Animator/musician David Heatley, comedian Daniel Lobell, and academic/3anuts author Daniel Leonard join your Pretty Much Pop host Mark Linsenmayer to discuss Charlie Brown and his author Charles Schulz from Peanuts’ 1950 inception through the classic TV specials through to the various post-mortem products still emerging.
What’s the enduring appeal, and is it strictly for kids? We talk about the challenges of the strip format, the characters as archetypes, Schulz as depressed existentialist, religion in Peanuts, and whether the strip is actually supposed to be funny.
Some articles we used for the discussion include:
We marvel today at what we consider the wonders of ancient Egypt, but at some point, they all had to have been built by people more or less like ourselves. (This presumes, of course, that you’ve ruled out all the myriad theories involving supernatural beings or aliens from outer space.) Safe to say that, whenever in human history work has been done, work has been skipped, especially when that work is performed by large groups. It would’ve taken great numbers indeed to build the pyramids, but even less colossally scaled tombs couldn’t have been built alone. And when a tomb-builder took the day off, he needed an excuse suitable to be written in stone — on at any rate, on stone.
“Ancient Egyptian employers kept track of employee days off in registers written on tablets,” writes Madeleine Muzdakis at My Modern Met. One such artifact “held by the British Museum and dating to 1250 BCE is an incredible window into ancient work-life balance.” Called ostraca, these tablets were made of “flakes of limestone that were used as ‘notepads’ for private letters, laundry lists, records of purchases, and copies of literary works,” according to Egyptologist Jennifer Babcock.
Discovered along with thousands of others in the tomb builder’s village of Deir el-Medina, this particular ostracon, on view at the British Museum’s web site, offers a rich glimpse into the lives of that trade’s practitioners. Over the 280-day period covered by this 3,200-year-old ostracon, common excuses for absence include “brewing beer” and “his wife was bleeding.”
Beer, Muzdakis explains, “was a daily fortifying drink in Egypt and was even associated with gods such as Hathor. As such, brewing beer was a very important activity.” And alarming though that “bleeding” may sound, the reference is to menstruation: “Clearly men were needed on the home front to pick up some slack during this time. While one’s wife menstruating is not an excuse one hears nowadays, certainly the ancients seem to have had a similar work-life juggling act to perform.” Most of us today presumably have it easier than did the average ancient Egyptian laborer, or even artisan. Depending on where you live, maybe you, too, could call in sick to work with the excuse of having been bitten by a scorpion. But how well would it fly if you were to plead the need to feast, to embalm your brother, or to make an offering to a god?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Over 40 months, 40 animators contributed to making a short animation. The process went something like this: An animator created a three second segment, then passed it to another animator in a different country. Then, that next animator made a new contribution, inching things forward.
Above you can watch the final product. It’s the brainchild of Nathan Boey. Enjoy.
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Before the word processor, before White-Out, before Post It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts. In 2011, Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired the manuscript of Austen’s abandoned novel, The Watsons. In announcing the acquisition, the Bodleian wrote:
The Watsons is Jane Austen’s first extant draft of a novel in process of development and one of the earliest examples of an English novel to survive in its formative state. Only seven manuscripts of fiction by Austen are known to survive. The Watsons manuscript is extensively revised and corrected throughout, with crossings out and interlinear additions.
Janeausten.ac.uk (the web site where Austen’s manuscripts have been digitized) takes a deeper dive into the curious quality of The Watsons manuscript, noting:
The manuscript is written and corrected throughout in brown iron-gall ink. The pages are filled in a neat, even hand with signs of concurrent writing, erasure, and revision, interrupted by occasional passages of heavy interlinear correction.… The manuscript is without chapter divisions, though not without informal division by wider spacing and ruled lines. The full pages suggest that Jane Austen did not anticipate a protracted process of redrafting. With no calculated blank spaces and no obvious way of incorporating large revision or expansion she had to find other strategies – the three patches, small pieces of paper, each of which was filled closely and neatly with the new material, attached with straight pins to the precise spot where erased material was to be covered or where an insertion was required to expand the text.
According to Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, this prickly method of editing wasn’t exactly new. Archivists at the library can trace pins being used as editing tools back to 1617.
