Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
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"We accept Pay Pal." (Image by Lipedia.)
I am posting this for sale in New York because we just saw the show “Oddities” featuring the store “Obscurities” and there was a mummified cat on the show. New York will probably be more open to odd things for sale than where we live. This is a real cat preserved underneath an old barn we just tore down. We accept Pay Pal.
Burroughs published "Junky" under the pen name "William Lee" in 1953. (Image by Christiaan Tonnis.)
I have zero interest in drugs, but I think William S. Burroughs’ first novel, Junky, is pretty much perfect writing, even though he wasn’t particularly enamored with this work. In a 1965 Paris Review Q&A, a chain-smoking Burroughs recalled how the writing of Junky came about. An excerpt:
“Interviewer: When and why did you start to write?
Burroughs: I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn’t seem to be any strong motivation. I was simply endeavoring to put down in a straightforward, journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
Interviewer: Why did you feel compelled to record these experiences?
Burroughs: I didn’t feel compelled. I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day. I don’t feel the results were at all spectacular. Junky is not much of a book, actually. I knew very little about writing at that time.
Interviewer: Where was this?
Burroughs: In Mexico City. I was living near Sears, Roebuck, right around the corner from the University of Mexico. I had been in the Army for four or five months and I was there on the GI Bill, studying native dialects. I went to Mexico partly because things were becoming so difficult with the drug situation in America. Getting drugs in Mexico was quite easy, so I didn’t have to rush around, and there wasn’t any pressure from the law.”
Tags: William S. Burroughs
"That incipient insanity appears in many of the writings can hardly be doubted." (Image by Hans Olde.)
Announcing the death of God probably wasn’t a real consensus-builder back in the nineteenth century, so Friedrich Nietzsche took it on the chin in 1900 when he died. This postmortem, originally published in the Springfield Republican and reprinted in the November 4, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was a scathing takedown of the extremist philosopher. An excerpt:
“The death of Friedrich Nietzsche is of no special significance to the world, because for ten years past the famous German philosopher had been in an insane asylum, the victim of the hopeless mania and paralysis, which mercifully brought death.
That incipient insanity appears in many of the writings can hardly be doubted. The brilliant gleams of intellectual insight with which they abound are obscured by great masses of nonsense, a delirium of wild and whirling words, which only the most extreme of his disciples can pretend to understand. His favorite vehicle was the aphorism; he disdained to stoop for demonstration. He might as well have said with the man in the anecdote, ‘I am not arguing–I’m just telling you.’ He likened his aphorisms to mountain peaks and said it took long legs to stride from one to the next. And the least capable of such a stride are those who have the habit of stopping to look where they leap.
Nietzsche’s philosophy is too extravagant and Teutonic to have gained much vogue outside of Germany, but it might very well be the fin de siecle philosophy of the civilized world. It represents the extreme swing of the pendulum away from Christianity. Two things made Nietzsche foam at the mouth, Wagnerism and Christianity. His special detestation was the altruism on which Christianity is founded. His ideal man was the ‘blonde brute,’ as he called him, the magnificent, untamed animal, pitiless, ruling by the right of strength, robbing, killing, regardless of others, joyous and exultant in unbridled egotism. Altruism he hated because it was the religion of the weak and sickly, a religion, he thought, pulling men down to the common level, preventing the development of the ‘beyond-man,’ as he fanatically called his ideal brute. The weak, the halt and the blind, the sick and the unfortunate touched not his sympathies. Away with such rubbish–the refuse of the race.
What profound irony in the fact that this upholder of such savage doctrines spent his last years, helpless and imbecile, in one of those kindly retreats which the religion he despised has given the world!”
Tags: Friedrich Nietzsche
Carlo Battisti was a linguistics professor. His turn in "Umberto D." was his only role.
Vittorio de Sica’s spare yet devastating 1952 drama about a post-war Italian pensioner who careers from stubborn to suicidal is a companion piece stylistically and thematically to his most famous neorealist classic, The Bicycle Thief, and its equal (or better) creatively, despite being a colossal bomb commercially at the time of its release.
Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti, a non-professional actor) is a retired Italian government employee who spent 30 years in the Ministry of Public Works but can’t get by on his puny pension. The film opens as Umberto and his fellow elders stage an illegal protest about their treatment, but the police arrive and the seniors scurry. Owing his vituperative landlady back rent, Umberto sells his gold pocket watch for a pittance to raise some lire, but it increasingly appears like he’s a man out of time. Too dignified to beg and seemingly forgotten by old friends, Umberto and his beloved pet dog, Flike, are headed for eviction. The crestfallen gentleman determines to find his pooch a good place to stay before he voluntarily enters his final resting place.
Umberto is a self-described “broken-down old man,” but it isn’t only his coporeal crumbling or finacial fix that has him desperate. It’s also the fraying of the moral code he sees around him in a nation no longer chastened by war. The apartment’s teenage housemaid is pregnant but not sure which boy is the father. The landlady rents rooms by the hour to amorous couples. It’s no country for old men. At first Umberto is indignant about surviving such indignities. Early in the film, he says of his landlady, “She’s hoping I’ll die, but I’m not going to.” Pretty soon, however, he’s not so sure.
Recent Film Posts:
Tags: Carlo Battisti, Vittorio De Sica
Robot actors on stage and in guerrilla performances. The big advantage is that they use slightly less cocaine than human actors. (Thanks Reddit.)
“It might be possible to make the television set so slim that it could be hung on the wall.” Two futuristic reports mixed in with other stuff.
Vintage uniforms at the New York City Police Museum. (Image by official-ly cool.)
Do you have a collection of police memorabilia from your own career, or a family member…….and have no one interested in preserving this heritage? Are you concerned about the collection falling into the wrong hands (criminals, unscrupulous dealers)? If so, feel free to contact me. I am a retired police officer, with 28 years on the job. I am a nationally recognized collector of police memorabilia such as badges, cabinet cards, Gamewell police call boxes, vintage uniforms, restraint devices (handcuffs, leg irons), shoulder patches, and other items. I would love to add new items into my collection, and will travel to your location to inspect your collection and provide an estimate. Of special interest are entire collections, or pre-1900 one of a kind items. Please contact me and I’ll provide you with specifics as to my background and collecting endeavors to satisfy you that you would be in good hands.
"They're a dirty, immoral bunch." (Image by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell.)
Ebony magazine was on the scene in San Francisco in 1967 to turn out a good Summer of Love article, “The Hippies of Hashberry: A New Generation Flees Fabled American Dream.” There was, naturally, an African-American angle to part of Charles E. Brown’s piece, which explained that the hippies were more taken with Native American culture than the Beats, who were influenced by black culture. But most of the report looked at hippiedom in a broader context. An excerpt:
“A residential neighborhood just south of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is probably where it all began. The steepled rooftops of Haight-Ashbury’s Victorian homes were once the mark of middle-class respectability. Three years ago the hippies converged and christened the place Hashberry. Now, as the ‘squares’ depart to resume ‘more orderly’ lives, the hippies come in larger numbers, mostly in the summer…They come to Haight-Ashbury to be ‘where it’s at.’
‘But they carry lice and venereal disease wherever they go,’ a Haight Street realtor complains. ‘They’re a dirty, immoral bunch.’ His views are seconded by most people in authority–certainly the police in nearly every city in America.
There are those, like Episcopalian minister Malcolm Boyd, who see them in a different light: as young men and women in search of an honest morality, a morality that is foreign to middle-class Americans. ‘This is a time of great social ferment,’ says the Rev. Mr. Boyd, ‘and very little is being swept under the rug…the people who appear to be copping out–the hippies–are making serious contributions…while some who pose as liberals are not.'”
Tags: Charles E. Brown, Malcolm Boyd
Orlando Fernandez took this photo for the "New York World Telegram."
