Twenty some years before a young engineer named Ray Tomlinson invented email, writer Kurt Vonnegut invented bee-mail in “The Drone King,” a story that didn’t see the light of day until his friend and fellow author Dan Wakefield unearthed it while going through old papers for a new Vonnegut collection.
The collection’s co-editor, Vonnegut scholar Jerome Klinkowitz, estimates that it was written in the early 50s, likely before the publication of his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952.
Several of his favorite themes crop up, too: the enthusiasm of the misguided entrepreneur, the battle of the sexes, and technology taken to absurd extremes (i.e. bees delivering scraps of messages in soda straws tied to their thoraxes).
If we’re not mistaken Indianapolis, Vonnegut’s boyhood home, now host to his Memorial Library, puts in an unbilled appearance, as well. The story’s Millennium Club bears an uncanny resemblance to that city’s Athletic Club, now defunct.
The self-pitying male haplessness Vonnegut spoofs so ably feels just as skewer-able in the post-Weinstein era, though the doddering black waiter’s dialect is rather queasy-making, especially in the mouth of the white narrator reading the story, above.
You can buy “The Drone King” as part of Kurt Vonnegut Complete Stories collection or read it free onlinehere. The Atlantic was also good enough to create an audio version. It’s excerpted up top. And it appears in its entirety right above.
Art Nouveau, Art Deco… these are terms we associate not only with a particular period in history—the turn of the 20th century and the ensuing jazz-age of the 20s—but also with particular locales: Paris, New York, L.A., London, Vienna, or the Jugendstil of Weimar Munich. We probably do not think of Rio de Janeiro. This may be due to biases about the privileged location of culture, such that most people in Europe and North America, even those with an arts education, know very little about art from “the colonies.”
But it is also the case that Brazil had its own modern art movement, one that strove for a distinctly Brazilian sensibility even as it remained in dialogue with Europe and the U.S. The movement announced itself in 1922, the centennial of the South American nation’s independence from Portugal.
In celebration, artists from São Paulo held the Semana de Arte Moderna, seven days in which, the BBC writes, they “constructed, deconstructed, performed, sculpted, gave lectures, read poetry and created some of the most avant-garde works ever seen in Brazil.”
1922 also happened to be the year that a Rio de Janeiro-born artist, illustrator, and graphic designer who went by the name J. Carlos (José Carlos de Brito e Cunha) took over the direction of the magazine Para Todos. Founded in 1918, the magazine began as a film rag, and its covers faithfully featured photo spreads of movie stars. But in 1926, Carlos, who had already proven himself a “major talent in Brazilian Art Deco graphic design,” writes Messy Nessy, began drawing his own cover illustrations, and he continued to do so for the next four years, as well as drawing thousands of cartoons and writing vaudeville plays and samba lyrics.
His work clearly draws from Euro-American sources, including several unfortunate racial caricatures. But it also introduces some uniquely Brazilian elements, or uniquely Carlos-ian elements, that seem almost proto-psychedelic (we might imagine a jazz-age Os Mutantes accompanying these trippy designs). J. Carlos was a prolific artist who “collaborated in design and illustration in all the major publications of Brazil from the 1920s until the 1950s.” In all, it’s estimated that he left behind over 100,000 illustrations. So devoted was Carlos to the art and culture of his native city that he apparently turned down an invitation by Walt Disney to work in Hollywood.
Print magazine describes Carlos’ work as “a cross between Aubrey Beardsley and John Held Jr.,” and while there is no shortage of the willowy, doll-like flappers, elongated, elfin figures, and intricate, spidery patterns we would expect from this derivation, Carlos is also doing something very different from either of those artists—or really from anyone working in the Northern Hemisphere. He has since become a heroic figure for Brazilian artists and scholars, inspiring an extensive web project, a visual thesis on Issuu, and two recent documentary films (all in Portuguese), which you can find here.
In 2009, Carlos received a posthumous honor that probably would have thrilled him in life, a tribute song by the Académicos da Rocinha samba club. Listen to it here and find several more of Carlos’ Para Todos covers at Messy Nessy, Print, and the Brazilian blog Os caminhos do Journalismo.
