From David Remnick’s excellent 1991 Washington Post coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ignominious ouster from the Kremlin, which occurred after he dismantled the Cold War Soviet machinery, leaving the former superpower less a danger to the rest of the world but seemingly no less a danger to itself:
“Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose battle to reform socialism has ended with the collapse of Leninist ideology and the Soviet Union, left the Kremlin tonight an exhausted and bitter man.
In his final days, Gorbachev told aides that he felt ‘balanced’ and ‘at peace’ with his choices, his place in history. But as he sat in the eerie quiet of his office last weekend receiving visitors and watching news reports on television, he learned that the presidents of the former Soviet republics, who had met to form the new Commonwealth of Independent States, had discussed not only an end to the Soviet Union but, with unconcealed relish, the details of his pension. Down the hall, members of President Boris Yeltsin’s Russian government were already taking measurements and inventory for their imminent move into the Kremlin.
‘For me, they have poisoned the air,’ Gorbachev confided to one reporter. ‘They have humiliated me.’
Gorbachev has tried hard to conceal his emotions, to cover them over with pride and the language of political euphemism. Yet his sense of rejection and betrayal from all sides seems no less profound for him than it was for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was ousted in 1964, or for Winston Churchill when he was summarily voted out of 10 Downing St. after leading Britain to victory in World War II. Four months ago, Gorbachev’s closest aides in the Communist Party, the military and the KGB arrested him and made clear an implicit threat of murder. Once back in Moscow, Yeltsin and other republics’ leaders leached him of all authority, making him look hollow and weak.”
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In 1996, Gorbachev is interviewed by noted male impersonator, Rosie Charles:
If you’d like, they can stuff the crust with cheese, comrade:
From Hunter S, Thompson’s essay, “The Hippies,” which was originally published in the Collier’s Encyclopedia 1968 Yearbook:
Everyone seems to agree that hippies have some kind of widespread appeal, but nobody can say exactly what they stand for. Not even the hippies seem to know, although some can be very articulate when it comes to details.
“I love the whole world,” said a 23-year-old girl in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, the hippies’ world capital. “I am the divine mother, part of Buddha, part of God, part of everything.
“I live from meal to meal. I have no money, no possessions. Money is beautiful only when it’s flowing; when it piles up, it’s a hang-up. We take care of each other. There’s always something to buy beans and rice for the group, and someone always sees that I get “grass” [marijuana] or “acid” [LSD]. I was in a mental hospital once because I tried to conform and play the game. But now I’m free and happy.”
She was then asked whether she used drugs often.
“Fairly,” she replied. “When I find myself becoming confused I drop out and take a dose of acid. It’s a short cut to reality; it throws you right into it. Everyone should take it, even children. Why shouldn’t they be enlightened early, instead of waiting till they’re old? Human beings need total freedom.
“That’s where God is at. We need to shed hypocrisy, dishonesty, and phoniness and go back to the purity of our childhood values.”
The next question was “Do you ever pray?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I pray in the morning sun. It nourishes me with its energy so I can spread my love and beauty and nourish others.”•
“On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing, a forty-one-year-old research scientist at Manchester University, was found dead by his housekeeper. Before getting into bed the night before, he had taken a few bites out of an apple that was, apparently, laced with cyanide. At an inquest, a few days later, his death was ruled a suicide. Turing was, by necessity rather than by inclination, a man of secrets. One of his secrets had been exposed two years before his death, when he was convicted of “gross indecency” for having a homosexual affair. Another, however, had not yet come to light. It was Turing who was chiefly responsible for breaking the German Enigma code during the Second World War, an achievement that helped save Britain from defeat in the dark days of 1941. Had this been publicly known, he would have been acclaimed a national hero. But the existence of the British code-breaking effort remained closely guarded even after the end of the war; the relevant documents weren’t declassified until the nineteen-seventies. And it wasn’t until the eighties that Turing got the credit he deserved for a second, and equally formidable, achievement: creating the blueprint for the modern computer.”
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Alan Turing the Cat who, by the way, pretty much sucks at math:
Time magazine heralded the advent of the Digital Age in its March 1, 1995 issue, which included an essay by Stewart Brand called “We Owe It All to the Hippies.” The piece argued, quite rightly, that the impetus for our booming tech sector came from the counterculture, courtesy of dropouts, phreaks, and hackers. An excerpt:
“In the 1960s and early ’70s, the first generation of hackers emerged in university computer-science departments. They transformed mainframes into virtual personal computers, using a technique called time sharing that provided widespread access to computers. Then in the late ’70s, the second generation invented and manufactured the personal computer. These nonacademic hackers were hard-core counterculture types — like Steve Jobs, a Beatle- haired hippie who had dropped out of Reed College, and Steve Wozniak, a Hewlett-Packard engineer. Before their success with Apple, both Steves developed and sold ‘blue boxes,’ outlaw devices for making free telephone calls. Their contemporary and early collaborator, Lee Felsenstein, who designed the first portable computer, known as the Osborne 1, was a New Left radical who wrote for the renowned underground paper the Berkeley Barb.