People across the country gathered information instantly from the Internet yesterday about the shooting of Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords. But in the pre-wired age, on November 22, 1963, concerned citizens of another tragedy, the assassination of President Kennedy, learned details by flocking to Morel’s Electronics shop in New York City, on Greenwich and Dey Streets. An even earlier generation had learned about the sinking of the Titanic by listening to a wireless transmission at Wanamaker’s department store.
Tags: Gabrielle Giffords, Orlando Fernandez, President John F. Kennedy
A 2008 Wall Street Journal article revealed that inmates in American prisons used cans of mackerel as currency, mostly because they were worth about a dollar and packs of cigarettes, an erstwhile coinage, had been banned. An Orlando Sentinel piece by Drew Harwell declares that honey buns are also a coin of the realm in penitentiaries as well as being a popular last meal for the condemned on death row. The sticky, sugary blobs are now more coveted behind prison walls than tobacco or envelopes or Coke. An excerpt:
“In September, the day after the New Orleans Saints beat the San Francisco 49ers in a Monday Night Football game, a fight broke out in the Alpha Pod of the Hernando County Jail.
Inmate Ricardo Sellers, 21, had punched Brandon Markey, 23, in the face, sending Markey to a Brooksville hospital, according to Hernando deputies. Sellers was angry that Markey hadn’t paid up after losing a bet over football.
His debt? Four honey buns.
For all their sweetness, honey buns have a history of involvement in prison violence. In 2006, at the Kent County Jail in Michigan, inmate Benny Rochelle dragged his cell mate off the top bunk, killing the man, when he could not find his honey bun. And last year, at the Lake Correctional Institution west of Orlando, two men were sentenced to life in prison for stabbing with crude shivs the man they thought had stolen shaving cream, cigarettes and a honey bun from their footlockers.
Yes, murder over honey buns. Was it their decadence, or their status as jailhouse currency?
In Texas and Pennsylvania, inmates bartered honey buns for tablets of Seroquel, an addictive antipsychotic abused on the street as a sleeping pill.
In Sarasota, a millionaire businessman charged with child abuse earned the nickname ‘Commissary King’ after fashioning honey buns into birthday cakes for inmates he felt he could sway to his defense.
In Naples, a bail bondsman was accused of giving an inmate hundreds of dollars’ worth of honey buns over 13 years as rewards for referring him business.”
Tags: Benny Rochelle, Brandon Markey, Drew Harwel, Ricardo Sellers
Quebec researcher Jean-Christophe Laurence recently showed tech gadgets that have fallen into disuse (floppy disks, ColecoVision game cartridges, Fisher-Price turntables, etc.) to schoolchildren and asked them to figure out what they were once used for. “Oh, I though it was a bomb,” one child says when examining an 8-track player. Great stuff. (Thanks Reddit and Geekosystem.)
Tags: Jean-Christophe Laurence
Pagans pray to a golden idol. (Image by A. Sargent.)
• Taken from the 1893 Brooklyn Daily Eagle Almanac.
"Sometimes the monkey goes out for a stroll on the beach."
This story from the August 12, 1894 Brooklyn Daily Eagle explains why so few barber shops these days have pet monkeys. An excerpt:
“A chief attraction of the barber shop attached to Schillinger’s hotel on Rockaway Beach is a monkey, which the barber plays with in the absence of faces to scrape or hair to cut. Sometimes the monkey goes out for a stroll on the beach. Yesterday afternoon he was peregrinating when little Ellen Mason of Allen street and Railroad avenue, who was also out for a stroll, happened to meet him. The child became frightened, and ran with the monkey in hot pursuit. In a playful way the monkey perched on one of Ellen’s arms and bit a good piece out of it. The child screamed, which had the effect of attracting the barber’s attention, who grabbed the miscreant by the tail as he was meditating another assault. The child was carried home and her wound bandaged.
Ellen’s father last night made application to Justice Smith for a warrant to shoot the monkey. It was granted.”
Tags: Ellen Mason, Justice Smith
A driver education class for first graders in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1954. Not such a bad idea, really. Jimmy Stewart narrates.
Tags: Jimmy Stewart
March 22, 2010: Sarah Palin–“Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!’ Pls see my Facebook page.”
