On January 28, 1986, NASA Challenger mission STS-51‑L exploded in the sky, into a twisting plume of smoke, a mere 73 seconds after takeoff. It left a nation stunned, and seven astronauts dead. Among them was the pilot, physicist and MIT grad Ronald McNair, who, in 1984, had become only the second African-American to travel into outer space.
As this animation narrated by his own brother explains, McNair’s path to becoming an astronaut wasn’t easy. Born and raised in the Jim Crow South (in Lake City, South Carolina, to be precise) McNair encountered racism in his everyday life. One touching story helps crystallize what his experience was like. As a nine-year-old, McNair tried to check out books from the “public” library — only to discover that “public” meant books were for whites, not blacks. The video tells the rest of the story. And I’ll just flag one important detail mentioned at the very end: On January 28, 2011, exactly 25 years after his death, the library was renamed The Dr. Ronald E. McNair Life History Center. You’ll also find a Ronald E. McNair Building on MIT’s campus too. And deservedly so.
Certainly for me, and perhaps for many of you, there’s something eerily familiar about the scene that plays out in this animation. Here’s the backstory: Starting when he was 12, Mike Cohen, a kid growing up in Buffalo, began recording the arguments he had with his parents (unbeknownst to them). At least one of the tapes, recorded in 1985, recently ended up in the hands of Rodd Perry, a first time animator, who created the cartoon above. By the looks of things, Brother Mike is still part of the music scene today.
Some enthusiasts of 19th-century American psychological horror master (or, in a very real sense, 19th-century American psychological horror inventor) Edgar Allan Poe find his work best read aloud. Thus we’ve previously featured Poe delivered in the gravitas-filled voices of such noted thespians as Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Christopher Walken, Christopher Lee, and James Mason. Mason did the reading (above) as a narration for a 1953 animated short The Tell-Tale Heart, adapting Poe’s 1843 story of the same name, which drew both an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film and — perhaps more in line with the Poe sensibility — a rating of “X” from the British Board of Film Censors.
WFMU managed to dig up even more Poe as read by Mason, three tracks of which they posted to their blog one Halloween, all with “creepy and dramatic organ stylings by Buddy Cole, who no doubt wore an Inverness cape for the occasion.” They come from a 1958 release from Decca Records, featuring Mason’s readings of not just “The Tell-Tale Heart” [MP3] but Poe’s cryptic fable “Silence” [MP3—below] and haunting final poem “Annabel Lee” [MP3—bottom]. (The flip side of the album offers something completely different, in the form of Agnes Moorehead “and a supporting cast” performing Lucille Fletcher’s radio play “Sorry, Wrong Number.”)
Opinions on who reads Poe most effectively will differ from listener to listener, but if you’d like to make a partial but direct comparison for yourself, simply line up Mason’s rendition of “The Tell-Tale Heart” on a playlist with the ones we’ve previously posted by Christopher Lee, Basil Rathbone — and of course, Iggy Pop. It may have become Poe’s best-known story in the first place by having retained its impact over all these 172 years, but having such a range of performative personalities interpret it can’t hurt in keeping it as eerie as ever.
If there is any contemporary figure out there that resembles Charles Foster Kane, it is that real estate mogul and unlikely GOP front runner, Donald Trump. Like Kane, Trump was educated in, and thrown out of, some of the most elite private schools out there. Both have huge, larger-than-life personalities that readily turned them into media icons. Both had tumultuous relationships with women that ended up tabloid fodder. Both ostentatiously flaunted their wealth. And both have grandiose political ambitions.
Above you can watch The Donald expound on Orson Welles’s masterpiece in a clip directed by none other than master documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Trump is remarkably thoughtful in this piece compared to the campaign trail where he often sounds like a WWE barker channeling Mussolini. He comes to the movie from a vantage point that most of us just don’t have; namely, he knows what it’s like being obscenely wealthy.
Citizen Kane is really about accumulation. And at the end of the accumulation, you see what happens. And it’s not necessarily all positive. I think you learn in Kane that maybe wealth isn’t everything. He had the wealth; he just didn’t have the happiness. The table getting larger and larger and larger with he and his wife getting further and further apart as he got wealthier and wealthier, perhaps I can understand that…. Wealth isolates you from other people.
At the end of the piece, Morris asks Trump to give Kane some advice. His response, delivered with a smirk, is pure Trump – i.e. bombastic and misogynist. “Get yourself a different woman.”
The segment comes from an aborted project by Morris called Movie Movie, where he envisioned putting modern figures into the films they most admire. So imagine Trump actually in a re-enactment of Kane. Or, as also almost happened, imagine Mikhail Gorbachev starring in a reenactment of Dr. Strangelove. It’s a damned shame that Movie Movie never got made.
Below you can see more of Trump along with Gorbachev, Lou Reed, Walter Cronkite and others talking about their favorite movies in a video made for the 2002 Academy Awards.
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 lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
In 1962, during the height of the Cold War, the United States launched nuclear weapons (bigger than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) into space and detonated them. Ostensibly, the goal was to see what these high altitude nuclear blasts might do to the Earth’s magnetic field.
The explosions took place some 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. And, as the NPR video above describes it, folks living in the Pacific watched the light show while gathered on rooftops and blithely sipping drinks. Below, you can view arresting footage of the tests — without having to worry about getting radioactive fallout in your cocktail.