As they followed the mantra ‘Turn on, tune in and drop out,’ college students of the ’60s also dropped academia’s traditional disdain for business. ‘Do your own thing’ easily translated into ‘Start your own business.’ Reviled by the broader social establishment, hippies found ready acceptance in the world of small business. They brought an honesty and a dedication to service that was attractive to vendors and customers alike. Success in business made them disinclined to ‘grow out of’ their countercultural values, and it made a number of them wealthy and powerful at a young age.
The third generation of revolutionaries, the software hackers of the early ’80s, created the application, education and entertainment programs for personal computers. Typical was Mitch Kapor, a former transcendental-meditation teacher, who gave us the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, which ensured the success of IBM’s Apple-imitating PC. Like most computer pioneers, Kapor is still active. His Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he co- founded with a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, lobbies successfully in Washington for civil rights in cyberspace. In the years since Levy’s book, a fourth generation of revolutionaries has come to power. Still abiding by the Hacker Ethic, these tens of thousands of netheads have created myriad computer bulletin boards and a nonhierarchical linking system called Usenet. At the same time, they have transformed the Defense Department-sponsored ARPAnet into what has become the global digital epidemic known as the Internet. The average age of today’s Internet users, who number in the tens of millions, is about 30 years. Just as personal computers transformed the ’80s, this latest generation knows that the Net is going to transform the ’90s. With the same ethic that has guided previous generations, today’s users are leading the way with tools created initially as ‘freeware’ or ‘shareware,’ available to anyone who wants them. Of course, not everyone on the electronic frontier identifies with the countercultural roots of the ’60s. One would hardly call Nicholas Negroponte, the patrician head of M.I.T.’s Media Lab, or Microsoft magnate Bill Gates ‘hippies.’ Yet creative forces continue to emanate from that period. Virtual reality — computerized sensory immersion — was named, largely inspired and partly equipped by Jaron Lanier, who grew up under a geodesic dome in New Mexico, once played clarinet in the New York City subway and still sports dreadlocks halfway down his back. The latest generation of supercomputers, utilizing massive parallel processing, was invented, developed and manufactured by Danny Hillis, a genial longhair who set out to build ‘a machine that could be proud of us.’ Public-key encryption, which can ensure unbreakable privacy for anyone, is the brainchild of Whitfield Diffie, a lifelong peacenik and privacy advocate who declared in a recent interview, ‘I have always believed the thesis that one’s politics and the character of one’s intellectual work are inseparable.’ Our generation proved in cyberspace that where self-reliance leads, resilience follows, and where generosity leads, prosperity follows. If that dynamic continues, and everything so far suggests that it will, then the information age will bear the distinctive mark of the countercultural ’60s well into the new millennium.”
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As mentioned in the article, the Osborne I, the first portable computer:
Donald Barthelme’s reading list was originally published in 2003 by the Believer. In it, the postmodern short-story master made 81 suggestions to his students. Some are out-of-print, but pretty much all can be had online. You can add Barthelme’s own 60 Stories to the list.
Nothing counterintuitive about this Wired post by Brandon Keim about research that suggests that city dwellers are more stressed out than rural counterparts and more prone to mental illness. Our ability to handle social stress and stimuli isn’t very elastic, which is bad news since social stress and stimuli aren’t decreasing anytime soon, not with those wired gadgets tucked neatly in our pockets adding to the urban ills of noise, traffic and crowds. Still, I’d rather live in a city. An excerpt:
“Compared to their rural counterparts, city dwellers have higher levels of anxiety and mood disorders. The schizophrenia risk of people raised in cities is almost double. Literature on the effect is so thorough that researchers say it’s not just correlation, as might be expected if anxious people preferred to live in cities. Neither is it a result of heredity. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and mind.
What those causes are is unknown, but many researchers have speculated that urban social environments are partly responsible. After all, cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness.
‘Most people speculated that it had something to do with social environments, but there was never any direct data,’ said Meyer-Lindenberg. ‘We provide the first mechanism that links cities to mental illness via social stress.'”
The great Berenice Abbott is responsible for this classic 1935 photograph of a mini-Hooverville that rose on Houston and Mercer Streets in Manhattan. The Great Depression hit hard and people were really hurting. (Notice the baby carriage outside one of the shanties, and the framed pictures hanging, an attempt at some semblance of normalcy.) Abbott had returned to New York City in 1929 after years in Paris and was stunned by how the building boom and the economic collapse had changed the city. She spent the next decade cataloging the transformation. An excerpt from Abbott’s 1991 obituary in the New York Times:
“Perhaps her most famous picture,a view of New York at night taken from the top of the Empire State Building, presents the city as a glittering tapestry of light, with massive buildings thrusting up from the criss-crossed streets. In her New York photographs, many of which were collected in the bookChanging New York(1939), Miss Abbott also provided an invaluable historical record of the physical appearance of the city at a time when it was undergoing rapid transformation.