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Donald Trump, as his supporters and detractors alike can agree, is immune to humor. All the parody, satire, ridicule, and insult with which he was ceaselessly bombarded during his four years as the President of the United States of America had, to a first approximation, no effect whatsoever. If anything, it just made him more powerful. “There has been tremendous scorn for and fun made of Trump, and indeed Trump supporters,” says the late humorist P.J. O’Rourke in the clip above from a 2106 Intelligence Squared event. But “when you are angry at the establishment, and you see the establishment not just disagreeing with your candidate but mocking your candidate, there is an element that says, ‘They’re mocking me.’ ”
As a result, “every time you went out to make fun of Trump, you increased his support, because people were feeling scorned.” The result of the 2016 election, which happened the next month, would seem to have borne this out. “When people feel they are outsiders,” O’Rourke says, “you cannot convince them by mocking them.” This may, at first, sound somewhat rich coming from a writer who spent half a century turning everything that so much as approached the world of politics into joke material. But O’Rourke didn’t engage in mockery, per se; rather, he straightforwardly observed that which came before him. “Humor isn’t about being funny,” he once said in another interview. “It’s about putting emotional distance between yourself and the patterns of human behavior.”
I’ve long kept that observation in mind, as I have so much else O’Rourke wrote and said. If any one thing made me a writer, it was all the fifteen-minute breaks from my high-school job at the Gap I spent reading his books at the Borders on the other side of the mall. I took a rebellious pleasure, at that age and at that time, in getting laughs from the work of a writer who was clearly not a man of the left. Or rather, a writer who was formerly a man of the left: a self-confessed 1960s hippie, he like many of the Baby Boom generation underwent a political conversion after noticing the deductions from his paycheck. “I’d been struggling for years to achieve socialism in America,” goes one of his oft-quoted lines, “only to discover that we had it already.”
Yet O’Rourke was never a doctrinaire right-winger. Forged at the National Lampoon (for which he wrote the well known piece “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”) he emerged as a 1980s libertarian-libertine. In recent decades, during which he often appeared as a convivial political outsider on shows like National Public Radio’s Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me, he shifted to the territory referenced in the title of his last book, 2020’s A Cry from the Far Middle. In the video above he reads its introduction, a dispatch from a time of not just “moron populism and idiot partisanship” but also a “grievous health crisis, lockdown isolation, economic collapse, and material deprivation.” Once a wisecracking correspondent from the world’s trouble spots, he knew to bet that even in America, “human nature will triumph over adversity and challenge. And I don’t mean that in a good way.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
What about the guy who makes and holds the cue cards?
Wally Feresten is just one of the backstage heroes to be celebrated in Creating Saturday Night Live, a fascinating look at how the long-running television sketch show comes together every week.
Like many of those interviewed Feresten is more or less of a lifer, having come aboard in 1990 at the age of 25.
He estimates that he and his team of 8 run through some 1000 14” x 22” cards cards per show. Teleprompters would save trees, but the possibility of technical issues during the live broadcast presents too big of a risk.
This means that any last minute changes, including those made mid-broadcast, must be handled in a very hands on way, with corrections written in all caps over carefully applied white painter’s tape or, worst case scenario, on brand new cards.
(After a show wraps, its cards enjoy a second act as dropcloths for the next week’s painted sets.)
Nearly every sketch requires three sets of cue cards, so that the cast, who are rarely off book due to the frequent changes, can steal glances to the left, right and center.
As the department head, Feresten is partnered with each week’s guest host, whose lines are the only ones to be written in black. Betty White, who hosted in 2010 at the age of 88, thanked him in her 2011 autobiography.
Surely that’s worth his work-related arthritic shoulder, and the recurrent nightmares in which he arrives at Studio 8H just five minutes before showtime to find that all 1000 cue cards are blank.
Costumes have always been one of Saturday Night Live’s flashiest pleasures, running the gamut from Coneheads and a rapping Cup o’Soup to an immaculate recreation of the white pantsuit in which Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her victory speech a scant 3 hours before the show aired.
“A costume has a job,” wardrobe supervisor Dale Richards explains:
It has to tell a story before (the actors) open their mouth…as soon as it comes on camera, it should give you so much backstory.
And it has to cleave to some sort of reality and truthfulness, even in a sketch as outlandish as 2017’s Henrietta & the Fugitive, starring host Ryan Gosling as a detective in a film noir style romance. The gag is that the dame is a chicken (cast member Aidy Bryant.)
Richards cites actress Bette Davis as the inspiration for the chicken’s look:
Because you’re not going to believe it if the detective couldn’t actually fall in love with her. She has to be very feminine, so we gave her Bette Davis bangs and long eyelashes and a beautiful bonnet, so the underpinnings were very much like an actress in a movie, although she did have a chicken costume on.
The number of quick costume changes each performer must make during the live broadcast helps determine the sketches’ running order.
