There are strong people quietly willing to do “what needs to be done” for the public good, and then there are those who enjoy insinuating that they are that sort of person, usually as justification for their self-serving, frequently racist or xenophobic actions. When the latter reaches for the Bible as back up, look out!
No one ever had more fun with this monstrous type than the writer Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic with a knack for wrapping her characters’ foul purposes in the “stinking mad shadow of Jesus.”
In her longest story “The Displaced Person,” the boorish, Bible-thumping Mrs. Shortley is not the only baddie. The refined Mrs. McIntyre, widowed mistress of the dairy operation that employs the Shortleys and a couple of African-American farmhands, is just as quick to indict those with whom she imagines herself at cross-purposes.
Transfer them to the small screen, and every actress over 40 would be clamoring for the chance to sink her teeth into one or the other.
In 1977, PBS hired playwright Horton Foote to adapt “The Displaced Person” for “The American Short Story,” and the roles of Shortley and McIntyre went to Shirley Stoler and Irene Worth, both excellent.
(See above…it’s always so much more amusing to play one of the villains than the hardworking, uncomplaining, titular character, here a Polish refugee from WWII.)
The audio quality is not the greatest, but stick with it to see Samuel L. Jackson, not quite 30, as the younger of the two farmhands.
O’Connor buffs will be interested to know that Andalusia, the writer’s own Georgia farm, served as the location for this hour-long project. (No need to rent a peacock!)
Despite the stately production values that were de rigeur for quality viewing of the period, the story retains the unmistakable tang of O’Connor—it’s a bitter, comic brew.
The latest and maybe not greatest fan reworking of Star Wars (now available on YouTube)lets you watch all six Star Wars films online. At once. With one film layered upon the other.
Is there some cultural value to this layering of films? Maybe only insofar as it gives the keen observer the chance to find some meta trends running through the films. One YouTuber commented, “The really interesting part is that they’re similarly paced. If you skip around you’ll almost always find all talking scenes lined up and all action scenes lined up. Just shows how formulaic movies are (or at least how formulaic George Lucas is).”
Feel free to drop your own observations in the comments section below. And, by the way, the person who created this mashup has also made available a full gallery of HD still frames on imgur here.
Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intending to, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the U.S. throughout the Cold War. I remember having books handed to me before the Berlin Wall came down, by family friends fearful of the evils of popular music—especially punk rock and metal, but also pretty much everything else. The descriptions in these paranoid tracts of the bands I knew and loved sounded so ludicrous and hyperbolic that I couldn’t help suspect each was in fact a work of satire. They were at the very least anachronistic, yet ideal, types of Poe’s Law.
The mechanisms of state repression in the Soviet Union on the eve of perestroika overmatched comparatively mild attempts at music censorship made by the U.S. government, but the propaganda mechanisms were similar. As in the alarmed pamphlets and books handed to me in churches and summer camps, the Komsomol list describes each band in obtuse and absurd terms, each one a category of the “type of propaganda” on offer.
Black Sabbath, a legitimately scary—and politically astute—band gets pegged along with Iron Maiden for “violence” and “religious obscurantism.” (Nazareth is similarly guilty of “violence” and “religious mysticism.”) A great many artists are charged with only “violence” or with “sex,” which in some cases was kind of their whole métier. A handful of punk bands—the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Stranglers—are cited for violence, and also simply charged with “punk,” a crime given as the Ramones’ only offense. There are a few oddly specific charges: Pink Floyd is guilty of a “distortion of Soviet foreign policy (‘Soviet aggression in Afghanistan’)” and Talking Heads endorse the “myth of the Soviet military threat.” A couple hilariously incongruous tags offer LOLs: Yazoo and Depeche Mode, two of the gentlest bands of the period, get called out for “punk, violence.” Kiss and the Village People (above), two of the silliest bands on the list, are said to propagate, “neofascism” and “violence.”
