Every Nuclear Bomb Explosion in History, Animated

in History | November 20th, 2019

I sus­pect many few­er peo­ple are assigned John Hersey’s Hiroshi­ma, a book most every­one in my cohort read at some stage in their edu­ca­tion. And cer­tain­ly, far few­er peo­ple are sub­ject­ed to the kind of alarmist (and rea­son­ably so) pro­pa­gan­da films that dra­ma­tized the gris­ly details of fall­out and nuclear win­ter. Even the recent HBO minis­eries Cher­nobyl, with its grotesque depic­tion of radi­a­tion poi­son­ing, prompt­ed a wave of tourism to the site, draw­ing Insta­gram gen­er­a­tion gawk­ers born too late to have heard the ter­ri­fy­ing news first­hand.

Yet, the threat of a nuclear dis­as­ter and its atten­dant hor­rors has hard­ly gone away. The UN Gen­er­al Assem­bly issued a state­ment this year warn­ing of the high­est poten­tial for a dev­as­tat­ing inci­dent since the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis. We are enter­ing a new era of nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion, with many coun­tries who have no love for each oth­er join­ing the race. “As the risk of nuclear con­fronta­tion grows,” writes Simon Tis­dall at The Guardian, “the cold war sys­tem of treaties that helped pre­vent Armaged­don is being dis­man­tled, large­ly at Trump’s behest.” Calls for a No-First-Use pol­i­cy in the U.S. have grown more urgent.

Liv­ing mem­o­ry of the peri­od in which two glob­al super­pow­ers almost destroyed each oth­er, and took every­one else with them, has not deterred the archi­tects of today’s geopol­i­tics. But remem­ber­ing that his­to­ry should nonethe­less be required of us all. In the Busi­ness Insid­er video above, you can get a sense of the scope of nuclear test­ing that esca­lat­ed through­out the Cold War, in an ani­mat­ed time­line show­ing every sin­gle explo­sion in Japan and the var­i­ous test­ing sites in Rus­sia, New Mex­i­co, Aus­tralia, and the Pacif­ic Islands from 1945 into the 1990s, when they final­ly drop off. As the decades progress, more coun­tries amass arse­nals and con­duct their own test­ing.

Despite the expert warn­ings, some­thing cer­tain­ly has changed since the fall of the Sovi­et Union. Over a forty year peri­od, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. trained to anni­hi­late the oth­er, and the prospect of nuclear war became an extinc­tion-lev­el event. That may not be the case in a frag­ment­ed, mul­ti­po­lar world with many small­er coun­tries vying for region­al suprema­cy. But a nuclear event, inten­tion or acci­den­tal, could still be cat­a­stroph­ic on the order of thou­sands or mil­lions of deaths. The ani­ma­tion shows us how we got here, through decades of nor­mal­iz­ing the stock­pil­ing and test­ing of the ulti­mate weapons of mass destruc­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

Pro­tect and Sur­vive: 1970s British Instruc­tion­al Films on How to Live Through a Nuclear Attack

U.S. Det­o­nates Nuclear Weapons in Space; Peo­ple Watch Spec­ta­cle Sip­ping Drinks on Rooftops (1962)

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

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The 1926 Silent Film The Flying Ace Tells the Alternative Universe Story of a Black Fighter Pilot, Many Years Before African-Americans Were Allowed to Serve as Pilots in the US Army

in Film | November 20th, 2019

The ori­gin of dra­mat­ic sto­ry­telling in cin­e­ma is often traced to a sin­gle movie, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. It also hap­pens to be a film that cel­e­brates the racist vio­lence of the Ku Klux Klan, based on a nov­el, The Clans­man, that does the same. The film’s tech­ni­cal achieve­ments and its racism became inte­gral to Hol­ly­wood there­after. Only rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly have black film­mak­ers begun enter­ing the main­stream with very dif­fer­ent kinds of sto­ries, win­ning major awards and mak­ing record prof­its.