It’s an ungainly word for English speakers, which is maybe why we do not hear it often: Gleichschaltung. Yet the concept remains central for a clear view of what happened to Germany in the 1930s. In 1933, the nation completely transformed, seemingly overnight, through “a concerted policy of ‘coordination’ (Gleischaltung),” the U.S. Holocaust Museum writes. “Culture, the economy, education, and law all came under Nazi control.” Those artists and organizations that were not purged had their essential character changed to reflect an entirely different set of artistic and political values. One publication, especially, serves as an example of the Nazification of culture.
The arts journal Jugend (Youth), writes Messy ’N Chic, “had been turned largely into propaganda” between 1933 and 1940, its final year. But prior to the regime’s takeover, Jugend showcased the most avant-garde, “degenerate” artists of the era, and might have been “the ‘brainiest’ periodical of the day,” as one critic wrote in a 1904 issue of The Yale Literary Magazine. “There is no magazine published in England or in this country which is at all like it.”
As in England, France, Austria, and the U.S., the Art Nouveau movement in Germany emerged from a whirlwind of post-Impressionist painting, Orientalist motifs, folk art, modernist art and advertising, book illustration, and graphic and industrial design. Appropriately, given its perch on the threshold of a new millennium, Art Nouveau looked both backward—to the medieval, gothic, and Romantic—and forward toward a more modernist, urbane, and urbanized sensibility.
So influential was Jugend that Art Nouveau in Germany became known as Jugendstil. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines writes, “Among Jugend’s most important qualities—indeed, an essential aspect of Art Nouveau and its German equivalent Jugendstil—was its brilliant escapism.” Founded in 1896 by writer George Hirth, the magazine was “from the start a venue to promote the new cultural Renaissance without recourse to the established ‘vintage’ art.” (See its very first cover right above.)
Jugenstil was primarily based in Munich, where most of its artists, designers, and writers lived and worked, until the turn of the century, when, notes the Art Encyclopedia, “the Munich group dispersed, heading for Berlin, Weimar and Darmstadt.” Art Nouveau in Germany developed in two phases, “a pre-1900 phase dominated by floral motifs, themselves rooted in English Art Nouveau and Japanese art,” and a “post-1900 phase, marked by a tendency towards abstract art.”
While we know the names of many Art Nouveau artists from elsewhere in Europe—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec in France, Aubrey Beardsley in England, Gustave Klimt in Austria, for example— Jugendstil in Germany produced few international stars. Many of the artists published in its pages were relatively unknown at first. But its shockingly brilliant covers and radical editorial tone put it at the forefront of German arts for decades. “Jugend’s political and social platform,” wrote the The Yale Literary Magazine critic, “is one of opposition—opposition to everything.”
In 1933, however, the magazine was forced to comply with the kind of dour conservatism it had arisen explicitly to protest. Its wild covers and proudly original contents turned sombre and neoclassical, as in the bust of Nietzsche on the cover above from 1934. Many of its artists disappeared or went into exile. But as we observe this transformation happening abruptly in the University of Heidelberg archive, we still see a magazine whose editorial staff held fast to notions of artistic quality, as they were forced to turn away from everything that had made Jugend exciting, cutting-edge, and worthy of its title.
When humorist and New Yorker contributor David Sedaris quit smoking about a decade ago, he chose Tokyo in which to do it: “Its foreignness would take me out of myself, I hoped, and give me something to concentrate on besides my own suffering.” That first extended trip not only allowed him to kick the habit and gave him plenty of culture clashes to write about, but began his relationship with Tokyo that continues to this day. “Windows flanked the moving sidewalks, and on their ledges sat potted flowers,” he writes in appreciation in his first diaries there. “No one had pulled the petals off. No one had thrown trash into the pots or dashed them to the floor. How different life looks when people behave themselves.”