Miss Abbott first achieved fame as a photographer in Paris in the 1920’s with her penetrating portraits of such artists and writers as James Joyce, Janet Flanner and Jean Cocteau. She is also known for a series of photographs illustrating laws and processes of physics.
As a participant in the photographic controversies of her day, Miss Abbott was an eloquent and contentious advocate of the documentary approach. In books and articles she argued that photography was uniquely a descriptive medium, and should not be used to simulate effects that could better be achieved in other arts. ‘Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium,’ she wrote in 1951. ‘It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.'”
Errol Morris, the Tolstoy of bloggers, uses his New York Times Opinionator space to tell the story of investigating whether his late brother, Noel, had a role in the creation of email alongside MIT programmer Tom Van Vleck. It’s a two-part marathon (here and here) and quite fascinating. It all apparently started with a simple 1965 memo. An excerpt:
“TOM VAN VLECK: In 1965, at the beginning of the year, there was a bunch of stuff going on with the time-sharing system that Noel and I were users of. We were working for the political science department. And the system programmers wrote a programming staff note memo that proposed the creation of a mail command. But people proposed things in programming staff notes that never got implemented. And well, we thought the idea of electronic mail was a great idea. We said, “Where’s electronic mail? That would be so cool.” And they said, “Oh, there’s no time to write that. It’s not important.” And we said, “Well, can we write it?” And we did. And then it became part of the system.
••••••••••
Completely unrelated: Errol Morris reveals his five favorite films.
Norman Mailer’s book Of a Fire on the Moon, about American space exploration during the 1960s, was originally published as three long and personal articles for Life magazine in 1969: “A Fire on the Moon,” “The Psychology of Astronauts,” and “A Dream of the Future’s Face.” Mailer used space travel to examine America’s conflicted and tattered existence–and his own as well. In one segment, he reports on a banquet in which Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket engineer who became a guiding light at NASA, meets with American businessmen on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch. An excerpt:
Therefore, the audience was not to be at ease during his introduction, for the new speaker, who described himself as a “backup publisher,” went into a little too much historical detail. “During the Thirties he was employed by the Ordinance Department of the German government developing liquid fuel rockets. During World War II he made very significant developments in rocketry for his government.”
A tension spread in this audience of corporation presidents and high executives, of astronauts, a few at any rate, and their families. There was an uneasy silence, an embarrassed pall at the unmentioned word of Nazi–it was the shoe which did not drop to the floor. So no more than a pitter-patter of clapping was aroused when the speaker went quickly on to say: “In 1955 he became an American citizen himself.” It was only when Von Braun stood up at the end that the mood felt secure enough to shift. A particularly hearty and enthusiastic hand of applause swelled into a standing ovation. Nearly everybody stood up. Aquarius, who finally cast his vote by remaining seated, felt pressure not unrelated to refusing to stand up for The Star-Spangled Banner. It was as if the crowd with true American enthusiasm had finally declared, “Ah don’ care if he is some kind of ex-Nazi, he’s a good loyal patriotic American.”
Von Braun was. If patriotism is the ability to improve a nation’s morale, then Von Braun was a patriot. It was plain that some of these corporate executives loved him. In fact, they revered him. He was the high priest of their precise art–manufacture. If many too many an American product was accelerating into shoddy these years since the war, if planned obsolescence had all too often become a euphemism for sloppy workmanship, cynical cost-cutting, swollen advertising budgets, inefficiency and general indifference, then in one place at least, and for certain, America could be proud of a product. It was high as a castle and tooled more finely than the most exquisite watch.
