The Red Menace: A Striking Gallery of Anti-Communist Posters, Ads, Comic Books, Magazines & Films

in Art, History, Politics | November 18th, 2014

By its very nature, pro­pa­gan­da dis­torts the truth or tells out­right lies. It tar­gets our basest impulses—fear and anger, flight or fight. While works of pure pro­pa­gan­da may pre­tend to make log­i­cal argu­ments, they elim­i­nate nuance and over­sim­pli­fy com­pli­cat­ed issues to the point of car­i­ca­ture. These gen­er­al ten­den­cies hold true in every case, but nowhere, per­haps, is this gross exag­ger­a­tion and fear mon­ger­ing more evi­dent than in times of war.

And while we’ve all seen our share of wartime pro­pa­gan­da, we may be less famil­iar with the decades-long pro­pa­gan­da war the U.S. and West­ern Europe waged against social­ism and Com­mu­nism, even decades before the Cold War era. It may sur­prise you to learn that this offen­sive began even before the start of World War One, as you can see above in a British Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty poster from 1909.

Rep­re­sent­ing social­ism as an ape-like demon stran­gling some sort of god­dess of “pros­per­i­ty,” this strik­ing piece of poster art sets the tone for almost all of the anti-Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da to come in the wake of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion. At least since this ear­ly graph­ic sal­vo, Com­mu­nists and social­ists have gen­er­al­ly been depict­ed as ter­ri­fy­ing mon­sters. See, for exam­ple, an ear­ly, post-WWI exam­ple of Russ­ian anti-Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da above, por­tray­ing the Com­mu­nist threat as an apoc­a­lyp­tic horse­man of death.

As the per­ceived threat increased, so too did the scale of the mon­strous car­i­ca­tures. In the post-WWI era Ger­man and Nor­we­gian posters above, Godzil­la-sized Com­mu­nists lay waste to entire cities. Below, in “Bol­she­vism Unmasked,” an exam­ple from the Sec­ond World War, the skele­tal Com­mu­nist destroy­er strad­dles the entire globe.

Occa­sion­al­ly the racial dimen­sions of these depic­tions were explic­it. More often, they were strong­ly implied. But a 1953 Cold War exam­ple below is par­tic­u­lar­ly unsub­tle. Show­ing a scene lit­er­al­ly right out of a schlocky Para­mount hor­ror film, fea­tur­ing actress Janet Logan, the text tells us, “In case the Com­mu­nists should con­quer, our women would be help­less beneath the boots of the Asi­at­ic Rus­sians.” At the top of this rather lurid piece of agit-prop, we’re also told that “many Amer­i­can men would be ster­il­ized” should Rus­sia win the “next world war.”

In the 50s and 60s, pop cul­ture media like film and com­ic books lent them­selves par­tic­u­lar­ly well to anti-Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da, and they were exploit­ed relent­less­ly by gov­ern­ment agen­cies, pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies, and cor­po­ra­tions. Films like I Mar­ried a Com­mu­nist (below) and The Red Men­ace (top), both from 1949, offered sen­sa­tion­al­ized pulpy takes on the red scare.

In these peak Cold War decades, anti-Com­mu­nist sen­ti­ment flour­ished as the U.S.’s for­mer ally the Sovi­et Union became its pri­ma­ry ene­my. Com­ic books pro­vid­ed the per­fect plat­form for the broad strokes of anti-Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da. As psy­chi­a­trist Fredric Wertham waged war against the cor­rupt­ing influ­ence of com­ic books, adver­tis­ers and the gov­ern­ment found them increas­ing­ly effec­tive at spread­ing mes­sages. “If there was any enti­ty that believed in the pow­er of com­ic books to indoc­tri­nate and instruct as Wertham did,” writes Greg Beato at Rea­son, “it was the U.S. gov­ern­ment.”

But pri­vate enti­ties did their share in the com­ic book war against Com­mu­nism as well. Wit­ness a par­tic­u­lar­ly wild exam­ple, Is This Tomor­row?, above. Pub­lished by the “Cat­e­chet­i­cal Guild Edu­ca­tion­al Soci­ety” in St. Paul, MN, this 1947 com­ic impli­cates gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of busi­ness, social wel­fare pro­grams, anti-reli­gious sen­ti­ment, and “peo­ple giv­ing up their sil­ly ideas about ‘sacred­ness’ of life” in a fiendish­ly orches­trat­ed plot to take over Amer­i­ca. Work­ers who embrace Com­mu­nist doc­trine are lit­tle more than dupes and pawns. You can read the whole fever­ish sce­nario here.

These car­toon scare tac­tics may seem out­landish, but of course we know that red scare pro­pa­gan­da had real effects on the lives and liveli­hoods of real Amer­i­cans, par­tic­u­lar­ly those in the arts and acad­e­mia. Free­think­ing, left-lean­ing cre­ative types and intel­lec­tu­als have long been tar­gets of anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia. The Amer­i­can Legion Mag­a­zine cov­er above illus­trates the fear—one still very preva­lent now—that col­lege pro­fes­sors were bent on cor­rupt­ing young, mal­leable minds. “Par­ents,” the mag­a­zine states, “can rid cam­pus­es of com­mu­nists who cloak them­selves in ‘aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom.’” At the height of the red scare, many col­lege pro­fes­sors, like Stan­ley Moore at Reed Col­lege, were dragged before the House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee and sum­mar­i­ly fired.