Every year for the past decade or so, we‘ve seen new, dire pronouncements of the death of print, along with new, upbeat rejoinders. This year is no different, though the prognosis has seemed especially positive of late in robust appraisals of the situation from entities as divergent as The Onion’s A.V. Club and financial giant Deloitte. I, for one, find this encouraging. And yet, even if all printed media were in decline, it would still be the case that the history of the modern world will mostly be told in the history of print. And ironically, it is online media that has most enabled the means to make that history available to everyone, in digital archives that won’t age or burn down.
One such archive, the British Library’s Flickr Commons project, contains over one million images from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. As the Library wrote in their announcement of these images’ release, they cover “a startling mix of subjects. There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.” Microsoft digitized the books represented here, and then donated them to the Library for release into the Public Domain.
One of the quirky features of this decidedly quirky assemblage is the Mechanical Curator, a bot-run blog that generates “randomly selected small illustrations and ornamentations, posted on the hour.” At the time of writing, it has given us an ad for the rather culturally dated artifact “Oriental Tooth Paste,” a product “prepared by Jewsbury & Brown.” Many of the other selections have considerably less frisson. Nonetheless, writes the Library, often “our newest colleague,” the Mechanical Curator, “plucks from obscurity, places all before you, and leaves you to work out the rest. Or not.”
Speaking of commerce, we also have an album devoted to advertisements, found by the community from, yes, the Mechanical Curator Collection. Here you will discover ads like “Oriental Tooth Paste” or that below for “Gentlemen’s & Boy’s Clothing 25 Per Cent. Under Usual London Prices” from 1894. Our conception of Victorian England as excessively formal gets confirmed again and again in these ads, which, like the random choice at the top of the post, contain their share of awkward or humorous historical notions.
Doubtless none of the proto-Mad Men of these very English publications foresaw such a marvel as the Mechanical Curator. Much less might they have foreseen such a mechanism arising without a monetizing scheme. But thanks to this free, newfangled algorithm’s efforts, and much assistance from “the community,” we have a digital record that shows us how public discourse shaped print culture, or the other way around. A fascinating, and at times bewildering, feature of this phenomenal archive is the requirement that we ourselves supply most of the cultural context for these austerely presented images.
The Rockford Files hit the airwaves in September 1974, and until the show ended in 1980, each episode began in the same way. During the title sequence, you’d hear a phone ring, and then an answering machine would start to play, “This is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message. I’ll get back to you.” With each new episode, a caller would leave a different message after the beep:
“It’s Norma at the market. It bounced. You want me to tear it up, send it back, or put it with the others?”
“It’s Laurie at the trailer park. A space opened up. Do you want me to save it or are the cops going to let you stay where you are?”
“It’s Audra. Remember last summer at Pat’s? I’ve got a twelve hour layover before I go to Chicago. How about it?”
“This is the message phone company. I see you’re using our unit, now how about paying for it?”
“I staked out that guy only it didn’t work out like you said. Please call me. Room 234. County Hospital.”
“Hey Rockford, very funny. I ain’t laughing. You’re gonna get yours.”
The short messages told you pretty much everything you needed to know about Jim Rockford. He’s a private detective living paycheck to paycheck. He cuts corners and bends rules when he needs to. He has friends among women, and enemies among men. He’s a quintessential private dick.
In total, 122 different answering machine messages were left during the run of the series. (Apparently, many featured the voices of 1970s celebrities and public figures.) You can play Season 1 above, and the remaining seasons below.
I remember thrilling, as a kid, to the envelope illustrations that the magazines I read ran on their letters pages. Not only would some of these readers (usually readers my age, with a lot of time on their hands) go to the trouble of writing and mailing a physical letter to their periodical of choice, they’d actually get as artistic as possible with the envelope as well. Some even did pretty impressive jobs, though as the envelope-illustrators of our time go, few rank up there with the likes of Maurice Sendak.
“This is how Maurice Sendak sometimes sent his letters,” wrote Letters of Note, tweeting out the image above. “Just imagine getting one.” The author of Where the Wild Things Areand In the Night Kitchen wrote the letter contained in this particular envelope to his fellow children’s book writer-illustrator Nonny Hogrogian, author of One Fine Day and The Contest. Sendak’s close colleagues might have got used to receiving such unconventionally illuminated correspondence, but he also wrote back to each and every one of his young readers, sometimes with similarly prepared correspondence.
Letters of Notealso tweeted a quote from a Fresh Air interview with Sendak in which Terry Gross asked for his favorite comments from his fans. Sendak told the story of a boy from whom he received “a charming card with a little drawing. I loved it.” In reply, he sent the child a postcard of appreciation and drew a Wild Thing on it, just as he did on the envelope of his letter to Hogrogian. The boy’s mother then wrote back to say her son “Jim loved your card so much he ate it,” which Sendak considered “one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
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wrote the letter contained in this particular envelope to his fellow children’s book writer-illustrator Nonny Hogrogian, author of 
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. Sendak’s close colleagues might have got used to receiving such unconventionally illuminated correspondence, but he also wrote back to each and every one of his young readers, sometimes with similarly prepared correspondence.