This would have been unthink­able in the 1920s, a peri­od of intense racial vio­lence when black WWI vet­er­ans came home to find their coun­try armed against them. “When the sol­diers returned,” writes Megan Pugh for the San Fran­cis­co Silent Film Fes­ti­val, “Jim Crow still reigned supreme and lynch mobs con­tin­ued to ter­ror­ize the South.” Hol­ly­wood pla­cat­ed white audi­ences by only ever fea­tur­ing black char­ac­ters in sub­servient, stereo­typ­i­cal roles, or cast­ing white actors in black­face.

Against these oppres­sive rep­re­sen­ta­tions, black film­mak­ers like Oscar Micheaux and George and Noble Jack­son “used cin­e­ma to con­front Amer­i­can racism,” respond­ing to Grif­fith with films like Micheaux’s With­in Our Gates and the Jack­sons’ uplift­ing The Real­iza­tion of a Negro’s Ambi­tion. There were also sev­er­al white film­mak­ers who made so-called “race movies.” But most of their films avoid any explic­it polit­i­cal com­men­tary.

These include the films of Richard Nor­man, who between 1920 and 1928 made sev­en fea­ture-length silent movies with all-black casts, “geared toward black audi­ences.” He made romances, come­dies, and adven­ture films, cast­ing black actors in seri­ous, “dig­ni­fied” roles. “Instead of tack­ling dis­crim­i­na­tion head-on in his films,” writes Pugh, “Nor­man cre­at­ed a kind of world where whites—and con­se­quent­ly racism—didn’t even exist.”

Though we may see this as a cyn­i­cal com­mer­cial deci­sion, and its own kind of appease­ment to seg­re­ga­tion, the approach also enabled Nor­man to tell pow­er­ful, alter­nate-uni­verse sto­ries that a more real­ist bent would not allow. 1926’s The Fly­ing Ace, for exam­ple, Norman’s only sur­viv­ing film, is about a black fight­er pilot return­ing home to “resume his civil­ian career as a rail­road detective—without remov­ing his Army Air Ser­vice uni­form, a con­stant reminder of his patri­o­tism and val­or.”

Nor­man tells the mov­ing sto­ry of Cap­tain Bil­ly Stokes (see Part 1 at the top), “a mod­el for the ideals of racial uplift,” despite the fact that “African-Amer­i­cans were not allowed to serve as pilots in the Unit­ed States Armed Forces until 1940.” One might say that rewrit­ing recent his­to­ry as wish-ful­fill­ment has always been a func­tion of cin­e­ma since… well, at least since The Birth of a Nation, if not fur­ther back to The Great Train Rob­bery.

Nor­man takes this impulse and dra­ma­tizes the life of an impos­si­bly hero­ic black WWI ser­vice­man, at a time when such men faced wide­spread abuse and dis­crim­i­na­tion in real­i­ty. While he insist­ed that he only made genre films, and avoid­ed what he called the “pro­pa­gan­da nature” of Micheaux’s films, it’s hard not to read The Fly­ing Ace as a polit­i­cal state­ment of its own, and not only for its oblique top­i­cal com­men­tary.

The film cen­ters on pos­i­tive, com­plex black char­ac­ters at a time when stu­dios made quite a bit of mon­ey doing exact­ly the oppo­site. Nor­man gave black audi­ences heroes of their own to root for. In The Fly­ing Ace, Cap­tain Stokes not only returns from fly­ing dan­ger­ous mis­sions for his coun­try, but he then goes on to cap­ture a band of thieves who stole his employer’s pay­roll. The char­ac­ter “nev­er would have made it onscreen in a Hol­ly­wood movie of the time.”

Nor­man estab­lished his stu­dio in Jack­sonville Flori­da, at the time con­sid­ered “the Win­ter Film Cap­i­tal of the World.” Many major stu­dios decamped there from New York until WWI, when they moved west to L.A. Nor­man, who grew up in Mid­dle­burg, Flori­da, made a for­tune invent­ing soft drinks before turn­ing to movies. He returned to his home state to find lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion left in Jack­sonville in the 1920s.