Most strikingly of all, there stood all “those vending machines, right out in the open, lined up on the sidewalk like people waiting for a bus.” The then-Paris-based Sedaris commiserates with a French Japanese language school classmate: “ ‘Can you believe it?’ he asked. ‘In the subway station, on the street, they just stand there, completely unmolested.’ ”
Our Indonesian classmate came up, and after listening to us go on, he asked what the big deal was.
“In New York or Paris, these machines would be trashed,” I told him.
The Indonesian raised his eyebrows.
“He means destroyed,” Christophe said. “Persons would break the glass and cover everything with graffiti.”
The Indonesian student asked why, and we were hard put to explain.
“It’s something to do?” I offered.
“But you can read a newspaper,” the Indonesian said.
“Yes,” I explained, “but that wouldn’t satisfy your basic need to tear something apart.”
Those vending machines, a basic expectation to Tokyoites but a barely imaginable luxury to many a foreigner, appear on one cover of theTokyoiter, a collaborative art project producing a series of covers for an imaginary New Yorker-style magazine based in the Japanese capital. This tribute to a distinctively Japanese form of automated sidewalk commerce comes from Hennie Haworth, an illustrator based in England (where Sedaris also now lives, incidentally) who spent six months in Japan doing nothing but drawing its vending machines.
“I have a family member living in Japan which gives me excuse to visit every now and again,” writes illustrator Yuliya. “One of the main inspirations I find in folklore and all the magical beings of Japan. I’m originally from Ukraine and grew up surrounded by folk tales and superstitions, and even though I never truly believed in any of it, it always fascinated me. I miss that in modern Western world. So the creatures on my cover are made up but they are inspired by Japanese Yokai and just like the rest of Tokyo, they’re taking a spontaneous nap on the train.” Other Tokyoiter covers, contributed by artists from all around the world, take as their subjects Tokyo’s architecture, its food, its street life, its bath houses, and much more besides.
Taken as a collection, the project presents a combination of images of Tokyo familiar even to those who’ve never set foot in the city and references whose nuances only a Tokyoite — or at least someone with a Sedaris-level familiarity with the place — can immediately grasp. What could be more Tokyo, for instance, than the Rockabilly dancers of YoyogiPark, portrayed here by Australian artist Grace Lee, who for more than 40 years have spent their Sunday afternoons taking 1950s Americana to its absolute limit for the enjoyment of all who pass by? And if you’ve gone to see them yourself, you’ll know that, if you get thirsty while watching, you can simply buy a drink from one of the many vending machines nearby, all lined up right out in the open.
After TheVillage Voiceannounced this week that it was folding its print operation, a couple people compared the venerable NYC rag’s demise to the end of Gawker, the snarky online tabloid taken down by Hulk Hogan and his shadowy financier Peter Thiel. For too many reasons to list, this comparison seems to my mind hardly apt. There’s a gesture toward the Voice’s profane unruliness, but the alternative weekly, founded in 1955, transcended the blog age’s sophomoric nihilism. The hermetic container of its newsprint sealed out frothing comment sections; no links ferried readers through rivers of personalized algorithms.
The Voice published hard journalism that many, including Voice writers themselves, have ruefully revisited of late. Its music and culture writers like Nat Hentoff, Lester Bangs, Sasha Frere-Jones, Robert Christgau and so many others are some of the smartest in the business. Its columnists, editors, and reviewers—Andrew Sarris, J. Hoberman, Robert Sietsema, Tom Robbins, Greg Tate, Michael Musto, Thulani Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates—equally so.
In its over sixty-year run, Voice writers sat in the front rows for the birth for hard bop, free jazz, punk, no wave, and hip-hop, and all manner of downtown experimentalism in-between and after.
Amongst the many remembrances from current and former Voice staff in a recent Esquire oral history, one from editor and writer Camille Dodero stands out: “The alt-weekly’s purpose was, in theory, speaking truth to power and the ability to be irreverent, and print the word ‘fuck’ while doing so.’” Mission accomplished many times over, as you can see yourself in Google’s Village Voice archive, featuring 1,000 scanned issues going all the back to 1955, when Norman Mailer founded the paper with Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and John Wilcock. There are “blind spots” in Google’s archive of the Voice, noted John Cook at the erstwhile Gawker. In 2009, his “searches didn’t turn up any coverage of Norman Mailer’s 1969 campaign or the Stonewall riots… and there’s not much on Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral bid.” Many years later, months and years in the Google archive remain blank, “no editions available.”