Now the real and true tasty beef of capitalism got up to speak, the grease and guts of it, the veritable brawn, and spoke with fulsome language in his small and well-considered voice. He was with friends on this occasion, and so a savory and gravy of redolence came into his tone, his voice was not unmusical, it had overtones which hinted of angelic super-possibilities one could not otherwise lay on the line. He was when all was said like the head waiter of the largest hofbrau in heaven. “Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen,” Von Braun began, “it is with a great deal of respect tonight that I meet you, the leaders, and the captains in the mainstream of American industry and life. Without your success in building and maintaining the economic foundations of this nation, the resources for mounting tomorrow’s expedition to the moon would never have been committed…. Tomorrow’s historic launch belongs to you and to the men and women who sit behind the desks and administer your companies’ activities, to the men who sweep the floor in your office buildings and to every American who walks the street of this productive land. It is an American triumph. Many times I have thanked God for allowing me to be a part of the history that will be made here today and tomorrow and in the next few days. Tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed,” He went on to talk of space as “the key to our future on earth,” and echoes of his vision drifted through the stale tropical air of a banquet room after coffee–perhaps he was hinting at the discords and nihilism traveling in bands and brigands across the earth. “The key to our future on earth. I think we should see clearly from this statement that the Apollo 11 moon trip even from its inception was not intended as a one-time trip that would rest alone on the merits of a single journey. If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar gravel pit and then forget the whole thing”–he spoke almost with contempt of the meager resources of the moon–“we would certainly be history’s biggest fools. But that is not our intention now–it never will be. What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth. We are expanding the mind of man. We are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in so doing all mankind will benefit. All mankind will reap the harvest…. What we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down upon the moon is a completely new step in the evolution of man.”•
Writing about The Truman Showreminded me of Rob Walker’s brilliant, frightening 2004 article, “The Hidden (in Plant Sight) Persuaders,” in the New York Times Magazine. Penned before social media really took off, the article examines howBzzAgent, a Boston-based marketing firm contracts citizens to engage in surreptitious whisper campaigns to promote products. That person in the mall conspicuously reading a just-published book or loudly mentioning a great new band–they may be BzzAgents. Most amazingly, apart from earning a few small rewards which they often don’t bother to collect, these people are unpaid volunteers just wanting to be a part of a stealth machinery, like airport cultists merely trying to plant the idea in your head that flowers are nice to buy. The article’s opening:
“Over the July 4 weekend last summer, at cookouts up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest, guests arrived with packages of Al Fresco chicken sausage for their hosts to throw on the grill. At a family gathering in Kingsley, Mich. At a small barbecue in Sag Harbor, N.Y. At a 60-guest picnic in Philadelphia.
We know that this happened, and we even know how various party guests reacted to their first exposure to Al Fresco, because the Great Sausage Fanout of 2004 did not happen by chance. The sausage-bearers were not official representatives of Al Fresco, showing up in uniforms to hand out samples. They were invited guests, friends or relatives of whoever organized the get-togethers, but they were also — unknown to most all the other attendees — ‘agents,’ and they filed reports. ‘People could not believe they weren’t pork!’ one agent related. ‘I told everyone that they were low in fat and so much better than pork sausages.’ Another wrote, ‘I handed out discount coupons to several people and made sure they knew which grocery stores carried them.” Another noted that ‘my dad will most likely buy the garlic” flavor, before closing, ‘I’ll keep you posted.’
These reports went back to the company that Al Fresco’s owner, Kayem Foods, had hired to execute a ‘word of mouth’ marketing campaign. And while the Fourth of July weekend was busy, it was only a couple of days in an effort that went on for three months and involved not just a handful of agents but 2,000 of them. The agents were sent coupons for free sausage and a set of instructions for the best ways to talk the stuff up, but they did not confine themselves to those ideas, or to obvious events like barbecues. Consider a few scenes from the life of just one agent, named Gabriella.
At one grocery store, Gabriella asked a manager why there was no Al Fresco sausage available. At a second store, she dropped a card touting the product into the suggestion box. At a third, she talked a stranger into buying a package. She suggested that the organizers of a neighborhood picnic serve Al Fresco. She took some to a friend’s house for dinner and (she reported back) ‘explained to her how the sausage comes in six delicious flavors.’ Talking to another friend whom she had already converted into an Al Fresco customer, she noted that the product is ”not just for barbecues” and would be good at breakfast too. She even wrote to a local priest known for his interest in Italian food, suggesting a recipe for Tuscan white-bean soup that included Al Fresco sausage. The priest wrote back to say he’d give it a try. Gabriella asked me not to use her last name. The Al Fresco campaign is over — having notably boosted sales, by 100 percent in some stores — but she is still spreading word of mouth about a variety of other products, and revealing her identity, she said, would undermine her effectiveness as an agent.
The sausage campaign was organized by a small, three-year-old company in Boston called BzzAgent, but that firm is hardly the only entity to have concluded that the most powerful forum for consumer seduction is not TV ads or billboards but rather the conversations we have in our everyday lives. The thinking is that in a media universe that keeps fracturing into ever-finer segments, consumers are harder and harder to reach; some can use TiVo to block out ads or the TV’s remote control to click away from them, and the rest are simply too saturated with brand messages to absorb another pitch. So corporations frustrated at the apparent limits of ‘traditional’ marketing are increasingly open to word-of-mouth marketing. One result is a growing number of marketers organizing veritable armies of hired ‘trendsetters’ or ‘influencers’ or ‘street teams’ to execute ‘seeding programs,’ ‘viral marketing,’ ‘guerrilla marketing.’ What were once fringe tactics are now increasingly mainstream; there is even a Word of Mouth Marketing Association.”