Some of the breakneck transformations are handled by Richards’ sister, Donna, who once beat the clock by piggybacking host Jennifer Lopez across the studio floor to the changing area where a well-coordinated crew swished her out of her opening monologue’s skintight dress and skyscraper heels and into her first costume.
That’s one example of the sort of traffic the 4‑person crane camera crew must battle as they hurtle across the studio to each new set. Camera operator John Pinto commands from atop the crane’s counterbalanced arm.
Those swooping crane shots of the musical guests, opening monologue and goodnights (see below) are a Saturday Night Live tradition, a part of its iconic look since the beginning.
Get to know other backstage workers and how they contribute to this weekly high wire act in a 33 episode Creating Saturday Night playlist, all on display below:
Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United Statesin the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the Socialist Worker, pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.”
His suggested books cover not just the 20th century but eras like the Civil War, and even, extensively, the time of Christopher Columbus. For those who take their analyses of the past in comically illustrated form, Zinn also highlights Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of the United States as “funny and remarkably rich in its content.”
Certain Zinn picks stand out as being of special interest to Open Culture readers. These include Noam Chomsky’s Year 501, in which “the nation’s most distinguished intellectual rebel gives us huge amounts of information about recent American foreign policy”; Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, with its “iconoclastic view of American political leaders, including Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson and the two Roosevelts, suggesting more consensus than difference at the top of the political hierarchy”; and W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction, “a direct counter to the traditional racist accounts of Reconstruction, presenting the narrative from the Black point of view.” Zinn also praises The Sixties, “a vivid history, well-written, thoughtful, by one of the activists of that era”: Todd Gitlin, who died earlier this month.
Despite its understandable inclination toward nonfiction, Zinn’s list also has room for several classic American novels like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. You may remember some of these books from your own high-school and university days, but whatever you got out of them back then, you’ll experience them more richly by revisiting them now, deeper into your own intellectual journey. As Zinn’s own life and work demonstrated, you can always find more angles from which to view the political, social, and cultural history of your county — the farther removed from those you were shown in school, the better.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
If so, you should definitely permit her to download the Google Arts & Culture app on your phone to take a selfie using the Pet Portraits feature.
Surely your pet will be just as excited to let a machine-learning algorithm trawl tens of thousands of artworks from Google Arts & Culture’s partnering museums’ collections, looking for doppelgängers.
Or maybe it’ll just view it as one more example of human folly, if a far lesser evil than our predilection for pet costumes.
Should your pet wish to know more about the artworks it resembles, you can tap the results to explore them in depth.
Dogs, fish, birds, reptiles, horses, and rabbits can play along too, though anyone hailing from the rodent family will find themselves shut out.
Mashable reports that “uploading a stock image of a mouse returned drawings of wolves.”
Last night, we sadly learned of the passing of Ivan Reitman, director of many beloved comedies–Meatballs (1979), Stripes (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), and beyond.
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1946–his mother an Auschwitz survivor and his father an underground resistance fighter–Reitman moved to Canada as a young child, where he eventually attended McMaster University. And there he “produced and directed Orientation [in 1968], the most successful student film ever made in Canada,” writes Macleans. “Produced at a cost of $1,800 while Reitman was president of the McMaster University Film Board, Orientation — the story of a freshman during his first week at university — was acquired by Twentieth CenturyFox of Canada as a “featurette” to accompany John And Mary in first-run engagements across the country.” “It earned $15,000 in rentals and continues to be in demand…” You can watch it above, or on McMaster’s website.
This year will see the long-delayed publication of a version of Ulysses that Joyce didn’t want you to read — not James Joyce, mind you, but the author’s grandson Stephen Joyce. Up until his death in 2020, Stephen Joyce opposed the publication of his grandfather’s best-known book in an illustrated edition. But he only retained the power actually to prevent it until Ulysses’ 2012 entry into the public domain, which made the work freely usable to everyone who wanted to. In this case, “everyone” includes such notables as neo-figurative artist Eduardo Arroyo, described by the New York Times’ Raphael Minder as “as one of the greatest Spanish painters of his generation.”
At the time of Ulysses’ copyright expiration, Arroyo had long since finished his own set of more than 300 illustrations for Joyce’s celebrated and famously intimidating novel. Arroyo noted in a 1991 essay, writes Minder, that “imagining the illustrations kept him alive when he was hospitalized in the late 1980s for peritonitis, an inflammation of the abdominal lining.”
