H.R. Giger’s Dark, Surrealist Album Covers: Debbie Harry, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Celtic Frost, Danzig & More

in Art, Music | July 22nd, 2020

The work of H.R. Giger is immensely powerful. Giger’s amazing cover for Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s album Brain Salad Surgery portrays a Gothic touch that could fit any heavy metal band at any time.

—Jimmy Page

Swiss artist Hans Ruedi Giger is a genre unto his own, single-handedly inventing the biomechanical horror of the 1980s with his designs for Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, the film that launched him into international prominence and turned Debbie Harry on to his work. Meeting him the following year, the Blondie singer asked Giger to design the cover and music videos for her solo album, KooKoo.

The album was panned, but the cover ended up being as prescient as the film that preceded it. It would “see its influence in films like Hellraiser, the rise of what was called the ‘modern primitive’ movement, and help cultivate the dark masochistic character Harry would play in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome,” writes Ted Mills in an earlier Open Culture post. “It was a feeling that would flourish in the decadent ‘80s.”

The record was also, in a way, “a throwback to Giger’s other famous record cover, the one for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery” from 1973 (above). Ten years before Alien, Giger designed his first album cover, for a “proto-metal” band called The Shivers.

Their 1969 Walpurgis, features what look very much like Alien’s facehuggers. Giger had been having this nightmare for a long time. Years after these beginnings, due in large part to Alien and its sequels and the Debbie Harry cover, Giger became highly sought after by metal bands, from Celtic Frost to Danzig to Carcass.

His work appears, however, on far more album covers than he would like. There have been “many small bands over the years,” he writes on his site, “presumably fans of mine, who had appropriated my artwork for their album and CD covers,” without getting permission. Giger himself has only created a few pieces specifically as album cover art, the last in 1989 for Steve Stevens’ Atomic Playboys. “Of the approximately 20 records on which my artwork has been seen over the last 30 years,” he writes, only a small number have been commissions. These include The Shivers, ELP, Harry, and Stevens.

All the other covers—those officially sanctioned, in any case—come from work Giger “made for myself, many years before, which the bands, later, licensed for their own use after seeing them in my books.” Though Giger himself is more of a jazz fan, his appeal to heavy metal is obvious. “Giger’s style of adding a surrealist twist to mechanical and biological scenes,” writes Allmusic, “often with twisted sexual undertones—was immediately identifiable,” and immediately identified a band as something seductively taboo and possibly deadly.

At least one use of his work got a band prosecuted. “Bay Area punks the Dead Kennedys included a poster of Giger’s Landscape #XX, also known as Penis Landscape (the image depicted rows of erect phalluses in coitus), in the packaging of their 1985 album Frankenchrist,” writes Rolling Stone, “and were subsequently put on trial for obscenity.”

Those who would misuse his work and violate his copyright may also find themselves in court. “It will,” he warns, “cost a lot more than if they had first contacted me, through my agent, to ask for permission.”

The Giger Bar: Discover the 1980s Tokyo Bar Designed by H. R. Giger, the Same Artist Who Created the Nightmarish Monster in Ridley Scott’s Alien

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Journey into the Occult

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

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The Moment When Bob Dylan Went Electric: Watch Him Play “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965

in History, Music | July 22nd, 2020

The phrase “when Dylan went electric” once carried as much weight in pop culture history as “the fall of the Berlin Wall” carries in, well, history. Both events have receded into what feels like the distant past, but in the early 1960s, they likely seemed equally unlikely to many a serious Bob Dylan fan in the folk scene. They also seemed equally consequential. To understand the culture of the decade, we must understand the import of Dylan’s appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, backed by Mike Bloomfield and other members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

The death of rock and roll in the 50s is often told through the lens of tragedy, but there was also anger, disgust, and mass disaffection. The Payola scandal had an impact, as did Elvis joining the army and Little Richard’s return to religion. Rock and roll was broken, tamed, and turned into commercial fodder. Simply put, it wasn’t cool at all, man, and even the Beatles couldn’t save it singlehandedly. Their arrival on U.S. shores is mythologized as music history Normandy—and has been credited with inspiring countless numbers of musicians—but without Dylan and the blues artists he imitated, things would very much have gone otherwise.