More con­fi­dent, it seems, than the pro­pa­gan­da of pre­vi­ous decades, the Cold War vari­ety shrunk the Com­mu­nist threat back to human dimen­sions. But Com­mu­nists were no less mon­strous than before—only more insid­i­ous. They looked like your neigh­bors, your co-work­ers, and your chil­dren’s teacher. Instead of pur­vey­ors of brute force, they were depict­ed as devi­ous manip­u­la­tors who used ide­o­log­i­cal machi­na­tions to per­vert democ­ra­cy and crip­ple cap­i­tal­ism. As in the Amer­i­can Legion col­lege pro­fes­sor cov­er sto­ry, edu­ca­tion was often posed as the cul­tur­al bat­tle­field on which—as the heat­ed Canadair ad above states—“Communism could take the citadel from with­in” by spread­ing “doubts about the old ways” and insin­u­at­ing “ideas of athe­ism, reg­i­men­ta­tion and false ide­al­ism.”

Post-WWII, of course, the great­est threat was not a full-scale invasion—it was total nuclear anni­hi­la­tion. It was a grim possibility—as Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove satir­i­cal­ly point­ed out—in which no one would win. Web Urban­ist points us toward one par­tic­u­lar­ly chill­ing and dis­hon­est piece of pro­pa­gan­da dis­trib­uted by the gov­ern­ment. In the poster above, we are assured that “After total war can come total liv­ing.” Unless the hap­py cou­ple is gaz­ing out over a man­i­cured sub­urb in the after­life, this scene of “total liv­ing” post-nuclear war is absurd giv­en the strat­e­gy of Mutu­al­ly Assured Destruc­tion. Nev­er­the­less, what the poster depicts is an ana­logue of the Sovi­ets’ total­i­tar­i­an ethos—it’s a future of total ide­o­log­i­cal puri­ty, in which the Earth has been cleansed of the hulk­ing mon­strous hordes of Com­mu­nism, as well as, pre­sum­ably, the cryp­to-Com­mu­nist teach­ers, artists, intel­lec­tu­als, and bureau­crats who threat­en from with­in.

via Web Urban­ist/io9/Kuriosi­tas

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Spot a Com­mu­nist Using Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism: A 1955 Man­u­al from the U.S. Mil­i­tary

Sovi­et Artists Envi­sion a Com­mu­nist Utopia in Out­er Space

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of How Boot­legged Hol­ly­wood Movies Helped Defeat Com­mu­nism in Roma­nia

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

David Foster Wallace’s Syllabus for His 2008 Creative Nonfiction Course: Includes Reading List & Footnotes

in Literature, Writing | November 13th, 2014

Pho­to cour­tesy of Clau­dia Sher­man.

The term “cre­ative non­fic­tion” has picked up a great deal of trac­tion over the past decade — per­haps too much, depend­ing upon how valid or invalid you find it. Mean­ing­ful or not, the label has come into its cur­rent pop­u­lar­i­ty in part thanks to the essays of nov­el­ist David Fos­ter Wal­lace: whether writ­ing non­fic­tion­al­ly about the Illi­nois State Fair, David Lynch, pro­fes­sion­al ten­nis, or a sev­en-night Caribbean cruise, he did it in a way unlike any oth­er man or woman of let­ters. While nobody can learn to write quite like him — this we’ve seen when Wal­lace-imi­ta­tors write pas­tich­es of their own — he did spend time teach­ing the art of cre­ative non­fic­tion as he saw it,

a broad cat­e­go­ry of prose works such as per­son­al essays and mem­oirs, pro­files, nature and trav­el writ­ing, nar­ra­tive essays, obser­va­tion­al or descrip­tive essays, gen­er­al-inter­est tech­ni­cal writ­ing, argu­men­ta­tive or idea-based essays, gen­er­al-inter­est crit­i­cism, lit­er­ary jour­nal­ism, and so on. The term’s con­stituent words sug­gest a con­cep­tu­al axis on which these sorts of prose works lie. As non­fic­tion, the works are con­nect­ed to actu­al states of affairs in the world, are “true” to some reli­able extent. If, for exam­ple, a cer­tain event is alleged to have occurred, it must real­ly have occurred; if a propo­si­tion is assert­ed, the read­er expects some proof of (or argu­ment for) its accu­ra­cy. At the same time, the adjec­tive cre­ative sig­ni­fies that some goal(s) oth­er than sheer truth­ful­ness moti­vates the writer and informs her work. This cre­ative goal, broad­ly stat­ed, may be to inter­est read­ers, or to instruct them, or to enter­tain them, to move or per­suade, to edi­fy, to redeem, to amuse, to get read­ers to look more close­ly at or think more deeply about some­thing that’s worth their atten­tion… or some combination(s) of these.