His stu­dio would become “one of the three lead­ing pro­duc­ers of race films in Amer­i­ca,” next to the Micheaux Film Cor­po­ra­tion and the Jack­sons’ Lin­coln Motion Pic­ture Com­pa­ny. In 2016, Nor­man Stu­dios was des­ig­nat­ed a Nation­al His­toric Land­mark. The filmmaker’s son, Richard Nor­man Jr. became a pilot, inspired by The Fly­ing Ace, and has plans to turn the build­ing into a muse­um cel­e­brat­ing Jack­sonville’s, and Nor­man’s, cin­e­ma lega­cy.

via Silent Movie GIFS

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Pio­neer­ing Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-Amer­i­can Film­mak­er

Watch D.W. Griffith’s Silent Mas­ter­piece Intol­er­ance Free Online — It’s the “Ulysses of the Cin­e­ma!”

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics 

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

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10 Paintings by Edward Hopper, the Most Cinematic American Painter of All, Turned into Animated GIFs

in Animation, Art | November 20th, 2019

The image of Amer­i­ca is an image bound up with the movies. That even goes for Amer­i­ca as rep­re­sent­ed in media oth­er than film, sug­gest­ing a cer­tain cin­e­mat­ic char­ac­ter in Amer­i­can life itself. No painter under­stood that char­ac­ter more thor­ough­ly than Edward Hop­per, an avid film­go­er who worked for a time cre­at­ing movie posters. He even “sto­ry­board­ed” his most famous 1942 Nighthawks, whose late-night din­er remains the visu­al def­i­n­i­tion of U.S. urban alien­ation. And though Hop­per’s Amer­i­ca also encom­pass­es the coun­try­side, nev­er would his views of it feel out of place in a work of film noir. His cin­e­mat­ic paint­ings have in turn influ­enced cin­e­ma itself, shap­ing the visu­al sen­si­bil­i­ties of auteurs across coun­tries and gen­er­a­tions.

Nighthawks, cit­ed as an influ­ence on urban visions like Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner, has also been faith­ful­ly recre­at­ed in films like Her­bert Ross’ Pen­nies from Heav­en, Wim Wen­ders’ The End of Vio­lence, and Dario Argen­to’ Deep Red. 1952’s House by the Rail­road has inspired direc­tors from Alfred Hitch­cock in Psy­cho to Ter­rence Mal­ick in Days of Heav­en.

A glance across the rest of Hop­per’s body of work reminds each of us of count­less shots from through­out cin­e­ma his­to­ry, Amer­i­can and oth­er­wise. Per­haps even more films will be brought to mind by the Hop­per-paint­ings-turned-ani­mat­ed GIFs com­mis­sioned by trav­el site Orb­itz as “a 21st-cen­tu­ry trib­ute to this titan of 20th-cen­tu­ry art, for the younger gen­er­a­tion who may not have been direct­ly intro­duced to his work.”

The ten of Hop­per’s works thus brought to life include, of course, Nighthawks and House by the Rail­road, as well as oth­er of his paint­ings both ear­ly and late, such as 1927’s Automat and 1952’s Morn­ing Sun. Both paint­ings depict a woman alone, a motif empha­sized by the notes accom­pa­ny­ing the ani­ma­tions. In the night­time of Automat, she “has an emp­ty plate in front of her, sug­gest­ing she’s already had some­thing to eat with her cof­fee,” and the win­dow’s reflec­tion of lamps extend­ing into the dark­ness sug­gests her “pos­si­ble lone­li­ness.” In the day­time of Morn­ing Sun, the build­ing out­side the win­dow “sug­gests that the woman’s view is not a par­tic­u­lar­ly scenic one,” and “the fact that she is sit­ting mere­ly to enjoy the sun could be inter­pret­ed as her desire to be clos­er to the out­doors, to nature, and escape the bleak­ness of urban life.”