In the early 60s, Dylan and the Beatles’ “respective musical constituencies were indeed perceived as inhabiting two separate subcultural worlds,” writes Jonathan Gould in Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America. “Dylan’s core audience was comprised of young people emerging from adolescence—college kids with artistic or intellectual leanings, a dawning political and social idealism, and a mildly bohemian style…. The Beatles’ core audience, by contrast, was comprised of veritable ‘teenyboppers’—kids in high school or grade school whose lives were totally wrapped up in the commercialized popular culture of television, radio, pop records, fan magazines, and teen fashion. They were seen as idolaters, not idealists.”

To evoke anything resembling the commercial pablum of Beatlemania, and at Newport, no less, spoke of treason to folk authenticity. Some called out “Where’s Ringo?” Others called him “Judas.” Dylan’s set “would go down as one of the most divisive concerts ever”—(and that’s saying a lot)—“putting the worlds of both folk and rock in temporary identity crisis,” Michael Madden writes at Consequence of Sound. The former folk hero accomplished this in all of three songs, “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Phantom Engineer,” an early take on “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Pete Seeger famously “threw a furious tantrum” upon hearing the first few bars of “Maggie’s Farm,” above, though he’s since said he was upset at the sound quality.

The moment was defining—and Dylan apparently decided to do it on a whim after hearing Alan Lomax insult the Paul Butterfield Band, who were giving a workshop at the festival. He came back onstage afterward to play two acoustic songs for the appreciative audience who remained, unfazed by the vehemence of half the crowd’s reaction to his earlier set. Yet the revolution to return rock to its folk and blues roots was already underway. Within six months of meeting Dylan in 1964, Gould writes, “John Lennon would be making records on which he openly imitated Dylan’s nasal drone, brittle strum, and introspective vocal persona.” (Dylan also introduced him to cannabis.)

In 1965, “the distinctions between the folk and rock audiences would have nearly evaporated.” The two met in the middle. “The Beatles’ audience, in keeping with the way of the world, would be showing signs of growing up,” while Dylan’s fans showed signs of “growing down, as hundreds of thousands of folkies in their late teens and early twenties” rediscovered “the ethos of their adolescent years.” They also discovered electric blues. Newport shows Dylan accelerating the transition, and also signified the arrival of the great electric blues-rock guitarists, in the form of the inimitable Mike Bloomfield, an invading force all his own, who inspired a generation with his licks on “Like a Rolling Stone” and on the absolute classic Paul Butterfield Blues Band debut album, released in The Year Dylan Went Electric.

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

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Lin-Manuel Miranda Breaks Down How He Wrote Hamilton’s Big Hit, “My Shot”

in Current Affairs, Music, Theatre | July 22nd, 2020

The current moment has forced the original cast and crew of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s massive hit musical Hamilton to revisit and reevaluate the story it tells about America’s founding. As Miranda himself told The Root’s Tonja Renée Stidhum, “All of these guys are complicit in the brutal practice of slavery, slavery is the third line of our show… that is just a prerequisite for the story we’re telling.” But he didn’t first set out to write history. “Originally, this was a concept album. I wanted to write a hip hop album, so I was never picturing the guys on the statues that are being torn down right now. I was picturing, ‘What are the voices that are best suited to tell the story.’”

Debuting in more optimistic times, when the country had its first Black president, Hamilton declared, says Leslie Odom, Jr. (who played Aaron Burr) that “if this history belongs to all of us… then we’re going to take it and we’re going to say it and use our own words to tell it!” Controversy and critique aside, there’s no denying Miranda’s tremendous gifts as a dramatist and songwriter, on display not only in Hamilton but in the Moana soundtrack.