Sex Pistols: punk, violence
B‑52s: punk, violence
Madness: punk, violence
Clash: punk, violence
Stranglers: punk, violence
Kiss: neofascism, punk, violence
Crocus: violence, cult of strong personality
Styx: violence, vandalism
Iron Maiden: violence, religious obscuritanism
Judas Priest: anticommunism, racism
AC/DC: neofascism, violence
Sparks: neofascism, racism
Black Sabbath: violence, religious obscuritanism
Alice Cooper: violence, vandalism
Nazareth: violence, religious mysticism
Scorpions: violence
Gengis Khan: anticommunism, nationalism
UFO: violence
Pink Floyd (1983): distortion of Soviet foreign policy (“Soviet agression in Afghanistan”)***
Talking Heads: myth of the Soviet military threat
Perron: eroticism
Bohannon: eroticism
Originals: sex
Donna Summer: eroticism
Tina Turner: sex
Junior English: sex
Canned Heat: homosexuality
Munich Machine: eroticism
Ramones: punk
Van Halen: anti-soviet propaganda
Julio Iglesias: neofascism
Yazoo: punk, violence
Depeche Mode: punk, violence
Village People: violence
Ten CC: neofascism
Stooges: violence
Boys: punk, violence
Blondie: punk, violence
The list circulated for “the purpose of intensifying control over the activities of discoteques.” It comes to us from Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, which cites it as an example, writes one reader, of “the contradictory nature of Soviet life, where as citizens participated in the ritualized, pro forma ideological discourse, this very discourse allowed them to carve out what they called ‘normal meaningful life’ that went beyond the state’s ideology.” A large part of that “normal” life involved circulating bootlegs of ideologically suspect music on improvised materials like discarded and stolen X‑Rays. The Komsomol eventually wised up. As Yurchak documents in his book, they co-opted local amateur rock bands and promoted their own events as a counter-attack on the influence of bourgeois culture. You can probably guess how much success they had with this strategy.
See the full list of thirty-eight bands and their “type of propaganda” above.
Umberto Eco, now 83 years old, has some advice to pass along to the young.
In March, the Italian semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist — and, of course, author of Foucault’s Pendulum — published How to Write a Thesis. It’s a witty, irreverent and practical guide for the student laboring over a thesis or dissertation. Josh Jones has more on that here.
Now, in a newly-released video from The Louisiana Channel (a media outlet based in Denmark), Eco turns his attention toward aspiring writers. And his wise counsel comes down to this: Keep your ego in check, make sure your ambitions are realistic, put in the time and the hard work, and don’t shoot for the Nobel Prize in Literature straight out of the gate. That, Eco says, kills every literary career. He’ll also tell you that writing is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.” They’re truisms — you discover when you’re an octogenarian — that turn out to be true.
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Most of us come to Michael Palin through his work as a comic actor (in the role of dead parrot salesman or otherwise), but at this point almost as many know him second as a founding member of Monty Python, and first as an affable globetrotter. That part of his career began in 1988, when he hosted the Earth-circumnavigating BBC travel series Around the World in 80 Days. (See an episode here.) Its success has led him, over the subsequent 27 years, onto further (and farther-flung) televised journeys: from the North Pole to the South, around the Pacific Rim, in the adventurous footsteps of Ernest Hemingway, across the Sahara, up the Himalayas, across the “new” central and eastern Europe, around the world again, and most recently through Brazil.
Not content to set a high watermark for travel television, Palin has also written a companion book for each series, lavishly collecting maps, pictures, and his own travel diaries. Those last reveal a more nuanced side of “the nicest chap in Britain,” whose famously easygoing, deferential, and unsurprisingly good-humored persona place him so well to deal with the world’s staggering variety of people, places, and inconveniences. “I can summon up nothing but resignation at the thought of cooking with the locals all morning, then having to listen to music and songs I don’t understand for the rest of the afternoon,” he writes after waking up on yet another island, in an entry excerpted in last year’s Travelling to Work, the latest published volume of his life’s diaries. “And, worst of all, having to look as if I’m enjoying it.”
But these books also reveal that most of the time, Palin really is enjoying it. His insatiable curiosity (not to mention his inexorable production schedule) drives him continuously ahead, a curiosity in which you, too can share now that he’s made all these books free to read online at palinstravels.co.uk. Click on the links/titles below, and then look for the prompts that say “Discover the Series Here” and, below that, “Start Reading the Book.”
And if you make a free account at the site, it will even allow you to you keep virtual “bookmarks” in as many of the books as you like, guaranteeing that you won’t get lost amidst this wealth of travel content. But if you choose to follow Palin’s example and actually get out there into every corner of the world, well, no such anti-lostness guarantees exist — but as every fan of Palin’s Travels knows, those very complications make it worthwhile. As least you won’t have a five-man crew trailing behind.