Even in a more scenic set­ting, like the Cape Eliz­a­beth, Maine of 1927’s Light­house Hill, an enrich­ing touch of bleak­ness nev­er­the­less comes through. “Both the light­house and cot­tage are the focal points of the paint­ing, yet despite the blue sky and calm scenery dis­played, the shad­ows bring an omi­nous feel­ing to what one would assume is an invit­ing house.” Befit­ting the work of a painter whose use of light and shad­ow still inspires artists of all kinds today, these GIFs most­ly ani­mate light sources: the blink of a neon sign, the sun’s dai­ly arc across the sky.

The GIF of 1939’s New York Movie, Hop­per’s most overt trib­ute to the cin­e­ma, intro­duces the flick­er­ing of the film pro­jec­tor. Purists may not appre­ci­ate these touch­es, but many of us will real­ize that Hop­per’s pro­jec­tors have always been flick­er­ing, his neon signs always blink­ing, his cups of cof­fee always steam­ing, and his suns always set­ting, at least in our minds. See all of the ani­mat­ed gifs here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Edward Hop­per “Sto­ry­board­ed” His Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks

Edward Hopper’s Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Intro­duc­tion

9‑Year-Old Edward Hop­per Draws a Pic­ture on the Back of His 3rd Grade Report Card

Paint­ings by Car­avag­gio, Ver­meer, & Oth­er Great Mas­ters Come to Life in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

See Clas­sic Japan­ese Wood­blocks Brought Sur­re­al­ly to Life as Ani­mat­ed GIFs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Alice B. Toklas Reads Her Famous Recipe for Hashish Fudge (1963)

in Books, Literature | November 20th, 2019

toklas cookbook

Alice Babette Tok­las met Gertrude Stein in 1907, the day she arrived in Paris. They remained togeth­er for 39 years until Stein’s death in 1946. While Stein became the cen­ter of the avant-garde art world, host­ing an exclu­sive salon that wel­comed the likes of Ernest Hem­ing­way, Pablo Picas­so, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Tok­las large­ly pre­ferred to stay in Stein’s shad­ow, serv­ing as her sec­re­tary, edi­tor and assis­tant.

That changed in 1933 when Stein wrote The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Alice B. Tok­las – a retelling of the couple’s life togeth­er with Tok­las serv­ing as nar­ra­tor. The book is Stein’s most acces­si­ble and best-sell­ing work. It also turned the shy, self-effac­ing Tok­las into a lit­er­ary fig­ure.

After Stein’s death, Tok­las pub­lished The Alice B. Tok­las Cook­book in 1954, which com­bined per­son­al rec­ol­lec­tions of her time with Stein along with recipes and mus­ings about French cui­sine. Yet it wasn’t her sto­ries about tend­ing to the wound­ed dur­ing WWI or her opin­ions on mus­sels that made the book famous. Instead, it was the inclu­sion of a recipe giv­en to her by Moroc­can-based artist Brion Gysin called “Hashish Fudge.”

In this 1963 record­ing from Paci­fi­ca Radio, Tok­las reads her noto­ri­ous recipe. The snack “might pro­vide an enter­tain­ing refresh­ment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chap­ter meet­ing of the DAR,” Tok­las notes in her reedy, dig­ni­fied voice. Then she gets on to the recipe itself:

Take one tea­spoon black pep­per­corns, one whole nut­meg, four aver­age sticks of cin­na­mon, one tea­spoon corian­der. These should all be pul­ver­ized in a mor­tar. About a hand­ful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them togeth­er. A bunch of Cannabis sati­va can be pul­ver­ized. This along with the spices should be dust­ed over the mixed fruit and nuts, knead­ed togeth­er. About a cup of sug­ar dis­solved in a big pat of but­ter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a wal­nut, it should be eat­en with care. Two pieces are quite suf­fi­cient.

Tok­las con­cedes that get­ting the key ingre­di­ent “can present cer­tain dif­fi­cul­ties” and rec­om­mends find­ing the stuff in the wild, which might have been pos­si­ble to do in the ear­ly 1960s. Nowa­days, the best course of action is to move to Wash­ing­ton, Col­orado or Uruguay.