How does he do it? Riding the wave of renewed Hamilton fandom after the Disney release of the original cast film, Miranda recently sat down with Rotten Tomatoes to discuss his process. When he gets to Hamilton, he gives us a detailed breakdown of “My Shot,” which, he says, took him a year to write.

“It was not only writing Hamilton’s ‘I want’ song,” says Miranda, “although it certainly is that. It was also proving my thesis that Hamilton’s intellect is what allows him to propel through the narrative of the story.” The play’s protagonist proves his intellectual worthiness by mastering and making his own the styles of Miranda’s favorite rappers, from Big Pun to Jay Z to Biggie to Mobb Deep. “I’m grabbing from the influences and paying homage to those influences. …I’m literally calling on the ancestors of this flow. …The ‘Whoah’ section, I’ll just say, is based on the AOL startup sound because I wanted it to feel like …his words are connecting with the world.”

Whether or not any of Hamilton’s younger viewers have ever heard the AOL startup sound, the detail reveals how Miranda’s mind works. His creations emerge from a matrix of references and allusions, each one chosen for its specific relation to the story. Many of these callbacks go over the audience’s heads, but they still have their intended effect, creating tension in “the densest couplets that I could write,” Miranda says. The message in “My Shot,” within the context of the musical itself, is that “Hamilton is the future within this group of friends.” But the message of Hamilton has nothing to do with the 18th century and everything to do with the 21st. Perhaps its most subversive idea is that the highest leadership in the U.S. might just as well look like Hamilton as Hamilton. See Miranda and the Hamilton cast perform “My Shot” at the White House just below.

via Laughing Squid

A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miranda Reimagines Hamilton as a Girl on Drunk History

The Muppets Sing the First Act of Hamilton

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

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Artists Give Advice to the Young: Words of Wisdom from Andrei Tarkovsky, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, John Cleese & Many More

in Art, Life | July 22nd, 2020

When Rainer Maria Rilke began corresponding with a poetically inclined 19-year-old military-academy cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus, he inadvertently founded a genre. After Rilke’s death, Kappus published the missives the two had exchanged in the 1900s as the book Letters to a Young Poet, a title to which established older artists giving advice to aspiring younger ones have paid homage ever since. Here in the 21st century, of course, their words of advice don’t usually come written in letters. They aren’t even limited to one-to-one correspondence: now such words of wisdom can easily be broadcast to every young person in the world with relative ease. For the young artist, the challenge thus has shifted from seeking advice to seeking out the right advice.

Hence the roundups we’ve posted here on Open Culture of offerings like “Advice to the Young,” a Youtube series from Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. In 2016 we highlighted its videos of creators who succeeded in shaping the culture without much in the way of compromise to their idiosyncratic visions: Laurie Anderson, Daniel Lanois, David, Byrne, Patti Smith, Umberto Eco, Marina Abramović.

In 2018 we featured an update on further advice to the young offered by writers like Jonathan Franzen and Lydia Davis, filmmakers like Wim Wenders, and artists like Ed Ruscha. The Louisiana Channel, which has continued to add new clips of advice from an ever-widening range of figures, has since uploaded sage counsel from the likes of photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn, dissident artist Ai Weiwei, and Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh.

As Welsh puts it, “The most important thing I would say to anybody who’s doing anything” — writing, music, art, what have you — is to “do it with exuberance, because that will come across.” Longtime Open Culture readers may remember Andrei Tarkovsky (an artist who in most respects seems to have occupied an entirely separate world from Welsh’s) having taken that idea further: young filmmakers shouldn’t “separate their work, their movie, their film, from the life they live,” and indeed should accept that their art requires “sacrificing of yourself. You should belong to it, it shouldn’t belong to you.” He also advises young people of any inclination that they “should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves” — perhaps the only mode in which they can stay true to their own perceptions and motivations.

“I think many writers are led into a compromise in their basic relationship to truth in their material,” says Rachel Cusk, author of the recent “Outline Trilogy” of novels and much other fiction and non-fiction besides, in her Louisiana Channel video. “You get a lot further by sticking to your guns.” But where do you find that material in the first place?