Recently deceased artist Chris Burden had a long history of working with automobiles in his art. In his early days he crucified himself to the top of a VW Beetle (a piece called Trans Fixed). He set about designing and building a 100 mph and 100 mpg automobile based on intuition called the B‑Car. In Big Wheel he used a motorcycle to power…a big wheel. And in Porsche with Meteorite he suspended the two objects above the museum floor on each end of a gigantic scale.
But his massive kinetic sculpture Metropolis II is something else: a child’s fever dream of a Hot Wheels-scale city, with 1,100 cars driving endlessly on 18 roadways, with two ramps that are 12 feet high and three conveyor systems that feed the cars back into the loop. The metal and the electricity needed to run the sculpture means that the thing is not just a sight to behold, but it’s staggeringly loud.
The title of the kinetic sculpture gives away its reference, that of Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis (watch it online) and its imaginary city scapes of elevated freeways and train tracks and people movers and planes that fly in between:
Burden’s work has its own structures too, some of which are made from building blocks, Lego, and Lincoln Logs, turned into houses and skyscrapers. Don’t expect sensible urban planning in this city: seen from above, Metropolis II is a chaos of roads, and closed systems from which there is no escape.
There was a trial run of the sculpture called Metropolis I, a smaller version that was soon sold to a Japanese collector and taken out of the public view.
For the sequel, Burden went bigger, enlisting eight people full time for five and a half years to build the piece. Said the artist:
“We wanted to expand it and make it truly overwhelming — the noise and level of activity are both mesmerizing and anxiety provoking.”
But instead of a nightmare commentary, Burden wanted the piece to be utopian. The cars are moving at 240 mph, according to scale, and there’s no gridlock. He was looking ahead to a future of driverless cars, as he shared a hatred like many Angelenos of endless traffic jams.
The 30 foot wide sculpture was bought for an undisclosed sum by billionaire businessman Nicholas Berggreun, who also sits on LACMA’s board. He’s loaned it to the museum until 2022 and it is currently now situated in a special wing where visitors can see it both at ground level and from above. It takes one assistant to keep it free of hiccups and it only runs for a few hours at a time, and only on weekends.
However, LACMA’s entryway is also home to a Burden piece one can see 24/7, the iconic Urban Light.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Last week we highlighted for you a beautiful Tree of Languages infographic, created by Minna Sundberg using data from ethnologue.com. This week, we present another visualization of world languages, this one produced by Alberto Lucas Lopéz, on behalf of the South China Morning Post. And, once again, the underlying data comes from ethnologue.com, a research project that catalogues all of the world’s known living languages.
Today’s graphic — click here to view it in a large format — takes the world’s 23 most popular languages, and then gives you a visual sense of how many people actually speak those languages overall, and where geographically those languages are spoken. The more a language is spoken, the more space it gets in the visual.
When you view the original graphic, you’ll note that Chinese speakers outnumber English speakers by a factor of four. And yet English is spoken in 110 countries, as compared to 33 for Chinese. And the number of people learning English worldwide dwarfs the number learning Mandarin.
As you look through Lopéz’s visual, you’ll want to keep one thing in mind: Although the 23 languages visualized above are collectively spoken by 4.1 billion people, there are at least another 6700 known languages alive in the world today. Someone has to cook up a proportional visualization of those. Any takers?
We all know that Alice’s dreamlike journey begins in earnest when she drinks from a bottle labeled “DRINK ME” and eats a cake labeled “EAT ME.” See what metaphors you will, but to my mind, this alone makes the story obvious Steadman material: many of us discover his art through its appearance in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a collaboration that qualifies Steadman as no stranger at all to visualizing unreal circumstances heightened, or induced, by one ingested substance or another.
His version, writes io9’s Cyriaque Lamar, “has gone through various print runs throughout the decades, and he modeled several of the characters on decidedly modern personalities. For example, the Cheshire Cat is a television talking head, the Caterpillar is a grass-smoking pedant, the Mad Hatter is a barking quizmaster, and the King and Queen of Hearts are a melting mass of political authority.”
See more of Steadman’spieces by picking up your own copy of the book, or visit Brain Pickings, where Maria Popova describes them as bringing “to Carroll’s classic the perfect kind of semi-sensical visual genius, blending the irreverent with the sublime.” Though by all available evidence thoroughly sane himself, Steadman’s illustrations have, over his fifty-year career, lent just the right notes of English insanity to a variety of subjects, from wine to dogs to psychogeography. Only natural, then, to see them accompany the insanity — which, sentence by sentence and page by page, comes to seem like sanity by other means — of a classic English tale like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
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