In the record­ing, Tok­las then goes on to recall how hashish fudge came to be includ­ed into her book.

“The recipe was inno­cent­ly includ­ed with­out my real­iz­ing that the hashish was the accent­ed part of the recipe,” she says with­out a trace of face­tious­ness. “I was shocked to find that Amer­i­ca wouldn’t accept it because it was too dan­ger­ous.”

“It nev­er went into the Amer­i­can edi­tion,” she says. “The Eng­lish are braver. We’re not coura­geous about that sort of thing.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Jan­u­ary 2014.

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejec­tion Let­ter from Pub­lish­er (1912)

Hear Gertrude Stein Read Works Inspired by Matisse, Picas­so, and T.S. Eliot (1934)

Gertrude Stein Recites ‘If I Told Him: A Com­plet­ed Por­trait of Picas­so’

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Improv Comedy (Live and Otherwise) Examined on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #20

in Comedy, Film, Pretty Much Pop, Television, Theatre | November 20th, 2019

 

What role does improv com­e­dy play in pop­u­lar cul­ture? It shows up in the work of cer­tain film direc­tors (like Christo­pher Guest, Adam McK­ay, and Robert Alt­man) and has sur­faced in some of the TV work of Lar­ry David, Robin Williams, et al. But only in the rare case of a show like Whose Line Is It Any­way? is the pres­ence of impro­vi­sa­tion obvi­ous. So is this art form doomed to live on the fringes of enter­tain­ment? Is it maybe of more appar­ent ben­e­fit to its prac­ti­tion­ers than to audi­ences?

Mark, Eri­ca, and Bri­an are joined by Tim Snif­f­en, announc­er on the pop­u­lar Hel­lo From the Mag­ic Tav­ern pod­cast, and a mem­ber of the Impro­vised Shake­speare Com­pa­ny and Baby Wants Can­dy (impro­vised musi­cals). He’s also writ­ten for Live From Here and oth­er things. We dis­cuss dif­fer­ent types of improv, a bit of the his­to­ry and struc­ture of Sec­ond City, improv’s alleged self-help ben­e­fits, how impro­vi­sa­tion relates to reg­u­lar act­ing, writ­ing, pod­cast­ing, and oth­er arts, and more.

Here are a few improv pro­duc­tions to check out:

For fur­ther read­ing, check out:

For musi­cal improv, try Naked­ly Exam­ined Music #30 with Paul Wer­ti­co and David Cain, and also #55 with Don Pre­ston (Zappa’s key­boardist) whom Mark quot­ed in this dis­cus­sion.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

 

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Nikola Tesla Accurately Predicted the Rise of the Internet & Smart Phone in 1926

in Science, Technology | November 19th, 2019

Cer­tain cult his­tor­i­cal fig­ures have served as pre­scient avatars for the tech­no-vision­ar­ies of the dig­i­tal age. Where the altru­is­tic utopi­an designs of Buck­min­ster Fuller pro­vid­ed an ide­al for the first wave of Sil­i­con Val­ley pio­neers (a group includ­ing com­put­er sci­en­tist and philoso­pher Jaron Lanier and Wired edi­tor Kevin Kel­ly), lat­er entre­pre­neurs have hewn clos­er to the prin­ci­ples of bril­liant sci­en­tist and inven­tor Niko­la Tes­la, who believed, as he told Lib­er­ty mag­a­zine in 1935, that “we suf­fer the derange­ment of our civ­i­liza­tion because we have not yet com­plete­ly adjust­ed our­selves to the machine age.”

Such an adjust­ment would come, Tes­la believed, only in “mas­ter­ing the machine”—and he seemed to have supreme con­fi­dence in human mastery—over food pro­duc­tion, cli­mate, and genet­ics. We would be freed from oner­ous labor by automa­tion and the cre­ation of “a think­ing machine” he said, over a decade before the inven­tion of the com­put­er. Tes­la did not antic­i­pate the ways such machines would come to mas­ter us, even though he can­ni­ly fore­saw the future of wire­less tech­nol­o­gy, com­put­ing, and tele­pho­ny, tech­nolo­gies that would rad­i­cal­ly reshape every aspect of human life.