John Cleese answers that straightforwardly in the Big Think interview clip just above: “I suggest at the start that you steal, or borrow — or as the artists would say, ‘are influenced by’ — anything that you think is really good and really funny, and which appeals to you. If you study that and try to reproduce it in some way, then it’ll have your own stamp on it.” Only then can you develop your own style. Or, to return to the needs of young poets of the world, you could take the advice of no less celebrated a predecessor in the art than Walt Whitman: “Don’t write poetry.”

Great Filmmakers Offer Advice to Young Directors: Tarantino, Herzog, Coppola, Scorsese, Anderson, Fellini & More

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Science Fiction, The Dream (1609)

in Astronomy, Literature, Religion, Sci Fi, Science | July 21st, 2020

The point at which we date the birth of any genre is apt to shift depending on how we define it. When did science fiction begin? Many cite early masters of the form like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as its progenitors. Others reach back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein as the genesis of the form. Some few know The Blazing World, a 1666 work of fiction by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who called her book a “hermaphroditic text.” According to the judgment of such experts as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, sci-fi began even earlier, with a novel called Somnium (“The Dream”), written by none other than German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler. Maria Popova explains at Brain Pickings:

In 1609, Johannes Kepler finished the first work of genuine science fiction — that is, imaginative storytelling in which sensical science is a major plot device. Somnium, or The Dream, is the fictional account of a young astronomer who voyages to the Moon. Rich in both scientific ingenuity and symbolic play, it is at once a masterwork of the literary imagination and an invaluable scientific document, all the more impressive for the fact that it was written before Galileo pointed the first spyglass at the sky and before Kepler himself had ever looked through a telescope.

The work was not published until 1634, four years after Kepler’s death, by his son Ludwig, though “it had been Kepler’s intent to personally supervise the publication of his manuscript,” writes Gale E. Christianson. His final, posthumous work began as a dissertation in 1593 that addressed the question Copernicus asked years earlier: “How would the phenomena occurring in the heavens appear to an observer stationed on the moon?” Kepler had first come “under the thrall of the heliocentric model,” Popova writes, “as a student at the Lutheran University of Tübingen half a century after Copernicus published his theory.”

Kepler’s thesis was “promptly vetoed” by his professors, but he continued to work on the ideas, and corresponded with Galileo 30 years before the Italian astronomer defended his own heliocentric theory. “Sixteen years later and far from Tübingen, he completed an expanded version,” says Andrew Boyd in the introduction to a radio program about the book. “Recast in a dreamlike framework, Kepler felt free to probe ideas about the moon that he otherwise couldn’t.” Not content with cold abstraction, Kepler imagined space travel, of a kind, and peopled his moon with aliens.

And what an imagination! Inhabitants weren’t mere recreations of terrestrial life, but entirely new forms of life adapted to lunar extremes. Large. Tough-skinned. They evoked visions of dinosaurs. Some used boats, implying not just life but intelligent, non-human life. Imagine how shocking that must have been at the time.

Even more shocking to authorities were the means Kepler used in his text to reveal knowledge about the heavens and travel to the moon: beings he called “daemons” (a Latin word for benign nature spirits before Christianity hijacked the term), who communicated first with the hero’s mother, a witch practiced in casting spells.

The similarities between Kepler’s protagonist, Duracotus, and Kepler himself (such as a period of study under Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe) led the church to suspect the book was thinly veiled autobiographical occultism. Rumors circulated, and Kepler’s mother was arrested for witchcraft and subjected to territio verbalis (detailed descriptions of the tortures that awaited her, along with presentations of the various devices). It took Kepler five years to free her and prevent her execution.

Kepler’s story is tragic in many ways, for the losses he suffered throughout his life, including his son and his first wife to smallpox. But his perseverance left behind one of the most fascinating works of early science fiction—published hundreds of years before the genre is supposed to have begun. Despite the fantastical nature of his work, “he really believed,” says Sagan in the short clip from Cosmos above, “that one day human beings would launch celestial ships with sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, filled with explorers who, he said, would not fear the vastness of space.”