This comes straight from the syl­labus of Eng­lish 183D, a work­shop Wal­lace taught at Pomona Col­lege in the spring of 2008, which you can read in its entire­ty at Salon (reprint­ed from The David Fos­ter Wal­lace Read­er). As you may remem­ber from the pre­vi­ous Wal­lace syl­labus we fea­tured, from a 1994 semes­ter of Eng­lish 102 — Lit­er­ary Analy­sis I: Prose Fic­tion at Illi­nois State Uni­ver­si­ty, the man could real­ly assem­ble a read­ing list. For his cre­ative non­fic­tion course, he had stu­dents read Jo Ann Beard’s “Wern­er,” Stephen Elliott’s “Where I Slept,” George Orwell’s clas­sic “Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage,” Don­na Steiner’s “Cold,” David Gessner’s “Learn­ing to Surf,” Kathryn Harrison’s “The For­est of Mem­o­ry,” Hes­ter Kaplan’s “The Pri­vate Life of Skin,” and George Saunders’s “The Brain­dead Mega­phone.”

In some ways, Wal­lace syl­labi them­selves count as pieces of cre­ative non­fic­tion. What oth­er pro­fes­sor ever had the prose chops to make you actu­al­ly want to read any­thing under the “Class Rules & Pro­ce­dures” head­ing? In the ninth of its thir­teen points, he lays out the work­shop’s oper­a­tive belief:

that you’ll improve as a writer not just by writ­ing a lot and receiv­ing detailed crit­i­cism but also by becom­ing a more sophis­ti­cat­ed and artic­u­late crit­ic of oth­er writ­ers’ work. You are thus required to read each of your col­leagues’ essays at least twice, mak­ing help­ful and spe­cif­ic com­ments on the man­u­script copy wher­ev­er appro­pri­ate. You will then com­pose a one-to-three-page let­ter to the essay’s author, com­mu­ni­cat­ing your sense of the draft’s strengths and weak­ness­es and mak­ing clear, spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tions for revi­sion.

But what­ev­er the rig­ors of Eng­lish 183D, Wal­lace would have suc­ceed­ed, to my mind, if he’d instilled noth­ing more than this in the minds of his depart­ing stu­dents:

In the grown-up world, cre­ative non­fic­tion is not expres­sive writ­ing but rather com­mu­nica­tive writ­ing. And an axiom of com­mu­nica­tive writ­ing is that the read­er does not auto­mat­i­cal­ly care about you (the writer), nor does she find you fas­ci­nat­ing as a per­son, nor does she feel a deep nat­ur­al inter­est in the same things that inter­est you.

True to form, DFW’s syl­labus comes com­plete with foot­notes.

1 (A good dic­tio­nary and usage dic­tio­nary are strong­ly rec­om­mend­ed. You’re insane if you don’t own these already.)

You can read the Cre­ative Non­fic­tion syl­labus in full here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

Read David Fos­ter Wallace’s Notes From a Tax Account­ing Class, Tak­en to Help Him Write The Pale King

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in Eng­lish

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

135 Free Philosophy eBooks

in | November 7th, 2014

This page fea­tures a grow­ing list of Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks, pre­sent­ing essen­tial works by Aris­to­tle, Hegel, Kant, Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein and many oth­er philoso­phers. You can gen­er­al­ly read these texts on your Kin­dle, iPad & iPhone, or web brows­er. For those inter­est­ed in phi­los­o­phy, you won’t want to miss our col­lec­tion of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es.

• Aquinas, Thomas — Sum­ma The­olo­giae
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• Rus­sell, Bertrand - Intro­duc­tion to Math­e­mat­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy
  • Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — ePub Ver­sion — Read HTML Edi­tion Online
• Rus­sell, Bertrand — Mys­ti­cism and Log­ic and Oth­er Essays
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Rus­sell, Bertrand - Polit­i­cal Ideals
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• Rus­sell, Bertrand — The Con­quest of Hap­pi­ness
  • Read Online Now
• Rus­sell, Bertrand - The Prob­lems of Phi­los­o­phy
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Rus­sell, Bertrand - West­ern Phi­los­o­phy
  • Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• Rus­sell, Bertrand — Why I Am Not a Chris­t­ian
  • iPad/iPhone — Read Online Now
• San­tayana, George — Some Turns of Thought in Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy: Five Essays
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats - Read Online Now
• San­tayana, George — The Life of Rea­son
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• San­tayana, George — These Sense of Beau­ty
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• San­tayana, George — Three Philo­soph­i­cal Poets: Lucretius, Dante and Goethe
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Sartre, Jean-Paul - Exis­ten­tial­ism Is a Human­ism
  • Read Online Now
• Sartre, Jean-Paul — Nau­sea
  • Read Online Now (French ver­sions)
• Schopen­hauer, Arthur - The World as Will and Rep­re­sen­ta­tion
  • Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats: Vol 1; Vol 2; and Vol. 3
• Schopen­hauer, Arthur — The Essays of Arthur Schopen­hauer; On Human Nature
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats (find Ger­man ver­sion here)
• Schopen­hauer, Arthur — Stud­ies in Pes­simism
  • iPad/iPhone — Read Online + Oth­er For­mats
• Seneca - On Ben­e­fits
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Smith, Adam - The The­o­ry of Moral Sen­ti­ments
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Smith, Adam - The Wealth of Nations
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Spin­oza — The Chief Works of Bene­dict de Spin­oza, 2 vols.
  • Read Online Now
• Spin­oza — Ethics
  • Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• St. Augus­tine — Con­fes­sions
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Sun Tzu - The Art of War
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Toc­queville, Alex­is de - Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca Vol 1.
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats – Read Online Now 
• Toc­queville, Alex­is de - Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca Vol 2.
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats – Read Online Now
• Thore­au, Hen­ry David - Walden
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Tol­stoy, Leo — What is Art?
  • Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Voltaire - Can­dide
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Voltaire — Micromé­gas
  • iPad/iPhone  — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Voltaire — The Philo­soph­i­cal Dic­tio­nary
  • Read Online Now
• Voltaire — The Works of Voltaire
  • Read Online Now
• Wittgen­stein, Lud­wig — The Blue Book
  • Read Online Now
• Wittgen­stein, Lud­wig — The Brown Book
  • Read Online Now
• Wittgen­stein, Lud­wig - Note­books, 1914–1916
  • Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Wittgen­stein, Lud­wig — Notes on Log­ic
  • Read Online Now
• Wittgen­stein, Lud­wig — Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions (Ger­man)
  • Read Online Now
• Wittgen­stein, Lud­wig - Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Wittgen­stein, Lud­wig - Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus (Ger­man-Eng­lish Side by Side Edi­tion)
  • Read Online Now
• Woll­stonecraft, Mary — A Vin­di­ca­tion of the Rights of Women
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now