In an ear­li­er, 1926, inter­view in Col­liers mag­a­zine, Tes­la pre­dict­ed, as the edi­tors wrote, com­mu­ni­cat­ing “instant­ly by sim­ple vest-pock­et equip­ment.” His actu­al words con­veyed a much grander, and more accu­rate, pic­ture of the future.

When wire­less is per­fect­ly applied the whole earth will be con­vert­ed into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er instant­ly, irre­spec­tive of dis­tance. Not only this, but through tele­vi­sion and tele­pho­ny we shall see and hear one anoth­er as per­fect­ly as though were face to face, despite inter­ven­ing dis­tances of thou­sands of miles; and the instru­ments through which we shall be able to do this will be amaz­ing­ly sim­ple com­pared with our present tele­phone. A man will be able to car­ry one in his vest pock­et. 

The com­plex­i­ty of smart phones far out­strips that of the tele­phone, but in every oth­er respect, Tesla’s pic­ture maps onto the real­i­ty of almost 100 years lat­er. Oth­er aspects of Tesla’s future sce­nario for wire­less also seem to antic­i­pate cur­rent tech­nolo­gies, like 3D print­ing, though the kind he describes still remains in the realm of sci­ence fic­tion: “Wire­less will achieve the clos­er con­tact through trans­mis­sion of intel­li­gence, trans­port of our bod­ies and mate­ri­als and con­veyance of ener­gy.”

But Tesla’s vision had its lim­i­ta­tions, and they lay pre­cise­ly in his tech­no-opti­mism. He nev­er met a prob­lem that wouldn’t even­tu­al­ly have a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion (and like many oth­er tech­no-vision­ar­ies of the time, he hearti­ly endorsed state-spon­sored eugen­ics). “The major­i­ty of the ills from which human­i­ty suf­fers,” he said, “are due to the immense extent of the ter­res­tri­al globe and the inabil­i­ty of indi­vid­u­als and nations to come into close con­tact.”

Wire­less tech­nol­o­gy, thought Tes­la, would help erad­i­cate war, pover­ty, dis­ease, pol­lu­tion, and gen­er­al dis­con­tent, when were are “able to wit­ness and hear events—the inau­gu­ra­tion of a Pres­i­dent, the play­ing of a world series game, the hav­oc of an earth­quake or the ter­ror of a battle—just as though we were present.” When inter­na­tion­al bound­aries are “large­ly oblit­er­at­ed” by instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion, he believed, “a great step will be made toward the uni­fi­ca­tion and har­mo­nious exis­tence of the var­i­ous races inhab­it­ing the globe.”

Tes­la did not, and per­haps could not, fore­see the ways in which tech­nolo­gies that bring us clos­er togeth­er than ever also, and at the same time, pull us ever fur­ther apart. Read Tes­la’s full inter­view here, in which he also pre­dicts that women will become the “supe­ri­or sex,” not by virtue of “the shal­low phys­i­cal imi­ta­tion of men” but through “the awak­en­ing of the intel­lect.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Elec­tric Pho­to of Niko­la Tes­la, 1899

The Elec­tric Rise and Fall of Niko­la Tes­la: As Told by Tech­noil­lu­sion­ist Mar­co Tem­pest

The Secret His­to­ry of Sil­i­con Val­ley

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

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Quentin Tarantino’s World War II Reading List

in Books, Film, History | November 19th, 2019

Image by Georges Biard, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

With his first three fea­tures Reser­voir Dogs, Pulp Fic­tion, and Jack­ie Brown, Quentin Taran­ti­no claimed 1990s Los Ange­les as his own. Then he struck bold­ly out into not just new geo­graph­i­cal and cul­tur­al ter­ri­to­ries, but oth­er time peri­ods. With his first full-on peri­od piece, 2009’s Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds, he showed audi­ences just how he intend­ed to use his­to­ry: twist­ing it for his own cin­e­mat­ic pur­pos­es, of course, but only mak­ing his depar­tures after steep­ing him­self in accounts of the time in which he envi­sioned his sto­ry tak­ing place. This nat­u­ral­ly involves plen­ty of read­ing, and Taran­ti­no recent­ly pro­vid­ed His­to­ryNet with a few titles that helped him prop­er­ly sit­u­ate Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds in the Europe of the Sec­ond World War.

