggestions to White, he writes,
I would like to get back to the Censor and agree to lose the shits, take the odd Jesus Christ out and lose Oh fuck off, but to retain ‘fart in your general direction’, ‘castanets of your testicles’ and ‘oral sex’ and ask him for an ‘A’ rating on that basis.
Unfortunately for Britain’s Python-loving kids and for the film’s investors, the AA rating stuck, at least until 2006, when it was re-rated for ages 12 and below in a theatrical re-release. This by contrast to its U.S. status, where the movie first scored a PG rating and was later upgraded to PG-13 (which didn’t exist in 1975) for its Blu-ray release. Monty Python and the Holy Grail has received a variety of mature ratings in various countries and—we should mention, since it’s Banned Books Week—has been entirely banned in Malaysia.
Another comedy team encountered similar difficulties with film ratings. The South Park duo—similarly adept at pitching potty jokes to grown-ups—ended up with an R for the feature length Bigger, Longer & Uncut, though censors originally wanted an NC-17. See the cuts the MPAA recommended for that film in Matt Stone’s legendary response memo to the ratings board and read the full transcript of the Python letter at Letters of Note.
Now comes his latest side project: On his web site, extension765.com, Soderbergh presents a short lesson in “staging,” a term that refers in cinema “to how all the various elements of a given scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coordinated.” He tells us: “I operate under the theory a movie should work with the sound off, and under that theory, staging becomes paramount.”
To illustrate his point, he takes the entirety of Steven Spielberg’s 1981 film, The Raiders of the Lost Ark; turns it into a silent, black & white film (watch it here); and then adds this commentary:
So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging, and this filmmaker forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are—that’s high level visual math shit).
Ok, that’s probably enough film school for today…
If you have managed to keep your attention span intact during this distracting information age, then you’re almost certainly familiar with Longform.org, a web site that makes it easy to find something great to read online, especially if you like reading informative, well-crafted works of non-fiction. Last week, Longform enhanced its service with the release of a new, free app for iPhone and iPad. It’s the “only 100% free app that filters out the internet junk and delivers nothing but smart, in-depth reads.” And, drawing on material from 1,000 publishers, the app lets readers “create their own custom feeds of high quality, feature-length journalism,” and then read it all on the go. It’s a mission that certainly aligns with ours, so we’re more than happy to give the new app a plug.
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We well know of the most famous cases of banned books: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. In fact, a full 46 of Modern Library’s “100 Best Novels” have been suppressed or challenged in some way. The American Library Association maintains a page that details the charges against each one. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird saw a challenge in the Vernon Verona Sherill, New York school district in 1980 as a “filthy, trashy novel” and in 1996, Lindale, Texas banned it from the advanced placement English reading list because it “conflicted with the values of the community.” Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath has a lengthy rap sheet, including total banning in Ireland (1953), Morris, Manitoba (1982), and all high school classes in Kanawha, Iowa (1980). The list of censored undisputed classics—every one of which surely has its own piece of giant store art in Barnes & Nobles nationwide—goes on.
In many ways this is typical. “The banned books lists you’ll find in many libraries and bookstores,” writes John Mark Ockerbloom at Everybody’s Libraries, “doesn’t [sic] focus much on the political samizdat, security exposés, or portrayals of Mohammed that are the objects of forcible suppression today. Instead, they’re often full of classics and popular titles sold widely in bookstores and online—or dominated by books written for young readers, or assigned for school reading.” Are these lists—and the banned books celebrations that occasion them—just “shameless propaganda” as conservative Thomas Sowell alleges? “Is it wrong to call these books banned?” asks Ockerbloom in his essay “Why Banned Books Week Matters.” Of course he answers in the negative; “not if you take readers seriously. An unread book, after all, has as little impact as an unpublished book.” Books that don’t pass muster with administrators, school boards, library associations, and legislators of all kinds, argues Ockerbloom, can be as inaccessible to young readers as those that get destroyed or fully suppressed in parts of the world without legal provisions for free speech.
This situation is in great part remediated by the free availability of texts on the internet, whether those currently under a ban or those that—even if they line the shelves in brick and mortar stores and Amazon warehouses—still meet with frequent challenges from community organizations eager to control what their citizens read. Today, in honor of this year’s Banned Books Week, we bring you free online texts of 14 banned books that appear on the Modern Library’s top 100 novels list. Next to each title, see some of the reasons these books were challenged, banned, or, in many cases, burned.