Astronomy had little connection with the material world in the early 17th century. “With Kepler came the idea that a physical force moves the planets in their orbits,” as well as an imaginative way to explore scientific ideas no one would be able to verify for decades, or even centuries. Hear Somnium read at the top of the post and learn more about Kepler’s fascinating life and achievements at Brain Pickings.

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

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How Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Lolita, “My Most Difficult Book”: A 1989 Documentary

in Books, Literature, Television | July 21st, 2020

How many of us could write a book with the impact of Lolita? The task, as revealed in the BBC Omnibus documentary above, lay almost beyond even the formidable literary powers of Vladimir Nabokov — almost, but obviously not quite. It did push him into new aesthetic, cultural, and compositional realms, as evidenced by his memories of drafting the novel on index cards in roadside motels (and when faced with especially noisy or drafty accommodations, in the backseat of the parked car) while road-tripping though the United States. The documentary’s subject is the exiled aristocrat novelist’s experience writing and publishing Lolita, the book that would make him world-famous — as well as the experience that brought him to the time and place that made such a cultural coup possible.

Aired in 1989, a dozen years after Nabokov’s death, My Most Difficult Book features interviews with the novelist’s Ferrari-driving son and translator Dmitri, his scholar-biographer Brian Boyd, and his younger admirer-colleagues including Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, and Edmund White. That last describes Nabokov’s novels as “great systems of meaning in which every element refers to every other one,” and Lolita marked a new height in his achievement in that form.

But the book’s popularity, or at least its initial wave of popularity, may be better explained by the controversy surrounding the elements of its by now well-known premise: the refined middle-aged European narrator, the coarse twelve-year-old stepdaughter whom he contrives to sexually possess — and succeeds in sexually possessing — as they drive across America, a vast land whose look, feel, and language Nabokov took pains to capture and repurpose.

“There are a lot of literalists out there,” says Amis, “who will think that you can’t write a novel like Lolita without being a secret slaver after young girls.” That was as true in 1989 as it was in 1955, when the book was first published, and indeed as true as it is today. Well into middle age, we learn in the documentary, strangers would ask Dmitri what it was like to be the son of a “dirty old man,” and in archive interview footage we see Nabokov address the public conflation of himself and Humbert Humbert, Lolita’s pedophiliac narrator. A serious chess enthusiast, Nabokov describes himself as writing novels as he would solve chess problems he posed to himself. What could present a more rigorous challenge than to tell a story, at a high artistic level, from the perspective of a monster? But Nabokov, as he admitted to one interviewer, was indeed a monster, at least according to one definition offered by his much-consulted English dictionary: “A person of unnatural excellence.”

Hear Vladimir Nabokov Read From the Penultimate Chapter of Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita: Just Another Great Love Story?

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Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different Lolita Book Covers

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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A Beatboxing Buddhist Monk Creates Music for Meditation

in Music, Religion | July 21st, 2020

Most of us assume Japanese Buddhist monks to be silent types. In their personal lives they may well be, but if they want to go viral, they’ve got to log onto the internet and make some noise. This is the lesson one draws from some of the Buddhist figures previously featured here on Open Culture: Kossan, he of the Beatles and Ramones covers, or Gyōsen Asakura, the priest who performs psychedelic services soundtracked with electronic dance music. Depending on your taste in music, their performances may or may not induce the mental quiet one associates with Buddhist practice, and the music of Yogetsu Akasaka, the latest Japanese Buddhist monk to attain internet fame, may at first sound equally untraditional. But listen and you may well find yourself in a meditative state without even trying.