Much to his chagrin, Gay Talese was the subject of a 1973 New York profile by Aaron Latham, who followed the famed New Journalist as he did first-hand research on the sexual revolution, dropping trou and taking notes at massage parlors and the sex club Plato’s Retreat, for a book that would ultimately be titledThy Neighbor’s Wife.Many years after the infamous article, Talese told the Paris Reviewthat the New York piece had “tainted me, trivialized me…I’m pictured in a massage parlor on West Fifty-seventh Street, frolicking around in the nude. I didn’t have that much dignity after that was published.” An excerpt from the infamous article:
“To research his book on America’s sex change, Gay went to work managing not one but two massage parlors. He served as the day manager at one and as the night manager at the other. Gay defends massage parlors by saying, ‘It is obviously better to be masturbated by massage girls than to masturbate yourself.’
His day would start about noon, when he would walk over to The Middle Earth, at 51st Street and Third Avenue, and open up. The Middle Earth stands around the corner from the Random House building where Nan Talese works as an editor. While Nan sat her desk on the eleventh floor of a glass-and-steel skyscraper, Gay would sit at this desk on the second floor of a brownstone. While up above Nan flipped through the pages of manuscripts, down below Gay would flip through the pages of a photograph album displaying pictures of the girls he had available. When the customer selected a photo he liked, Gay would call the girl’s name and then ask for $18. The girl chosen would appear and lead the customer into a massage room. Half an hour later, she would say goodbye to the customer, stuff the sheet in a garbage can that served a laundry hamper, and go to the bathroom to wash her hands.
At 7 p.m., Gay would leave The Middle Earth and proceed to his second job at The Secret Life, at 26th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he not only took the customers’ money ($15), but frisked them before he let them have a girl. He twice removed guns from men who had come for massages (one was a policeman). Gay held the guns at the desk until the men were finished with the girls. He did not want his book to turn into an In Cold Blood.”
____________________________
“At Plato’s Retreat, you can make your dreams come true”:
What was termed New Journalism reached critical mass in the 1960s, though Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling and others had been doing it for decades. The colorful writing appeared prominently in the New York Herald Tribune, New York (which was born of the Trib), Esquire and numerous other periodicals. The style varied, but, oh, there was style. “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’: Eyewitness Report By Tom Wolfe,” was the New York article, published in its February 14, 1972 issue, that defined the liberation of ink-stained wretches after it had overthrown the accepted order. An excerpt in which Wolfe recalls the furious work ethic behind the birth of the new:
“The Herald Tribune assigned me split duties, like a utility infielder’s. Two days a week I was supposed to work for the city desk as a general assignment reporter, as usual. The other three days I was supposed to turn out a weekly piece of about 1,500 words for the Herald Tribune’s new Sunday supplement, which was called New York. At the same time, following the success of ‘There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmm) . . . . .’—I was also cranking out stories for Esquire. This setup was crazy enough to begin with. I can remember flying to Las Vegas on my two regular days off from the Herald Tribune to do a story for Esquire—’Las Vegas!!!!’—and winding up sitting on the edge of a white satin bed in a Hog-Stomping Baroque suite in a hotel on the Strip—in the décor known as Hog-Stomping Baroque there are 400-pound cut-glass chandeliers in the bathrooms—and picking up the phone and dictating to the stenographic battery of the Trib city desk the last third of a story on demolition derbies in Long Island for New York—’Clean Fun at Riverhead’—hoping to finish in time to meet a psychiatrist in a black silk mohair suit with brass buttons and a shawl collar, no lapels, one of the only two psychiatrists in Las Vegas County at that time, to take me to see the casualties of the Strip in the state mental ward out Charleston Boulevard. What made it crazier was that the piece about the demolition derbies was the last one I wrote that came anywhere close to being 1,500 words. After that they started climbing to 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 words. Like Pascal, I was sorry, but I didn’t have time to write short ones. In nine months in the latter part of 1963 and first half of 1964 I wrote three more long pieces for Esquire and twenty for New York. All of this was in addition to what I was writing as a reporter for the Herald Tribune city desk two days a week. The idea of a day off lost all meaning. I can remember being furious on Monday, November 25, 1963, because there were people I desperately needed to talk to, for some story or other, and I couldn’t reach them because all the offices in New York seemed to be closed, every one. It was the day of President Kennedy’s funeral. I remember staring at the television set . . . morosely, but for all the wrong reasons.”
In the ’60s and ’70s, before people were connected virtually, excuses were found for homemakers to come together in groups. These gatherings sometimes formed around Tupperware–non-biodegradable plastic food containers. This 1961 commercial depicts a Tupperware home party.