March 25, 2010: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords–“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action.”
January 8, 2011: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shot in Tucson rampage; federal judge killed.
"tiny tim apocalypse."
A few search engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Subtly suggesting to this guy that maybe he should trim the beard a little since 2009.
In the article, Brian MacKinnon hinted that he would get plastic surgery and try to enter medical school under a new identity.
In 1997 Granta published its “Ambition” issue. It contains a really great piece called “I Was Brandon Lee,” written by journalist Ian Parker, who is now a staff writer for the New Yorker. The story profiles a brazen impostor named Brian MacKinnon, a Scottish man who in 1995 went back and attended his old high school again when he was 32, pretending to be “Brandon Lee,” a Canadian teen who excelled academically, enjoyed extracurriculars and dreamed of being a doctor when he “grew up.”
One of the most interesting things about the case is that administrators, teachers and fellow students convinced themselves that the oldish-looking MacKinnon was 17, even though the truth stared them in the face. An excerpt:
“Gwyneth Lightbody was surprised, but hoped she did not show her surprise. ‘I said, ‘Well–in you come.” She told me that ‘He did not look like your typical teenager. I assumed he was an adult, but when you’re presented with facts…I mean, in teaching, you see all sorts of strange sights. It could be he had some illness that made him age rapidly–or something.’
On the first day she met some fellow teachers mid-morning. ‘We were all saying, ‘Have you got a pupil that looks old?’ We all thought he was an adult. But we assumed everything had been done, and he was just a bit of an oddity.’ Pupils were doing the same, trying to make Brandon fit his own story–by reminding themselves, for example, of the wide range in teenage body types. ‘I had a boyfriend who was over six feet then,’ one student said to me; another said: ‘I could think of boys with beards and hairy chests. If someone says they’re seventeen, you’re not going to turn round and say no, no you’re not.’ By lunch it seems MacKinnon had been accepted as an old-looking, odd-looking teenager–an alien from Canada–rather than an adult who looked his age.”
"Unique Valentine's Day gift." (Image by Andrew Dunn.)
Cow Skull & Antlers – UNIQUE VALENTINES DAY GIFT FOR A COLLECTOR
Genuine Cow skull with horns & teeth
Originally purchased at an American Indian Pow Wow
Also comes with REAL mounted horns & a pair of deer antlers
Depending on how you define OXO, Tennis for Two was either the first or second video game. A paddle contest displayed on an oscilloscope, the game was created by physicist and pinball fan William Higinbotham, who debuted it in 1958 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Oh, and Higinbotham also helped build the first atomic bomb and later became an outspoken opponent of nukes. From his 1994 New York Times obituary:
“William A. Higinbotham, a physicist who developed electronic components for the first atomic bomb and then became a leading advocate of controlling nuclear weapons, died on Thursday at his home in Gainesville, Ga. He was 84.
The cause was emphysema, his family said.
Mr. Higinbotham was a group leader in electronics at Los Alamos, N.M., where the first atomic bomb was developed during World War II. But he soon helped establish a group of scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, that warned about the risks posed by nuclear weapons unless they were tightly controlled.
Mr. Higinbotham has also been called the grandfather of modern video games. In 1958, as a senior physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, he built for the laboratory’s annual public show what was very possibly the first video game — a tennis game that was displayed on a tiny cathode ray tube.”
Tags: William Higinbotham
All three articles excerpted are contained Mitchell''s great collection, "Up in the Old Hotel."
Three wonderful opening sentences from articles written by the unimpeachable New Yorker legend Joseph Mitchell.
••••••••••
From “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (1956):
“When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries there.”
••••••••••
From “Hit on the Head with a Cow” (1938):
“When I have time to kill, I sometimes go to the basement of a brownstone tenement on Fifty-ninth Street, three-quarters of a block west of Columbus Circle, and sit on a rat-gnawed Egyptian mummy and cut up touches with Charles Eugene Cassell, an old Yankee for whose bitter and disorderly mind I have great respect.”