“The 37-year-old went viral in May, after posting his ‘Heart Sutra Live Looping Remix,’ a video that’s relaxing like ASMR, and engrossing like a DJ set,” writes Vice’s Miran Miyano. “With the loop machine, he layers sounds and chants all coming from one instrument — his voice.” A musician since his teens and a beatboxer since his early twenties, the Tokyo-based Akasaka became a monk five years ago, following the path taken by his father, an abbott at a temple in rural Iwate Prefecture.

“Before he was ordained in 2015, he belonged to a theatre company formed in Fukushima prefecture, northeast Japan, after the region was devastated by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami,” writes Richard Lord in the South China Morning Post. “He has also been a full-time busker in countries including the United States and Australia.”

A busker Akasaka remains, in a sense, albeit one who, from the corner of YouTube he’s made his own, can be heard across the globe. In addition to recordings like his hit version of the Heart Sutra, he’s also been live streaming performances for the past two months. Lasting up to nearly two hours, these streams provide Akasaka an opportunity to vary his musical as well as spiritual themes, bring different instruments into the mix, and respond to fans who send him messages from all over the world, mostly outside his homeland. “I think in Japan, people often associate Buddhism with funerals, and the sutra has a little bit of a negative and sad image,” he says to Vice. Indeed, as the saying goes, the modern Japanese is born Shinto, marries Christian, and dies Buddhist. But as Akasaka shows us, his tradition has something to offer all of us, no matter our nationality, in life as well.

via Metafilter

Buddhist Monk Covers Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law,” Then Breaks Into Meditation

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Beatboxing Bach’s Goldberg Variations

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Icons of Art Wearing Masks: Frida Kahlo, Mona Lisa, Girl with the Pearl Earring & More

in Art, Current Affairs | July 20th, 2020

We hear the phrase “unprecedented times” every day now, but the truth is few calamities in human history are more precedented than plagues and pestilences. In Western history, at least, disease epidemics seem always to have been followed by Machiavellian opportunism and cultish conspiracy theories that only made things worse.

During the 14th century, almost six hundred years before Naomi Klein defined the shock doctrine, the Black Death “strengthened the power of the state and accelerated the domination of key markets by a handful of large companies,” write Eleanor Russell and Martin Parker at The Conversation (hello, Amazon). In their argument, disaster capitalism may have preceded actual capitalism, and it started with the plague.

In his history of the Great Plague of 1665, Daniel Defoe described how “everyone behaved badly, though the rich behaved the worst,” as Jill Lepore writes at The New Yorker, forcing their servants to put their lives at risk to provision the great houses. “This Necessity…,” writes Defoe, “was in a great Measure the Ruin of the whole City,” though few in London then understood how to slow transmission of the disease.

That was not the case when the Influenza epidemic took the lives of hundreds of millions around the world between 1918 and 1920. Doctors understood how the flu spread and recommended that everyone wear a mask in public. Cities passed ordinances and immediately resistance sprang up, leading to organizations like San Francisco’s Anti-Mask League, whose rhetoric sounds like that of anti-mask protestors of today.

The times may be unique—for the speed at which COVID-19 spread around the world, for instance, along with the disinformation—but humans have lived through many versions of pandemic, and many disastrously selfish, opportunistic, and short-sighted responses to it. We may contemplate these historical repetitions as we admire the Instagram creations of artist Genevieve Blais, who has been posting images of famous paintings, statues, and photographs with their subjects wearing masks.

More than novelty memes or highbrow public service announcements, Blais’ creations are part-whimsical/part-sobering reminders of the persistence of plagues throughout history—their influence on the rise and fall of dynasties and powerful patrons, and the ignorance and folly that led to so much preventable death. Technologically speaking, humans are better positioned than ever before to combat epidemics of disease. But it’s worth remembering the precedents for our current conditions. Plagues have shaped human history. We don’t always have to respond to them the same way. See all of Blais’s masked fine art images at her Plague History Instagram page. If you DM her, she will make you a print.

via Kottke

Vintage Science Face Masks: Conquer the Pandemic with Science, Courtesy of Maria Popova’s BrainPickings

Download Classic Works of Plague Fiction: From Daniel Defoe & Mary Shelley, to Edgar Allan Poe

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Dr. Fauci Reads an Undergrad’s Entire Thesis, Then Follows Up with an Encouraging Letter

in Current Affairs, Graduation Speech, Letters, Politics, Science | July 20th, 2020

Photo via the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

What are some qualities to look for in a leader?