The Voice has had its own blind spots. Writer Walter Troy Spencer referred to Stonewall, for example, as “The Great Faggot Rebellion” and used a phrase that has perhaps become the most wearisome in American English: “there was mostly ugliness on both sides.” This anti-gay prejudice was a regular feature of the paper’s first few years, but by 1982, just as the AIDS crisis began to filter into public consciousness, the Voice was the second organization in the US to offer extended benefits to domestic partners. It became a prominent voice for New York’s LGBTQ culture and politics, through all the buyouts, cutbacks, and unbeatable competition that brought it to its current pass.
The paper also became a voice for the most interesting things happening in the city at any given time, such as the goings on at a Bowery dive called CBGB in 1975. Character studies have long been a Voice staple. Lester Bangs’ write-up of Iggy Pop two years later cut to the heart of the matter: “It’s as if someone writhing in torment has made that writhing into a kind of poetry.” Back in ’75, Andrew Sarris wrote a rather jaw-dropping profile of Hervé Villechaize (in which he begins a sentence, “The problem of midgets….”). …. the more I look through Voice back issues, the more I think it might have been a Gawker of its time, but as onetime columnist Harry Siegel tells Esquire, “what made it unique depends a lot on the age of who you’re asking. It was a very different paper in different decades. It was valuable enough for a long time that people paid money to read it.”
Indeed its first issue cost 5 cents, though by the nondescript cover, above, you wouldn’t guess it would amuse or titillate in the ways the Village Voice became well-known for—in its columns, photos, cartoons, and libertine advertising and classifieds. But most people these days remember it as “free every Wednesday,” to proffer dance, film, theater, music, restaurants, to line subway cars and birdcages, and to open up the city to its readers. The Voice is dead, long live the Voice.
In searching for a treasure trove of publications springing from the avant-garde, deliberately irrational, early 20th-century European “anti-art” art movement known as Dada, where would you first look? Many corners of the world’s historic cultural capitals may come right to mind, but might we suggest the University of Iowa? Even if you don’t feel like traveling to the middle of the United States to plunge into an archive of highly purposeful nonsense, you can view their impressive collection of Dada periodicals (36 in total), books, leaflets, and ephemera online.
“Founded in 1979 as part of the Dada Archive and Research Center, the International Dada Archive is a scholarly resource for the study of the historic Dada movement,” says its front page. The collection contains “works by and about the Dadaists including books, articles, microfilmed manuscript collections, videorecordings, sound recordings, and online resources,” and in its digital form it “provides links to scanned images of original Dada-era publications in the International Dada Archive,” including the influential Dada and 291, as well as “many of the major periodicals of the Dada movement from Zurich, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere, as well as books, exhibition catalogs, and broadsides by participants in the Dada movement.” (Note: if you click on magazines in the collection, you can download the various pages.)
The history of the archive, written by Timothy Shipe, also addresses an important question: “Why Iowa? One answer lies in a clear affinity between the Dada movement and this University. The internationalist, multilingual, multimedia nature of Dada makes Iowa, with its International Writers’ Program, its Writers’ Workshop, its Center for Global Studies, its Translation Workshop and Center, its dynamic programs in music, dance, art, theater, film, literature, and languages, an especially appropriate place to house the Dada Archive. A brief glance at the history of Dada will make this affinity clear.”
You can learn more about that history from the Dada material we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture: the video series The ABCs of Dada which explains the movement (or at least explains it as well as anyone can hope to); the material we gathered in celebration of its hundredth anniversary last year; and three essential Dadaist films by Hans Richter, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. That will put into clearer context the 36 journals you can peruse in the University of Iowa’s Digital Dada Archive, some of which put out many issues, some of which stopped after the first, and all of which offer a glimpse of an artistic spirit, scattered across several different countries, which flared up briefly but brightly with anarchic energy, destructive creativity, a forward-looking aesthetic sense, and no small amount of humor.