••••••••••
From “Goodbye, Shirley Temple” (1939):
“I’ve been going to Madame Visaggi’s Third Avenue spaghetti house off and on since speakeasy days, and I know all the old customers.”
Tags: Joseph Mitchell
From a 1977 radio interview for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Quirks and Quarks program. (Thanks Treehugger.)
Tags: Isaac Asimov
New York City has earthquakes, but they’re so minor we never feel them. In most instances, the earth prefers to swallow us up one by one. But it’s different in Los Angeles.
L.A.’s tempermental turf is the subject of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, a volume on the topic by David L. Ulin. I remember Ulin’s writing from back in the day when he wrote book reviews for Newsday. He’s worked at the Los Angeles Times for a number of years now.
Among other earthquake-related topics, Ulin’s book looks at the thorny issue of earthquake prediction, by scientists and psychics, the concerned and the kooky. An excerpt about Linda Curtis, Seismological Secretary of the Southern California field office of the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena:
“Curtis is, in many ways, the USGS gatekeeper, the public affairs officer who serves as a frontline liaison with the community and the press. Her office sits directly across the hall from the conference room, and if you call the Survey, chances are it will be her low-key drawl you’ll hear on the line. In her late forties, dark-haired and good-humored, Curtis has been at the USGS since 1979, and in that time, she’s staked out her own odd territory as a collector of earthquake predictions, which come across the transom at sporadic but steady intervals, like small seismic jolts themselves.
‘I’ve been collecting almost since day one,’ she tells me on a warm July afternoon in her office, adding that it’s useful for USGS to keep records, if only to mollify the predictors, many of whom view the scientific establishment with frustration, paranoia even, at least as far as their theories are concerned.
‘Basically,’ she says, ‘we are just trying to protect our reputation. We don’t want to throw these predictions in the wastebasket, and then a week later…’ She chuckles softly, a rolling R sound as thick and throaty as a purr. ‘Say somebody predicted a seven in downtown L.A., and we ignored it. Can you imagine the reaction if it actually happened? So this is sort of a little bit of insurance. If you send us a prediction, we put it in the file.'”
••••••••••
“Plus–the city of Los Angeles and its millions of people”:
Tags: David L. Ulin, Linda Curtis
Misunderstood even by its own studio at the time of its release, director Robin Hardy’s debut film, a tale about a prim Scottish police sergeant investigating a missing-child case on a private island, uses a fiendish, economical screenplay by Anthony Shaffer to mock everything in its path, even itself.
Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) is stonewalled by the locals from the second a police helicopter deposits him on remote Summerisle, a Scottish burg known for its capacity to grow produce. It initially seems like this will be a straightforward case for the experienced lawman, but it’s actually something altogether kinkier, thanks to the prurient islanders.
Howie, a devout Christian, is appalled by the pagan sexual rituals performed openly and wantonly by the isle’s batshit inhabitants, who like to pray, dance and sing naked. Even the chaste Howie has to look twice when the tavern owner’s bawdy daughter Willow (Britt Ekland) displays her charms. And Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), the village’s leader, may be the biggest wackjob of them all. Trying hard to focus on his work as the town’s licentious Mayday festival approaches, Howie interrogates one lewd, lying local after another as he zeroes in on the missing girl, who may have been murdered in some sort of sick ritual sacrifice.
What’s amazing about Wicker Man is that despite lazily being labeled a horror film, it’s really a breezy and funny whodunit until its famous conclusion, almost working as a comedy of manners, as joyous as it is sinister. It’s like an elaborate practical joke, albeit one being played by bloodthirsty pagans. The amusement emanates not only from Howie’s stunned reactions to the gleeful heathenism but from the good Christian looking down on the islanders, conveniently forgetting that his own religion is based on a brutal sacrifice. “You’ll simply never understand the nature of sacrifice,” Howie is told at one point, but what he can’t understand he may have no choice but to accept.•
Tags: Anthony Shaffer, Britt Ekland, Christopher Lee, Edward Woodward, Robin Hardy
Bold futuristic designs during the race for space.
Tags: André Courréges