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Read Online)
This staple of high school English classes everywhere seems to mostly get a pass. It did, however, see a 1987 challenge at the Baptist College in Charleston, SC for “language and sexual references.”
Seized and burned by postal officials in New York when it arrived stateside in 1922, Joyce’s masterwork generally goes unread these days because of its legendary difficulty, but for ten years, until Judge John Woolsey’s decision in its favor in 1932, the novel was only available in the U.S. as a bootleg. Ulysses was also burned—and banned—in Ireland, Canada, and England.
Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare often seems like one of the very few things liberals and conservatives can agree on—no one wants to live in the future he imagines. Nonetheless, the novel was challenged in Jackson County, Florida in 1981 for its supposedly “pro-communist” message, in addition to its “explicit sexual matter.”
Again the target of right-wing ire, Orwell’s work was challenged in Wisconsin in 1963 by the John Birch Society, who objected to the words “masses will revolt.” A 1968 New Survey found that the novel regularly appeared on school lists of “problem books.” The reason most often cited: “Orwell was a communist.”
Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (Audio)
Vonnegut’s classic has been challenged by parents and school boards since 1973, when it was burned in Drake, North Dakota. Most recently, it’s been removed from a sophomore reading list at the Coventry, RI high school in 2000; challenged by an organization called LOVE (Livingstone Organization for Values in Education) in Howell, MI in 2007; and challenged, but retained, along with eight other books, in Arlington Heights, IL in 2006. In that case, a school board member, “elected amid promises to bring her Christian beliefs into all board decision-making, raised the controversy based on excerpts from the books she’d found on the internet.” Hear Vonnegut himself read the novel here.
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London (Read Online)
London’s most popular novel hasn’t seen any official suppression in the U.S., but it was banned in Italy and Yugoslavia in 1929. The book was burned in Nazi bonfires in 1933; something of a historical irony given London’s own racist politics.
The Nazis also burned Sinclair’s novel because of the author’s socialist views. In 1959, East Germany banned the book as “inimical to communism.”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence (Read Online)
Lawrence courted controversy everywhere. Chatterly was banned by U.S. customs in 1929 and has since been banned in Ireland (1932), Poland (1932), Australia (1959), Japan (1959), India (1959), Canada (1960) and, most recently, China in 1987 because it “will corrupt the minds of young people and is also against the Chinese tradition.”
This true crime classic was banned, then reinstated, at Savannah, Georgia’s Windsor Forest High School in 2000 after a parent “complained about sex, violence, and profanity.”
Lawrence endured a great deal of persecution in his lifetime for his work, which was widely considered pornographic. Thirty years after his death, in 1961, a group in Oklahoma City calling itself Mothers Unite for Decency “hired a trailer, dubbed it ‘smutmobile,’ and displayed books deemed objectionable,” including Sons and Lovers.
If anyone belongs on a list of obscene authors, it’s Burroughs, which is only one reason of the many reasons he deserves to be read. In 1965, the Boston Superior Court banned Burroughs’ novel. The State Supreme Court reversed that decision the following year. Listen to Burroughs read the novel here.
Poor Lawrence could not catch a break. In one of many such acts against his work, the sensitive writer’s fifth novel was declared obscene in 1922 by the rather unimaginatively named New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser (Read Online)
American literature’s foremost master of melodrama, Dreiser’s novel was banned in Boston in 1927 and burned by the Nazi bonfires because it “deals with low love affairs.”
You can learn much more about the many books that have been banned, suppressed, or censored at the University of Pennsylvania’s “Banned Books Online” page, and learn more about the many events and resources available for Banned Books Week at the American Library Association’s website.
Few know as much about our incompetence at predicting our own future as Matt Novak, author of the site Paleofuture, “a blog that looks into the future that never was.” Not long ago, I interviewed him on my podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture; ever since, I’ve invariably found out that all the smartest dissections of just how little we understand about our future somehow involve him. And not just those — also the smartest dissections of how little we’ve always understood about our future. Take, for example, the year 1936, when, in Novak’s words, “a quarterly magazine for book collectors called The Colophon polled its readers to pick the ten authors whose works would be considered classics in the year 2000.” They named the following:
At first glance, this list might not look so embarrassing. Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis remains oft-referenced, if much more so for Babbitt (Kindle + Other Formats – Read Online Now), his 1922 indictment of a business-blinkered America, than for It Can’t Happen Here, his bestselling Hitler satire from the year before the poll. Most Americans passing through high school English still bump into Willa Cather, Robert Frost (four of whose volumes you can find in our collection Free eBooks), and perhaps Eugene O’Neill (likewise) and Theodore Dreiser (especially through Sister Carrie: Kindle + Other Formats – Read Online Now) as well.