There was a time, not so long ago, when not only could a blockbuster Hollywood comedy make a reference to a science magazine, but everyone in the audience would get that reference. It happened in Ghostbusters, right after the titular boys in gray hit it big with their first high-profile busting of a ghost. In true 1980s style, a success montage followed, in the middle of which appeared the cover of Omni magazine’s October 1984 issue which, according to the Ghostbusters Wiki, “featured a Proton Pack and Particle Thrower. The tagline read, ‘Quantum Leaps: Ghostbusters’ Tools of the Trade.’ ”
The movie made up that cover, but it didn’t make up the publication. In reality, the cover of Omni’s October 1984 issue, a special anniversary edition which appears at the top of the magazine’s Wikipedia page today, promised predictions of “Love, Work & Play in the 21st Century” from the likes of beloved sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury, social psychologist Stanley Milgram, physicist Gerard O’Neill, trend-watcher John Naisbitt — and, of course, Ronald Reagan. Now you can find that issue of Omni, as well as every other from its 1978-to-1995 run, digitized in high-resolution and made available on Amazon.
“Omni was a magazine about the future,” writes Motherboard’s Claire Evans, telling the story of “the best science magazine that ever was.” In its heyday, it blew minds by regularly featuring extensive Q&As with some of the top scientists of the 20th century–E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk–tales of the paranormal, and some of the most important science fiction to ever see magazine publication” by William Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Harlan Ellison, George R. R. Martin — and even the likes of Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and William S. Burroughs. “By coupling science fiction and cutting-edge science news, the magazine created an atmosphere of possibility, where even the most outrageous ideas seemed to have basis in fact.”
Originally founded by Kathy Keeton (formerly, according to Evans, “a South African ballerina who went from being one of the highest-paid strippers in Europe”) and Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Omni not only had an impact in unexpected areas (the eccentric musical performer Klaus Nomi, himself a cultural innovator, took his name in part from the magazine’s) but took steps into the digital realm long before other print publications dared. It first established its online presence on Compuserve in 1986; seven years later, it opened up its archives, along with forums and new content, on America Online, a first for any major magazine. Now Amazon users can purchase Omni’s digital back issues for $2.99 each, or read them for free if they have Kindle Unlimited accounts. (You can sign up for a 30-day free trial for Kindle Unlimited and start binge-reading Omni here.)
Jerrick Media, owners of the Omni brand, have also begun to make available on Vimeo on Demand episodes of Omni: The New Frontier, the 1980s syndicated television series hosted by Peter Ustinov. And without paying a dime, you can still browse the fascinating Omni material archived at Omni Magazine Online, an easy way to get a hit of the past’s idea of the future — and one presenting, in the words of 1990s editor-in-chief Keith Farrell, “a fascination with science and speculation, literature and art, philosophy and quirkiness, serious speculation and gonzo speculation, the health of the planet and its cultures, our relationship to the universe and its (possible) cultures, and a sense that whatever else, tomorrow would be different from today.”
As the co-founders of Impactstory describe it, Unpaywall is “an extension for Chrome and Firefox that links you to free full-text as you browse research articles. Hit a paywall? No problem: click the green tab and read it free!”
Their FAQ gets into the mechanics a little more, but here’s the gist of how it works: “When you view a paywalled research article, Unpaywall automatically looks for a copy in our index of over 10 million free, legal fulltext PDFs. If we find one, click the green tab to read the article.”
While many science publishers put a paywall in front of scientific articles, it’s often the case that these articles have been published elsewhere in an open format. “More and more funders and universities are requiring authors to upload copies of their papers to [open] repositories. This has created a deep resource of legal open access papers…” And that’s what Unpaywall draws on.
This seems like quite a boon for researchers, journalists, students and policymakers. You can download the Unpaywall extension for Chrome and Firefox, or learn more about the new service at the Unpaywall website.
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