Gen­er­al Resources

• 80 Phi­los­o­phy ebooks from UC Press
  • Read Online Now
• 70 Phi­los­o­phy eBooks from Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh Press
  • Read Online Now

Kandinsky, Klee & Other Bauhaus Artists Designed Ingenious Costumes Like You’ve Never Seen Before

in Art | November 3rd, 2014

Artists of the Bauhaus school—includ­ing founder Wal­ter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an and others—broke rad­i­cal­ly with famil­iar tra­di­tion and made min­i­mal­ist, abstract, and some­times shock­ing state­ments with their work. We know this his­to­ry, but you prob­a­bly haven’t seen these cul­tur­al fig­ures phys­i­cal­ly embody their aes­thet­ic prin­ci­ples as they do in the pho­tographs here, from cos­tume par­ties the Bauhaus school held through­out the twen­ties.

As Rachel Doyle at Curbed writes, “if you thought Bauhaus folk were good at design­ing cof­fee tables, just have a look at their costumes—as bewitch­ing and sculp­tur­al as any oth­er stu­dent project, but with an amaz­ing flam­boy­ance not oft ascribed to the move­ment.”

The whim­si­cal cos­tume parties—to which, wrote Hun­gar­i­an archi­tect Farkas Mol­nár, artists devot­ed “the great­est expen­di­tures of energy”—represented fur­ther attempts to tran­scend “medieval con­di­tions” and inte­grate “today’s sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal advances… into gen­er­al cul­ture.” So wrote Mol­nár in a 1925 essay, “Life at the Bauhaus,” where he describes the play­ful­ly seri­ous con­di­tions at the school. These par­ties, he asserts, were supe­ri­or to “fan­cy-dress balls” orga­nized by artists in oth­er cities in that “our cos­tumes are tru­ly orig­i­nal. Every­one pre­pares his or her own. Nev­er a one that has been seen before. Inhu­man, or humanoid, but always new.” Every­one par­tic­i­pat­ed, it seems, from the newest stu­dent to, as Mol­nár calls them, “the big­wigs”:

Kandin­sky prefers to appear decked out as an anten­na, Itten as an amor­phous mon­ster, Feininger as two right tri­an­gles, Moholy-Nagy as a seg­ment tran­spierced by a cross, Gropius as Le Cor­busier, Muche as an apos­tle of Maz­daz­nan, Klee as the song of the blue tree. A rather grotesque menagerie…

Might that be Kandin­sky in the pho­to­graph at the top? Just who is this lumi­nous fig­ure? Why did Gropius dress up as Le Cor­busier, and what, exact­ly, does “the song of the blue tree” look like? We can iden­ti­fy at least one of these artists—the bald man in black at the cen­ter of the pho­to­graph below is Oskar Schlem­mer, painter, sculp­tor, design­er, and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er. Schlem­mer gave Bauhaus cos­tume design its most for­mal con­text with the Tri­adic Bal­let, a pro­duc­tion, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, that “com­bined his work in both sculp­ture and the­ater to cre­ate the inter­na­tion­al­ly acclaimed extrav­a­gan­za which toured from 1922 to 1929.”

The ballet’s “18 cos­tumes,” writes Curbed, “were designed by match­ing geo­met­ric forms with anal­o­gous parts of the human body: a cylin­der for the neck, a cir­cle for the heads…. These elab­o­rate cos­tumes [see pho­to of per­form­ers below]… total­ly upped the ante at the Bauhaus school’s reg­u­lar cos­tume balls.” Schlem­mer “made no secret of the fact that he con­sid­ered the styl­ized, arti­fi­cial move­ments of mar­i­onettes to be aes­thet­i­cal­ly supe­ri­or to the nat­u­ral­is­tic move­ments of real humans.” His bal­let, Dan­ger­ous Minds remarks, may be “the least ‘human’ dance per­for­mance ever con­ceived.”