In a 1969 ad placed in Field & Stream, Tupperware tried to create a secondary male market for their goods: “Harry, what on earth are you doing with my Tupperware? What all smart sportsmen are doing. Using Tupperware, their wives’ favorite food containers, for their favorite hunting and fishing gear. Giving it the protection it deserves. And gets only in Tupperware. Tupperware is airtight. Waterproof. Moisture-proof. Dustproof. Rustproof. And that’s proof enough. Besides, Tupperware won’t rattle, dent or break. Tupperware has containers you can use for everything from scopes to spinners. From flies to film. From pliers to pipe tobacco. Best of all, you don’t need a license to buy Tupperware. And there’s no limit either.”
This classic photograph depicts Mongolian giant Öndör Gongor, who lived approximately from 1880 to 1925, though not too much is certain about his life. For instance, he either worked as an accountant, an elephant keeper, a bodyguard or a wrestler. The sketchy biographical details are collected at The Tallest Man website. An excerpt:
“According to an interview with his daughter G. Budkhand, published in 1997, Ondor Gongor was the third child of a herder named Pürev, who lived in the Dalai Choinkhor wangiin khoshuu, or what is today Jargalant sum of Khövsgöl aimag. He was not particularly big as child, only had long fingers. Because of him always eating a lot, he became a bit unpopular with his parents, and eventually was sent to Ikh Khüree. One day, he was summoned to the Bogd Khan, given fresh clothes, and after a while he was even made to marry a woman who worked as one of the Bogd Khan’s seamstresses, on the grounds that according to a horoscope by the Bogd Khan, their fates were connected.
The accounts are a bit at odds about what Gongor’s occupation at the Bogd Khan’s court was: accountant and keeper of the Bogd Khan’s elephant, the Bogd Khan’s bodyguard, or wrestler. In 1913, he travelled to Russia with a delegation headed by Sain Noyon Khan Namnansüren. Later, he is said to have worked at the toll office.
Ondor Gongor had four children. He died in his home area in the late 1920s, before reaching the age of 50. His corpse is said to have been stolen during the funeral – at that time, the deceased were laid out in the steppe to be devoured by birds and other animals – and now on display in a US museum.”
From “Ticket to the Fair,” David Foster Wallace’s great 1994 Harper’s piece about the mixed pleasures of the Illinois State Fair, which seems to have been his entrée into magazine journalism:
“Sitting on the bench, I watch the carnies way below. They mix with no one, never seem to leave Happy Hollow. Late tonight, I’ll watch them drop flaps to turn their booths into tents. They’ll smoke cheap dope and drink peppermint schnapps and pee out onto the midway’s dirt. I guess they’re the gypsies of the rural United States–itinerant, insular, swarthy, unclean, not to be trusted. You are in no way drawn to them. They all have the same blank hard eyes as people in the bathrooms of East Coast bus terminals. They want your money and maybe to look up your skirt; beyond that you’re just blocking the view. Next week they’ll dismantle and pack and haul up to the Wisconsin State Fair, where they’ll never set foot off the midway they pee on. While I’m watching from the bench, an old withered man in an lllinois Poultry Association cap careers past on one of those weird three-wheeled carts, like a turbocharged wheelchair, and runs nearly over my sneaker. This ends up being my one unassisted interview of the day, and it’s brief. The man keeps revving his cart’s engine like a biker. ‘Traish,‘ he calls the carnies. ‘Lowlifes.’ He gestures down at the twirling rides. ‘Wouldn’t let my own kids go off down there on a goddamn bet.’ He raising pullets down near Olney. He has something in his cheek. ‘Steal you blind. Drug-addicted and such. Swindle you nekked them games. Traish. Me, I ever year we drive up, I carry my wallet like this here.’ He points to his hip. His wallet’s on a big steel clip attached to a wire on his belt; the whole thing looks vaguely electrified. Q: ‘But do they want to? Your kids? Hit the Hollow?’ He spits brownly. ‘Hail no. We all come for the shows.’ He means the livestock competitions. ‘See some folks, talk stock. Drink a beer. Work all year round raising ’em for show birds. It’s for pride. And to see folks. Shows’re over Tuesday, why, we go on home.’ He looks like a bird himself. His face is mostly nose, his skin loose and pebbly like poultry’s. His eyes are the color of denim. ‘Rest of this here’s for city people.’ Spits. He means Springfield, Decatur, Normal. ‘Walk around, stand in line, eat junk, buy soovneers. Give their wallet to the traish. Don’t even know there’s folks come here to work up here.’ He gestures up at the barns, then spits again, leaning way out over the cart to do it. ‘We come up to work, see some folks. Drink a beer. Bring our own goddamn food. Mother packs a hamper. Hail, what we’d want to go on down there for! No folks we know down there.’ He laughs. Asks my name. ‘It is good to see folks,’ he says before leaving me and peeling out in his chair, heading for the chicken din. ‘We all stayin’ up to the motel. Watch your wallet, boy.'”
Nikola Tesla, background, with Mark Twain, who desperately needed to use the can.