Taran­ti­no calls Ian Ous­by’s Occu­pa­tion: The Ordeal of France 1940–1944 “a very good overview that answered all of my ques­tions about life in Nazi-occu­pied France.” Ulysses Lee’s The Employ­ment of Negro Troops is “the most pro­found thing I’ve ever read on both the war and racist Amer­i­ca of the 1940s, com­mis­sioned by the U.S. Army to exam­ine the effec­tive­ness of their employ­ment of black sol­diers.” And for Taran­ti­no, who does­n’t just make films but lives and breathes them, under­stand­ing Nazi Ger­many means under­stand­ing its cin­e­ma, begin­ning with Eric Rentschler’s Min­istry of Illu­sion: Nazi Cin­e­ma and Its After­life, “a won­der­ful crit­i­cal reex­am­i­na­tion of Ger­man cin­e­ma under Joseph Goebbels” that “goes far beyond the demo­niz­ing approach employed by most writ­ers on this sub­ject,” includ­ing even excerpts from Goebbels’ diaries.

Rentschler also “dares to make a fair appraisal of Nazi film­mak­er Veit Har­lan,” who made anti­se­mit­ic block­busters as one of Goebbels’ lead­ing pro­pa­gan­da direc­tors. But the work of no Nazi film­mak­er had as much of an impact as that of Leni Riefen­stahl, two books about whom Taran­ti­no puts on his World War II read­ing list: Glenn B. Infield­’s Leni Riefen­stahl: The Fall­en Film God­dess, the first he ever read about her, as well as Riefen­stahl’s epony­mous mem­oir, which he calls “mes­mer­iz­ing. Though you can’t believe half of it. That still leaves half to pon­der. Her descrip­tions of nor­mal friend­ly con­ver­sa­tions with Hitler are amaz­ing and ring of truth” — and that praise comes from a film­mak­er who made his own name with good dia­logue.

In a recent DGA Quar­ter­ly con­ver­sa­tion with Mar­tin Scors­ese, Taran­ti­no revealed that he’s also at work on a book of his own about that era: “I’ve got this char­ac­ter who had been in World War II and he saw a lot of blood­shed there. Now he’s back home, and it’s like the ’50s, and he does­n’t respond to movies any­more. He finds them juve­nile after every­thing that he’s been through. As far as he’s con­cerned, Hol­ly­wood movies are movies. And so then, all of a sud­den, he starts hear­ing about these for­eign movies by Kuro­sawa and Felli­ni,” think­ing “maybe they might have some­thing more than this pho­ny Hol­ly­wood stuff.” He soon finds him­self drawn inex­orably in: “Some of them he likes and some of them he does­n’t like and some of them he does­n’t under­stand, but he knows he’s see­ing some­thing.” This is hard­ly the kind of premise that leads straight to the kind of vio­lent cathar­sis in which Taran­ti­no spe­cial­izes, but then, he’s pulled off more unlike­ly artis­tic feats in his time.

via His­to­ryNet

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Steals from Oth­er Movies: A Video Essay

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Cre­ates Sus­pense in His Favorite Scene, the Ten­sion-Filled Open­ing Moments of Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds

The Films of Quentin Taran­ti­no: Watch Video Essays on Pulp Fic­tion, Reser­voir Dogs, Kill Bill & More

Leni Riefenstahl’s Tri­umph of the Will Wasn’t a Cin­e­mat­ic Mas­ter­piece; It Was a Stag­ger­ing­ly Effec­tive Piece of Pro­pa­gan­da

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Klaus Nomi Debut His New Wave Vaudeville Show: The Birth of the Opera-Singing Space Alien (1978)

in Art, Music | November 19th, 2019

Giv­en the his­to­ry of New York’s East Vil­lage as the first for­eign lan­guage neigh­bor­hood in the coun­try after waves of Euro­pean immi­gra­tion, per­haps it’s only nat­ur­al that Klaus Nomi, opera-singing Ger­man per­for­mance artist who made a name for him­self in the punk clubs of the late 70s, would find a home there.