It may come as no sur­prise then that the Tri­adic Bal­let influ­enced some of the hyper-styl­ized alien cos­tum­ing of David Bowie’s Zig­gy Star­dust tour. Per­haps even more than the pho­tographs of rev­el­ers from the cos­tume par­ties, the Tri­adic Bal­let, which has been peri­od­i­cal­ly revived since its 1922 debut, pre­serves the fas­ci­nat­ing inno­va­tions Bauhaus artists envi­sioned for the human form. Just below, watch a 1970 film pro­duc­tion recre­at­ing many of the orig­i­nal designs, and see more pho­tographs of Bauhaus cos­tumes at The Char­nel-House.

via Curbed

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Home­made Hand Pup­pets of Bauhaus Artist Paul Klee

Time Trav­el Back to 1926 and Watch Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Cre­ate an Abstract Com­po­si­tion

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

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

Happy Halloween! Louis Armstrong Performs Skeleton in the Closet (1936)

in Film, Museums, Music | October 31st, 2014

Should you hap­pen to be in the vicin­i­ty of Coro­na, Queens this Hal­loween after­noon, the Louis Arm­strong House Muse­um will be wel­com­ing trick-or-treaters ’til 6pm. (Fun-sized Snick­ers be damned! Go any­way, just to see “To Jack Bradley, the ‘Great­est’ Pho­to Tak­er,” a col­lec­tion of can­did, pri­vate moments cap­tured by the friend Satch­mo described as his “white son.”)

If pre-exist­ing engage­ments pre­vent you from haunt­ing Coro­na today, vir­tu­al chills await you, above, with “The Skele­ton In The Clos­et,” Armstrong’s show-stop­ping num­ber from 1936’s Pen­nies From Heav­en. (That masked man on the drums is fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor Lionel Hamp­ton.)

The vin­tage Hal­loween con­tent is a real treat. Gimme ghosts, gob­lins, and an “old desert­ed man­sion on an old for­got­ten road” over psy­cho gore or depressed pre­fab sex­i­ness any day, not just Octo­ber 31.

Pen­nies From Heav­en was Armstrong’s first major screen appear­ance. At the insis­tence of star Bing Cros­by, his turn as a math­e­mat­i­cal­ly-chal­lenged band­leader snagged him a main title cred­it, a first for an African-Amer­i­can actor appear­ing oppo­site whites.

The role itself is not a pil­lar of race advance­ment, but Ricky Ric­car­di, the Arm­strong House’s Archivist notes that Arm­strong remained fond of the work, reen­act­ing an entire scene from mem­o­ry when he and Cros­by appeared as guests on the David Frost Show in 1971.

Ric­car­di sub­jects “The Skele­ton in the Clos­et” to a close musi­cal and per­for­mance analy­sis on his Won­der­ful World of Louis Arm­strong blog, a major source of year round good­ies for Arm­strong fans.

Rat­tle your bones!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Louis Arm­strong Plays His­toric Cold War Con­certs in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

Watch the Ear­li­est Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong Per­form­ing Live in Con­cert (Copen­hagen, 1933)

Louis Arm­strong Plays Trum­pet at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids; Dizzy Gille­spie Charms a Snake in Pak­istan

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

H.P. Lovecraft Gives Five Tips for Writing a Horror Story, or Any Piece of “Weird Fiction”

in Literature, Writing | October 29th, 2014

Image by Lucius B. Trues­dell, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Though the term “weird fic­tion” came into being in the 19th century—originally used by Irish goth­ic writer Sheri­dan Le Fanu—it was picked up by H.P. Love­craft in the 20th cen­tu­ry as a way, pri­mar­i­ly, of describ­ing his own work. Love­craft pro­duced copi­ous amounts of the stuff, as you can see from our post high­light­ing online col­lec­tions of near­ly his entire cor­pus. He also wrote in depth about writ­ing itself. He did so in gen­er­al­ly pre­scrip­tive ways, as in his 1920 essay “Lit­er­ary Com­po­si­tion,” and in ways spe­cif­ic to his cho­sen mode—as in the 1927 “Super­nat­ur­al Hor­ror in Lit­er­a­ture,” in which he defined weird fic­tion very dif­fer­ent­ly than Le Fanu or mod­ern authors like Chi­na Miéville. For Love­craft,

The true weird tale has some­thing more than secret mur­der, bloody bones, or a sheet­ed form clank­ing chains accord­ing to rule. A cer­tain atmos­phere of breath­less and unex­plain­able dread of out­er, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seri­ous­ness and por­ten­tous­ness becom­ing its sub­ject, of that most ter­ri­ble con­cep­tion of the human brain–a malign and par­tic­u­lar sus­pen­sion or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safe­guard against the assaults of chaos and the dae­mons of unplumbed space.

Here we have, broad­ly, the tem­plate for a very Love­craft­ian tale indeed. Ten years lat­er, in a 1937 essay titled “Notes on Writ­ing Weird Fic­tion,” Love­craft would return to the theme and elab­o­rate more ful­ly on how to pro­duce such an arti­fact.