Some of us may also remember Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic Civil War poem John Brown’s Body from our school days, but it would take a well-read soul indeed to nod in agreement with such selections as New England historian James Truslow Adams and now little-read (though once Sinclair- and Dreiser-acclaimed) fantasist James Branch Cabell. The well-remembered George Santayana still looks like a judgment call to me, but what of absent famous names like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, or maybe James Joyce? The Colophon’s editors included Hemingway on their own list, but which writers do you think stand as the Fitzgeralds and Faulkners of today — or, more to the point, of the year 2078? Care to put your guess on record? Feel free to make your predictions in the comments section below.
Beginning scooter riders can find a veritable biker’s breakfast of pointers on the Internet. One could cobble them together to make a contemporary owners manual, covering such crucial topics as braking, throttling, steering, and staying upright. But sometimes one craves something a bit more elusive, a bit more spiritual. Is there a youtube equivalent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
Not really, but there are these early 80s ads for Honda scooters, featuring some of the era’s most iconoclastic acts.
They put Adam Ant’s dashing post-punk appeal to the test by confining him in close quarters with Grace Jones. Grace, above, dominated, with all the confidence and ease of a tiger caged up with a peacock.
The prize? Can’t speak for Adam, but Grace got to film another spot. Her co-stars this time were a grid of infants, whose mothers must’ve been relieved that the alien diva queen never actually interacted with them. Can you imagine if Huggies had shared Honda’s adventurous advertising sensibilities?
Jazz great musician Miles Davis didn’t have to do much to lend an air of cool to that scooter. Even the cardboard boxes scattered in the background of his garage benefit from his presence. The Prince of Darkness’ reputation was never an 80’s-specific phenomenon, but he looks the part, kitted out like the Road Warrior.
Synth-pop superstars Devo urged beginning riders to adopt their extremely unconventional brand of conformity, suggesting that the band’s uniform of coveralls and, uh, shoes was the perfect thing to wear while riding that Honda. Those who wanted to hang on to some semblance of individuality could do so via scooter color.
Ironic though it may have been, their willingness to be seen sporting, nay, promoting helmets makes Devo’s ad my personal favorite.
Winston Churchill is one of those colossal figures who readily qualifies for that unfashionable moniker of The Great Man of History. This was a guy who warned of Hitler’s threat long before it seemed polite to do so. Through his political acumen and brilliant oratory skills, the two-time prime minister rallied his demoralized country to face down the massive, seemingly unstoppable German army. Beyond that, he won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature, for, among other works, his six volume series on the Second World War. And, on top of all that, Churchill was also a passionate painter. And unlike George W. Bush’s touchingly awkward attempts, Churchill’s paintings were actually pretty good. You can see a few above and below and even more here. (Click on the images to view them in a larger format.)
For Churchill, painting was the best way to mentally step away from what had to be a titanically stressful job. “Painting is complete as a distraction,” he wrote in 1948. “I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind. Whatever the worries of the hour or the threats of the future, once the picture has begun to flow along, there is no room for them in the mental screen.”
Churchill turned to painting at a low point in his life. After an invasion of Gallipoli, which he in part orchestrated, went spectacularly wrong in 1915, he resigned from his government position (First Lord of the Admiralty) in disgrace. “I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it,” he wrote. Then he discovered the joys of putting paint to canvas. Over the next 48 years, he cranked out some 500 paintings, mostly landscapes. Oil was his preferred medium and, judging from his oeuvre, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and William Turner were big influences. “When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting,” he wrote. “And so get to the bottom of the subject.”
So how good was he? Noted English artist and royal portraitist Sir Oswald Birley was quite impressed by the Prime Minister’s abilities. “If Churchill had given the time to art that he has given to politics, he would have been by all odds the world’s greatest painter.” Of course, Birley was also regularly employed by Churchill, so you might want to take that statement with a grain of salt. David Coombs, who co-authored the book Sir Winston Churchill: His Life and His Paintings, offered a more even-handed assessment. “When he’s very good, he’s very, very good, but sometimes, he’s horrid.”
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. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily. The Veeptopus store is here.
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