By his time, the ten­e­ments had giv­en way to oth­er demo­graph­ic waves: includ­ing Beat­niks, writ­ers, actors, Warho­lian Fac­to­ry super­stars, and punk and New Wave scen­esters, whom Dan­ger­ous Mind’s Richard Met­zger calls a “sec­ond gen­er­a­tion” after Warhol, “drawn in by that Warhol myth but doing their own things.”

Even amidst the thriv­ing DIY exper­i­men­tal­ism of Post-Warho­lian art, fash­ion, and music, of a scene includ­ing Talk­ing Heads, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kei­th Har­ing, Nomi stood out. It was the way he seemed to inhab­it two time peri­ods at once. He arrived both as a cabaret per­former from Weimar Germany—a trag­ic clown with the voice of an angel—and as a thor­ough­ly con­vinc­ing inter­galac­tic trav­el­er, tele­port­ing in briefly from the future.

No one was pre­pared for this when he made his New York debut at Irv­ing Plaza’s New Wave Vaude­ville show in 1978, evok­ing an even ear­li­er era by singing “Mon cœur s’ou­vre à ta voix,” from Camille Saint-Saëns’ 1877 opera Sam­son et Dalila. After his stun­ning per­for­mance, he would dis­ap­pear from the stage in a con­fu­sion of strobe lights and smoke. East Vil­lage artist Joey Arias remem­bers, “It was like he was from a dif­fer­ent plan­et and his par­ents were call­ing him home.”

Oth­er acts at New Wave Vaude­ville, a four-night East Vil­lage vari­ety show, were “doing a punk ver­sion of Mick­ey Rooney, ‘We’re going to do a goofy show,’” says Kris­t­ian Hoff­man, the musi­cian who became Nomi’s musi­cal direc­tor. In came Nomi with “a whole dif­fer­ent lev­el of accom­plish­ment.” MC David McDer­mott was oblig­ed to announce that he was not singing to a record­ing. You can see Nomi debut at New Wave Vaude­ville above, in a clip from the 2004 film The Nomi Song.

The sig­nif­i­cance of these ear­ly per­for­mances goes far beyond the imme­di­ate shock of their first audi­ences. At these shows, Nomi met Hoff­man, who would form his band and write the songs for which he became best known. Pro­duc­er and direc­tor of the New Wave Vaude­ville show Susan Han­naford and Ann Mag­nu­son were also the own­er and bar­tender at Club 57, where Nomi would help them orga­nize exhibits by artists like Ken­ny Scharf.

See­ing Nomi’s debut can still feel a bit like watch­ing a vis­i­tor arrive from both the past and the future at once. And it is lucky we have this ear­ly footage of an artist who would to on to per­form with David Bowie and become a gay icon and pio­neer of the­atri­cal New Wave. But we should also see his arrival on the scene as an essen­tial doc­u­ment of the his­to­ry of the East Vil­lage, and its trans­for­ma­tion into “a play­ground,” as Messy Nessy writes, “for artis­tic mis­an­thropes, anar­chists, exhi­bi­tion­ists, queers, poets, punks and every­thing in between,” includ­ing opera-singing aliens from West Berlin.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Enchant­i­ng Opera Per­for­mances of Klaus Nomi

Klaus Nomi Per­forms with Kraftwerk on Ger­man Tele­vi­sion (1982)

David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hyp­not­ic Per­for­mance on SNL (1979)

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

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