Weird Fic­tion, wrote Love­craft in that lat­er essay, is “obvi­ous­ly a spe­cial and per­haps a nar­row” kind of “sto­ry-writ­ing,” a form in which “hor­ror and the unknown or the strange are always close­ly con­nect­ed,” and one that “fre­quent­ly emphasize[s] the ele­ment of hor­ror because fear is our deep­est and strongest emo­tion.” Although Love­craft self-dep­re­cat­ing­ly calls him­self an “insignif­i­cant ama­teur,” he nonethe­less sit­u­ates him­self in the com­pa­ny of “great authors” who mas­tered hor­ror writ­ing of one kind or anoth­er: “[Lord] Dun­sany, Poe, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Alger­non Black­wood, and Wal­ter de la Mare.” Even if you only know the name of Poe, it’s weighty com­pa­ny indeed.

But be not intimidated—Lovecraft wasn’t. As our tra­di­tion­al hol­i­day cel­e­bra­tion of fear approach­es, per­haps you’d be so inclined to try your hand at a lit­tle weird fic­tion of your own. You should cer­tain­ly, Love­craft would stress, spend some time read­ing these writ­ers’ works. But he goes fur­ther, and offers us a very con­cise, five point “set of rules” for writ­ing a weird fic­tion sto­ry that he says might be “deduced… if the his­to­ry of all my tales were ana­lyzed.” See an abridged ver­sion below:

1. Pre­pare a syn­op­sis or sce­nario of events in the order of their absolute occur­rence—not the order of their nar­ra­tions.

This is a prac­tice adhered to by writ­ers from J.K. Rowl­ing and William Faulkn­er to Nor­man Mail­er. It seems an excel­lent gen­er­al piece of advice for any kind of fic­tion.

2. Pre­pare a sec­ond syn­op­sis or sce­nario of events—this one in order of nar­ra­tion (not actu­al occur­rence), with ample full­ness and detail, and with notes as to chang­ing per­spec­tive, stress­es, and cli­max.

3. Write out the story—rapidly, flu­ent­ly, and not too critically—following the sec­ond or nar­ra­tive-order syn­op­sis. Change inci­dents and plot when­ev­er the devel­op­ing process seems to sug­gest such change, nev­er being bound by any pre­vi­ous design.

It may be that the sec­ond rule is made just to be bro­ken, but it pro­vides the weird fic­tion prac­ti­tion­er with a begin­ning. The third stage here brings us back to a process every writer on writ­ing, such as Stephen King, will high­light as key—free, unfet­tered draft­ing, fol­lowed by…

4. Revise the entire text, pay­ing atten­tion to vocab­u­lary, syn­tax, rhythm of prose, pro­por­tion­ing of parts, niceties of tone, grace and con­vinc­ing­ness of tran­si­tions…

And final­ly….

5. Pre­pare a neat­ly typed copy—not hes­i­tat­ing to add final revi­so­ry touch­es where they seem in order.

You will notice right away that these five “rules” tell us noth­ing about what to put in our weird fic­tion, and could apply to any sort of fic­tion at all, real­ly. This is part of the admirably com­pre­hen­sive qual­i­ty of the oth­er­wise suc­cinct essay. Love­craft tells us why he writes, why he writes what he writes, and how he goes about it. The con­tent of his fic­tion­al uni­verse is entire­ly his own, a method of visu­al­iz­ing “vague, elu­sive, frag­men­tary impres­sions.” Your mileage, and your method, will indeed vary.

Love­craft goes on to describe “four dis­tinct types of weird sto­ry” that fit “into two rough categories—those in which the mar­vel or hor­ror con­cerns some con­di­tion or phe­nom­e­non, and those in which it con­cerns some action of per­sons in con­nec­tion with a bizarre con­di­tion or phe­non­menon.” If this doesn’t clear things up for you, then per­haps a care­ful read­ing of Lovecraft’s com­plete “Notes on Writ­ing Weird Fic­tion” will. Ulti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, “there is no one way” to write a sto­ry. But with some practice—and no small amount of imagination—you may find your­self join­ing the com­pa­ny of Poe, Love­craft, and a host of con­tem­po­rary writ­ers who con­tin­ue to push the bound­aries of weird fic­tion past the some­times parochial, often pro­found­ly big­ot­ed, lim­its that Love­craft  set out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

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

H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle & Other British Authors Sign Manifesto Backing England’s Role in WWI

in History | October 23rd, 2014

Thinkers have said a great deal about the rel­a­tive might of the pen and the sword—often one well-known phrase in particular—but still, the sub­ject of intel­lect ver­sus might remains a mat­ter of active inquiry. But what if might har­ness­es intel­lect? What if those who live by the pen pick up their writ­ing tool of choice to endorse the nation­al use of weapon­ry infi­nite­ly more pow­er­ful than all the swords ever forged? This very thing hap­pened in the Britain of 1914: “FAMOUS AUTHORS DEFEND ENGLAND’S WAR,” read the head­lines, and Uni­ver­si­ty of Ottawa Eng­lish pro­fes­sor Nick Milne has more his­tor­i­cal analy­sis of the event in the first post of “Pen and Sword,” a series focus­ing on British Pro­pa­gan­da at the open edu­ca­tion­al resource World War I Cen­te­nary: Con­tin­u­a­tions and Begin­nings.