Mark Twain’s interest in science unsurprisingly brought him into contact with the greatest of all electricians, Nikola Tesla, and the two became friends. During one meeting, a Tesla invention had an unusual affect on the writer. An excerpt from a Katherine Krumme article:
“Yet another excitement awaited Tesla’s visitors at the laboratory. Tesla had been perfecting a mechanical oscillator, a sort of engine that would produce alternating current of a high frequency. The inventor had noticed an interesting effect of the machine: it produced significant vibrations. Tesla wondered if these vibrations might have therapeutic or health benefits, and one day when Mark Twain was at his lab the author asked if he might experience these vibrations himself.
As the story goes, Mr. Twain stood on a platform of the machine while Tesla set the oscillator into operation. Twain was enjoying himself greatly and exclaimed: ‘This gives you vigour and vitality.’ After some time Tesla warned the writer that he should come down, but Twain was having fun and he refused. Tesla again insisted, but Twain stayed on the machine for several minutes more until, suddenly, he exclaimed: ‘Quick, Tesla. Where is it?’ Tesla directed his friend to the restroom. Twain had experienced first hand what had been known to the laboratory workers for some time: the laxative effect of the machine’s vibrations.” (ThanksMarginal Revolution.)
••••••••••
Jack and Meg with a Tesla Coil in Coffee and Cigarettes:
The opening of “The Fifth Beatle,” Tom Wolfe’s 1965 kandy-kolored profile of New York disc jockey Murray the K, who horned in on Beatlemania and made himself a pop icon of sorts for a while:
“John, Paul, George, Ringo and–Murray the K!–the fifth Beatle! Does anybody out there really understand what it means that Murray the K is the Fifth Beatle? Does anybody comprehend what something like that took? Does anybody comprehend what a victory it was to become George the Beatle’s roommate in the hotel in Miami and do things like tape record conversations with George during those magic bloomings of the soul just before a man goes to sleep and bring back to the kids the sound of a pure universe with nothing but George, Murray the K and Fedders Miami air-conditioning in it? No; practically nobody out there comprehends. Not even Murray the K’s fellow disc jockey William B. Williams, of WNEW, who likes singers like Frank Sinatra, all that corny nostalgia of the New Jersey roadhouses, and says, ‘I like Murray, but if that’s what he has to do to make a buck, he can have it.’
You can imagine how Murray the K feels! He not only makes a buck, he makes about $150,000 a year, he is the king of the Hysterical Disc Jockeys, and people still look at him and think he is some kind of amok gnome. Do they know what’s happening? Here in the studio, close up, inside the glass panels, amid the microphone grilles, cue sheets and commercials in capital letters, Murray the K sits on the edge of his seat, a solidly built man, thirty-eight years old, with the normal adult worried look on his face, looking through the glass at an engineer in a sport shirt. Granted, there are Murray the K’s clothes. He has on a stingy brim straw hat, a shirt with wide lavender stripes on it, a pair of black pants so tight that have to have three-inch Chinese slits on the sides at the bottom so they will fit over the gussets of his boots. Murray the K has 62 outfits like this, elf boots, Russian hats, flipnik jerseys, but isn’t that all part of it?”
••••••••••
In 1974, Murray the K, still a name but no longer a star, promotes sock hop concerts on a morning TV show in NYC:
“The Maniac Will Be Televised,” Walter Kirn’s contribution the Atlantic‘s new feature, “The 14 Biggest Ideas of the Year,” is a meditation on how Trump and Sheen and the Tea Party brought the lunatic fringe to the mainstream, realizing that truth was negligible during a suspicious era, outscreaming the white noise of the Digital Age. Joaquin Phoenix’s 2009 attempt to become our ubiquitous madman seemed a failure at the time, but it was really just prelude. An excerpt:
“Sheen was the spilled beaker in the laboratory who proved that in an age of racing connectivity, a cokehead can be a calming presence. His branching, dopamine-flooded neural pathways mirrored those of the Internet itself, and his lips moved at the speed of a Cisco router, creating a perfect merger of form and function. Trump, though his affect is slower and less sloppy, also showed mastery of the Networked Now by speaking chiefly in paranoid innuendo. The Web, after all, is not a web of truths; its very infrastructure is gossip-shaped. The genius of Sheen and Trump and other mediapaths (Michele Bachmann belongs on this list too) is that they seem to understand, intuitively, that the electronic brain of the new media has an affinity for suspicious minds.”
In a 1993 Wired feature, “Seven Wired Wonders,” science writer James Gleick was right on target in identifying the telephone as the tool of the near-future. An excerpt:
“After a century of fading into our bedside tables and kitchen walls, the telephone — both the instrument and its network — is on the march again. As a device shrinking to pocket size, the telephone is subsuming the rest of our technological baggage — the fax machine, the pager, the clock, the compass, the stock ticker, and the television. A sign of the telephone’s power: It is pressing the computer into service as its accessory, not the other way round.