The initial hope was for an Arroyo-illustrated edition to mark the 50th anniversary of Joyce’s death in 1991, but without the permission of the author’s estate, the project had to be put on hold for a couple of decades. When that time came, it was taken up again by two publishers, Barcelona’s Galaxia Gutenberg and New York’s Other Press.
“Some of Arroyo’s black-and-white illustrations are printed in the margins of the book’s pages, while others are double-page paintings whose vivid colors are reminiscent of the Pop Art that inspired him.” His drawings, watercolors and collages include “eclectic images of shoes and hats, bulls and bats, as well as some sexually explicit representations of scenes that drew the wrath of censors a century ago.” For Ulysses’ “710 pages of inner monologue and dialogue, stream of consciousness, blank verse, Greek classics, and the venues and byways of Dublin, 1904,” as the Los Angeles Times’ Jordan Riefe puts it, are as well known for their formidable complexity as it is for the power they once had to scandalize polite society.
Arroyo, who died in 2018, stayed faithful to Ulysses’ content. (“Of course there are graphic nudes,” Riefe adds, “especially in later chapters.”) He also succeeded in completing an arduous project that the most notable artists of Joyce’s day refused even to attempt. “Joyce himself had asked Picasso and Matisse to illustrate it,” writes Galaxia Gutenberg’s Joan Tarrida, “but neither took on the task. Matisse preferred to illustrateThe Odyssey,” Ulysses’ own structural inspiration, “which deeply offended Joyce.” What Joyce would make of Arroyo’s vital and multifarious illustrations, more of which you can sample at Literary Hub, is any scholar’s guess — but then, didn’t he say something about wanting to keep the scholars guessing for centuries?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
The Riot Grrrl movement feels like one of the last real revolutions in rock and punk, and not just because of its feminist, anti-capitalist politics. As Polyphonic outlines in his short music history video, Riot Grrrl was one of the last times anything major happened in rock music before the internet. And it’s especially thrilling because it all started with *zines*.
Women in the punk scene had a right to complain. Bands and their fans were very male, and sexual harassment was chronic at shows, leaving most women standing at the back of the crowd. Some zines even spelled it out: “Punks Are Not Girls,” says one.
Alienated from the scene but still fans at heart, Tobi Vail and Kathleen Hanna, already producing their own feminist zines, joined forces to release “Bikini Kill” a gathering of lyrics, essays, confessionals, appropriated quotes, plugs for Vail’s other zine “Jigsaw”, and a sense that something was happening. Something was changing in rock culture. Kim Deal of the Pixies and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth were heroes, Poly Styrene of X‑Ray Spex was a legend, and Yoko Ono “paved the way in more ways than one for us angry grrl rockers.” Another zine, “Girl Germs,” was created by Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman.
Bikini Kill the zine led to Bikini Kill the band in 1990, and their song “Rebel Girl” became an anthem of a new feminist rock movement focused mainly in the Pacific Northwest, around the same time as grunge.
Wolfe and Neuman, joined by Erin Smith, formed Bratmobile in 1991. K Records founder Calvin Johnson had asked them to play support for Bikini Kill, and out of necessity—Wolfe first admitted they were a “fake band”—they grabbed rehearsal space and became a “real” band on the spot. “Something in me clicked,” Wolfe said. “Like, okay, if most boy punk rock bands just listen to the Ramones and that’s how they write their songs, then we’ll do the opposite and I won’t listen to any Ramones and that way we’ll sound different.”
The burgeoning scene needed a manifesto, and it got one in “Bikini Kill” issue #2. The Riot Grrrl Manifesto staked out a space that was against “racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism, thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism” as well as “capitalism in all its forms.” It ends with: “BECAUSE I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will change the world for real.”
The manifesto (and the very healthy Pacific Northwest live scene) spawned a movement, even bringing with it bands that had been around previously, like L7. Riot Grrrl set out to elevate women’s voices and music, without capitulating to male standards, and return to the DIY and collective energy of the early punk scene. It also brought feminist theory out of the colleges and onto the stage, and with it queer theory and dialog about trauma, rape, and abuse—everything mainstream culture would rather not talk about. Like the original punk scene in the 1970s, it burned brightly and flamed out. But it inspired generations of bands, from Sleater-Kinney to White Lung, as well as non-rock music like the Electroclash movement.
Read a zine from the time, or listen to the lyrics of Riot Grrrl bands and you will hear the same discourse, and recognize the same tactics, as today. In some ways it feels even more radical now-—that humble, photocopied zines could affect a whole scene and not be atomized by social media.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
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