“In Sep­tem­ber of 1914,” writes Milne in a ver­sion of the post up at Slate, “as the armies of Europe were engaged in the Race to the Sea and the stale­mate of the trench­es loomed, Rud­yard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and oth­er British authors col­lab­o­rat­ed on a remark­able piece of war pro­pa­gan­da. Fifty-three of the lead­ing authors in Britain — a num­ber that includ­ed Thomas Hardy and H.G. Wells — append­ed their names to the ‘Authors’ Dec­la­ra­tion.’ This man­i­festo declared that the Ger­man inva­sion of Bel­gium had been a bru­tal crime, and that Britain ‘could not with­out dis­hon­our have refused to take part in the present war.’ ” Oth­er men of let­ters the War Pro­pa­gan­da Bureau could con­vince to sign on, in addi­tion to Kipling, a fel­low rarely called insuf­fi­cient­ly patri­ot­ic, includ­ed “defend­er of unortho­dox thought by unortho­dox meth­ods” G.K. Chester­ton.

You can take a close-up look at the com­plete list of sig­na­to­ries with their brief bios, as well as the sig­na­tures them­selves, by click­ing at the image of the New York Times page up above. (Then click again to zoom in.) Eng­land may not, in the event, have lost the First World War, but the buoy­an­cy its writ­ers pro­vid­ed its fight­ing spir­it had lit­tle to do with it. Ger­many “respond­ed to the dec­la­ra­tion by bring­ing togeth­er an even larg­er assort­ment of artists, authors, and sci­en­tists to sign the Man­i­festo of the Nine­ty-Three, an astound­ing doc­u­ment which denied any Ger­man wrong­do­ing in Bel­gium and bewil­der­ing­ly accused the Allies of ‘incit­ing Mon­go­lians and negroes against the white race.’ ”

Sev­er­al of the British writ­ers involved, most notably H.G. Wells, even­tu­al­ly devel­oped a pub­lic cyn­i­cism toward the war. “The uni­ty of vision and pur­pose the dec­la­ra­tion so strong­ly implied,” as Milne mild­ly puts it, “did not endure.”

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Col­or Pho­tos From World War I, on the Ger­man Front

Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

British Actors Read Poignant Poet­ry from World War I

Frank W. Buck­les, The Last U.S. Vet­er­an of World War I

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The C.I.A.‘s “Bestiary of Intelligence Writing” Satirizes Spook Jargon with Maurice Sendak-Style Drawings

in Comedy, Creativity, English Language, History | October 17th, 2014

Ten years in acad­e­mia gave me a healthy dis­like of clichéd jar­gon, as well as an appre­ci­a­tion for jokes about it. There are a few, like the aca­d­e­m­ic sen­tence gen­er­a­tor and Ph.D. Comics, that cap­ture a bit of what it’s like to go to school and work in high­er ed. Cor­po­rate drones, of course, have Office Space and Dil­bert. But what about the spooks, those name­less, face­less agents who work tire­less­ly away in the base­ment of Lan­g­ley, doing who knows what to whom? Where does the C.I.A. go to laugh at its pecu­liar brand of hack­neyed dou­ble­s­peak? Not that we were sup­posed to know this, but per­haps many of them turn to an arti­cle called “the Bes­tiary of Intel­li­gence Writ­ing” in a 1982 copy of inter­nal agency newslet­ter Stud­ies in Intel­li­gence.

Medi­um describes this odd piece as a “zoo of fic­tion­al fau­na,” and like that strange lit­er­ary form, the medieval Euro­pean bes­tiary (often a source of satire and cri­tique), this 17-page arti­cle, with foot­notes, sin­gles out the most offen­sive spook buzz­words as though they were car­di­nal sins—naming 15 mem­bers of “the Col­lec­tion” in all, each one rep­re­sent­ed by its own Mau­rice Sendak-like pen­cil-drawn beast and a descrip­tion of its habits. The two-head­ed beast at the top, Mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary Analy­sis, is a “hybrid—the fruit of the casu­al mat­ing of stan­dard forms of Analy­sis.” Just above, we have Height­ened Ten­sions, “the adult form of Con­ven­tion­al Tensions—Tensions that have acquired stilts by thriv­ing on a rich diet of pover­ty, mal­nu­tri­tion and espe­cial­ly alien­ation.” Sounds like rough work, this spy game….