A thirst for knowledge
A sense of duty
The scruples to give credit where credit is due
A calm, clear communication style
Humility

Dr. Anthony Fauci brings these qualities to bear as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health.

They’re also on display in his message to then-undergrad Luke Messac, now an emergency medicine resident at Brown University, whose research focuses on the histories of health policy in southern Africa and the US, and who recently tweeted:

13 years ago, I emailed Dr. Fauci out of the blue to ask if I might interview him for my undergrad thesis. He invited me to his office, where he answered all my questions. When I sent him the thesis, HE READ THE WHOLE THING (see his overly effusive review below). Who does that?!

Here’s what Fauci had to say to the young scientist:

It certainly reads like the work of a class act.

In addition to serving as one of the COVID-19 pandemic’s most recognizable faces, Dr. Fauci has acquired another duty—that of scapegoat for Donald Trump, the 6th president he has answered to in his long career.

He seems to be taking the administration’s potshots with a characteristically cool head, though compared to the furious criticisms AIDS activists directed his way in the 80s and 90s, he’s unlikely to find much of educational value in them.

Last March, The Body Pro, a newsletter for workers on the front lines of HIV education, prevention, care, and services quoted ACT UP NY’s Jim Eigo on the doctor’s response to a letter demanding parallel tracking, a policy revision that would put potentially life-saving drugs in the hands of those who tested positive far earlier than the existing clinical trial requirements’ schedule would have allowed:

Lo and behold, he read the letter and liked it, and the following year he started promoting the idea of a parallel track for AIDS drugs to the FDA. Had he not helped us push that through, we couldn’t have gotten a lot of the cousin drugs to AZT, such as ddC and ddI, approved so fast. They were problematic drugs, but without them, we couldn’t have kept so many people alive.

Fauci, despite being straight and Catholic, was not only not homophobic, which much of medical practice still was in the late 1980s, he also wouldn’t tolerate homophobia among his colleagues. He knew there was no place for that in a public-health crisis.

Speaking of correspondence, Dr Messac seems to have taken the “perpetual student” concept Dr. Fauci impressed upon him back in 2007 to heart, as evidenced by a recent tweet, regarding a lesson gleaned from Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron, a 1977 documentary about bodybuilders:

Schwarzenegger explained how he would figure out what to work out every day by looking in a mirror and finding his weakest muscles. It’s pretty good advice for studying during residency. Every shift reveals a weakness, and greats never stop looking for their own.

In writing to Messac, Dr. Fauci alluded to his commencement speeches, so we thought it appropriate to leave you with one of his most recent ones, a virtual address to the graduating class of his alma mater, College of the Holy Cross:

“Now is the time, if ever there was one” he tells the Class of 2020, “to care selflessly about one another… Stay safe, and I look forward to the good work you will contribute in the years ahead.”

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Dr. Wise on Influenza: Rare Silent Film Shows How They Tried to Educate the Public About the Spanish Flu a Century Ago (1919)

in Film, History | July 20th, 2020

“Pics or it didn’t happen,” says the Internet, a phrase typically “used in jest,” writes Erin Ratelle at Space and Culture, as “a counter to an outrageous claim of events. However, its root is predicated on the notion that media is integral to being or existence,” that we must record everything. Such implicit understanding was only in its infancy in 1918, when the influenza outbreak known as the Spanish Flu began, which perhaps goes some way toward explaining why a viral pandemic that killed millions around the world—far more than World War I—is so underrepresented in the historical record.