Most of the beasts are cud­dly enough, some mis­chie­vous, some per­haps dead­ly. Above, we have Dire Straits and below, Para­me­ters. “The Agency author and artist detailed 15 mon­sters in all—complete with illus­tra­tions,” writes Medi­um, “Both of their names are redact­ed in the doc­u­ment. We’ll nev­er know just which CIA agents turned their hand towards snarky polit­i­cal satire.” The doc­u­ment comes to us via a cache of records declas­si­fied in a law­suit filed by for­mer agency employ­ee Jef­fry Scud­der. We do know that the two anony­mous lam­poon­ists were inspired by A Polit­i­cal Bes­tiary, book by James Kil­patrick, car­toon­ist Jeff Mac­Nel­ly, and for­mer sen­a­tor and pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Eugene McCarthy. See the full, bone dry arti­cle here, and think about the work talk that might dri­ve you to such cre­ative extremes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The CIA’s Style Man­u­al & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writ­ing Like a Spy

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

How the CIA Turned Doc­tor Zhiva­go into a Pro­pa­gan­da Weapon Against the Sovi­et Union

Declas­si­fied CIA Doc­u­ment Reveals That Ben Franklin (and His Big Ego) Put U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty at Risk

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

Typed Portraits of Literary Legends: Kerouac, Saramago, Bukowski & More

in Art, Literature | October 15th, 2014

Artists have used all sorts of odd media to cre­ate por­traits, every­thing from gui­tar picks to dice to wood­en eggs. Add to this list Brazil­ian type artist Álvaro Fran­ca, who uses the type­writer. Instead of com­pos­ing lit­er­ary por­traits of his heroes, Fran­ca types out lit­er­al por­traits. The prin­ci­ple of the pic­tures are the same grey-scale print­ing used in news­pa­pers or, if you spent time in the com­put­er lab in the 1990s, those dot matrix images that were such the rage among com­put­er nerds. Using a com­put­er, Fran­ca breaks the image down into dis­crete pix­els and adds one or more key­strokes to that pix­el. ‘I’ and ‘O’ seem to work for lighter greys while visu­al­ly dense let­ters like ‘x’and “m” are used for the dark­er end of the spec­trum.

As he writes in on his web­site:

Type­writ­ten Por­traits is an exper­i­men­tal art project. Dur­ing my exchange in the Cam­bridge School of Art, I devel­oped a tech­nique for imag­ing gray scale with the type­writer and, from there, I made por­traits of five of my favorite authors in lit­er­a­ture who worked on type­writ­ers. The series is still ongo­ing and there are plans for five more pic­tures.

You can see a time-lapse video of Fran­ca cre­at­ing a por­trait of beat icon Jack Ker­ouac above. And below you can see a few more pic­tures includ­ing Charles Bukows­ki and Jose Sara­m­a­go here.

via Boing Boing

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Draw­ings of Jean-Paul Sartre

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

Jorge Luis Borges, After Going Blind, Draws a Self-Por­trait

The Distortion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Created “a McDonald’s Generation of Music Consumers”

in Music | October 13th, 2014

It’s an old joke at this point—the hipster’s retro-obses­sion with vinyl is an affec­ta­tion as bogus as lou­vered sun­glass­es and high-waist­ed acid washed jeans, right? Well, there are plen­ty of peo­ple who buy records and lis­ten to them, too. There are even peo­ple who buy and lis­ten to cas­sette tapes, imag­ine that! You can count me in both camps, and it isn’t because—or only because—I love the look and feel of these ana­log cul­tur­al arti­facts or that I’m nos­tal­gic for sim­pler times. It’s because I love the sound. Even cheapo cas­sette tapes can often sound bet­ter to me than the medi­um of music we’ve all grown so accus­tomed to over the last decade or so—the MP3.

Begin­ning in the CD era, the so-called “Loud­ness Wars” more or less killed the dynam­ics of record­ed music, push­ing every sound to the absolute limit—from the most del­i­cate­ly plucked acoustic gui­tar string to a black met­al singer’s most demon­ic roar. With­out the pleas­ing push-pull of musi­cal dynam­ics, songs lose their depth and pow­er. Once the music is released as prod­uct, it suf­fers anoth­er indig­ni­ty in the data com­pres­sion of MP3s and stream­ing ser­vices, for­mats that—according to high-end audio com­pa­ny Harmon—“have dimin­ished the qual­i­ty and flat­tened the emo­tion” of music. In the short film above, The Dis­tor­tion of Sound, Har­mon brings togeth­er a num­ber of engi­neers, pro­duc­ers, and musi­cians, includ­ing big names like Quin­cy Jones, Slash, Hans Zim­mer, and Snoop Dogg to dis­cuss what Har­mon acoustic engi­neer Dr. Sean Olive, calls “the val­ley of sound qual­i­ty” we’ve sup­pos­ed­ly reached in the last five years.

Harmon’s Chief Engi­neer Chris Lud­wig claims that data com­pres­sion (not audio compression—a dif­fer­ent tech­nol­o­gy), “removes up to 90% of the orig­i­nal song.” With our low-qual­i­ty MP3s and cheap, tin­ny ear­buds and lap­top speak­ers, says Zim­mer, we’ve become “a McDonald’s gen­er­a­tion of music con­sumers.” It’s a depress­ing real­i­ty for audio­philes and musi­cians, but Har­mon has the solu­tion and Dis­tor­tion of Sound is essen­tial­ly an adver­tise­ment for it. Whether or not you buy in is your call, but along the way, you’ll get an inter­est­ing intro­duc­tion to the record­ing process and the his­to­ry of record­ed music. Scroll down to the bot­tom of the “Dis­tor­tion of Sound” page to see how Har­mon is “bring­ing sound qual­i­ty back.” They aren’t doing it with tape decks and turnta­bles.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Young Reveals the New Killer Gad­get That Will Save Music

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