These days if a Utah county commission meeting about masks for children gets thronged by unmasked protesters, we get almost-instant video at The Washington Post. Images filter out through Twitter and Facebook, or move in the other direction, and millions see them within hours. During the 1918 flu pandemic, unmasked protesters against mask laws also abounded, but coverage of their stunts took months to move from local papers to national outlets, who eventually covered the San Francisco Anti-Mask League’s strident refusals. The devastating epidemic, however, estimated to have infected one third of the world, was almost entirely absent from silent film at the time.

Cinema of all kinds avoided the subject, writes Bryony Dixon at the British Film Institute (BFI): “It’s astonishing to think how invisible the first pandemic in the time of cinema is from the film record. Apart from one informational film, which survives in the BFI National Archive, the influenza pandemic of 1918/1919 doesn’t appear in British film at all. There were no newsreel reports, and no fiction films were made that even mentioned the three waves of the pandemic that struck the country in the final year of the First World War and would kill 200,000 people” in the UK and 500 million worldwide.

This does not mean there are no films about plague and pestilence from the time. But the present seemed to have been too painful. Filmmakers looked back to Boccaccio, one of whose Decameron stories was adapted for the screen. “It must certainly have been easier,” Dixon writes, “for silent era audiences to contemplate pandemic within the moral framework of the medieval period.” Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death was adapted by Fritz Lang in a screenplay for Otto Rippert’s 1919 The Plague in Florence. F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu is, arguably, about disease, as is its source, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But fiction and documentary mostly stayed mum about the deadly flu pandemic.

In 1918, the War had nearly every European nation (and the U.S. at that point) preoccupied. Government control over major media outlets censored coverage of the disease, ostensibly to avoid a panic. The staggering death tolls of war and infection were overwhelming. A political narrative took shape to suggest a culprit, Spain, which was neutral during WWI, and the first country to begin covering the disease in their press (hence the “Spanish Flu,” which did not originate in Spain). The one exception to the blackout in the BFI archive is the short informational film at the top, Dr. Wise on Influenza.

Produced under the auspices of Sir Arthur Newsholme, the Chief Medical Officer of the Local Government Board (LGB), the film arrived a little too late to do much good after the second wave of infections began in 1919, and it was not widely distributed. The short film promotes wearing masks, and it tells a very familiar story, as Dixon explains:

The ‘doctor’ uses the device of a fictional story in which a rather dim Mr Brown coughs and sneezes over colleagues in the office and the street, before going on to infect 100 people at a theatre (we see a rare early glimpse of the Empire Leicester Square, which was showing a musical, The Lilac Domino).

It doesn’t end well for Mr Brown, and an on-screen title lists the grim totals of deaths in British cities, just as we’ve become used to seeing today. Other parallels with the current situation are spooky: the prime minister, Lloyd George, like Boris Johnson, was hospitalised for days with the virus, and an anxious nation was told it was ‘touch and go’ for a while.

History has been rhyming all over the place lately, maybe the most poetic thing about the ugly times we’re living in. As much as we might have believed that the world, or our particular corner of it, had changed, we’re finding out how little progress we’ve actually made. Ironically, one of the most remarkable differences between the early 21st century and everything that came before—the omnipresence of cameras and video—has accelerated these realizations. We can now witness, in ways no one possibly could have in 1919, just how much of the past we’re dragging along behind us.

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

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29 Free Short Stories from Some of Today’s Most Acclaimed Writers: Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell & More

in Literature | July 19th, 2020

Let us call your attention to 29 free short stories, written by some of today’s most acclaimed writers. They come courtesy of The New York Times’ Decameron Project. They write:

Inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” a 14th-century collection of tales told by a group of 10 characters taking shelter in an Italian villa during the Black Plague, this [collection] features stories from Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Téa Obreht, Karen Russell, Tommy Orange, Yiyun Li and others. The so-called Decameron Project is the first time in the magazine’s modern history that an entire issue is devoted to new fiction.

You can read the stories online here. And if you prefer audio, hear two stories read aloud by Tommy Orange and Edwidge Danticat here.

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29 Free Short Stories from Some of Today’s Most Acclaimed Writers: Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell & More

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