We know now that the telephone is not just a device. It is a network — it is the network, copper or fiber or wireless — sprouting terminals that may just as well be workstations as headsets or Princesses. As the network spreads, it is fostering both the universality and the individuality of human discourse. The Net itself, the world’s fastest-spreading communications medium, is the telephone network in its most liberating, unruly, and fertile new guise.
Thus Bell’s child is freeing our understanding of the possibilities that lie in ancient words: neighborhood and meeting and information and news. It is global; it is democratic; it is the central agent of change in our sense of community. It is how, and why, we are wired.”
From “The Devil and John Holmes,” Mike Sager’s 1989 Rolling Stone article about the further decline of porn star John Holmes, whose rapacious drug habit led him from adult films to even darker and more desperate corners of Tinseltown in the 1980s:
“Blood! Blood! So much blood!” Holmes was having a nightmare. Tossing and moaning, punching and kicking. “So much blood!” he groaned over and over.
Jeana was scared to death. She didn’t know what to do. Wake him? Let him scream? It was Thursday, July 2nd, 1981. After bathing at Sharon’s, Holmes had come here, to this motel in the Valley. He walked through the door, flopped on the bed, passed out.
Jeana sat very still on the edge of the bed, watching aTV that was mounted on the wall. After a while, the news. The top story was something about a mass murder. Four bodies. A bloody mess. A house on Wonderland Avenue. Jeana stood up, moved closer to the tube. “That house,” she thought. Things started to click. “I’ve waited outside that house. Isn’t that where John gets his drugs?”
Hours passed, John woke. Jeana said nothing. They made a run to McDonald’s for hamburgers. They watched some more TV. Then came the late-night news.The cops were calling it the Four on the Floor Murders. Dead were Joy Miller, Billy DeVerell, Ron Launius, Barbara Richardson. The Wonderland Gang. The murder weapon was a steel pipe with threading at the ends. Thread marks found on walls, skulls, skin. House tossed by assailants. Blood and brains splattered everywhere, even on the ceilings. The bodies were dis- covered by workmen next door; they’d heard faint cries from the back of the house: “Help me. Help me.” A fifth victim was carried out alive. Susan Launius, 25, Ron Launius’s wife. She was in intensive care with a severed finger and brain damage.The murders were so brutal that police were comparing the case to the Tate-LaBianca murders by the Manson Family.
Holmes and Jeana watched from the bed. Jeana was afraid to look at John. She cut her eyes slowly, caught his profile. He was frozen. The color drained from his face. She actually saw it. First his forehead, then his cheeks, then his neck. He went white.
Jeana said nothing. After a while, the weather report came on. She cleared her throat “John?”
“What?”
“You had this dream. You know, when you were sleeping? You said something about blood.”
Holmes’s eyes bulged. He looked very scared. She’d never seen him look scared before. “Yeah, well, uh,” he said. “Um, I lifted the trunk of the car, and I gave myself a nosebleed yesterday. Don’t worry.”
Paul Thomas Anderson providing commentary for scene from the Holmes documentary Exhausted.
Ray Bradbury explains to Oriana Fallaci why we should travel into space, in the 1966 book, If The Sun Dies:
For the same reason that makes us bring children into the world. Because we’re afraid of death and darkness, and because we want to see our image reflected and perpetuated to immortality. We don’t want to die, but death is there, and because it’s there we give birth to children who’ll give birth to other children and so on to infinity. And this way we are handed down to eternity. Don’t let us forget this: that the Earth can die, explode, the Sun can go out, will go out. And if the Sun dies, if the Earth dies, if our race dies, then so will everything die that we have done up to that moment. Homer will die, Michelangelo will die, Galileo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Einstein will die, all those will die who now are not dead because we are alive, we are thinking of them, we are carrying them within us. And then every single thing, every memory, will hurtle down into the void with us. So let us save them, let us save ourselves. Let us prepare ourselves to escape, to continue life and rebuild our cities on other planets: we shall not long be of this Earth! And if we really fear the darkness, if we really fight against it, then, for the good of all, let us take our rockets, let us get well used to the great cold and heat, the no water, the no oxygen, let us become Martians on Mars, Venusians on Venus, and when Mars and Venus die, let us go to the other solar systems, to Alpha Centauri, to wherever we manage to go, and let us forget the Earth. Let us forget our solar system and our body, the form it used to have, let us become no matter what, lichens, insects, balls of fire, no matter what, all that matters is that somehow life should continue, and the knowledge of what we were and what we did and learned: the knowledge of Homer and Michelangelo, of Galileo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, of Einstein! And the gift of life will continue.•
Ragpicker's Row, 59 Baxter Street. (Image Jacob Riis.)
This classic 1898 photograph of New York City’s Ragpicker’s Row was taken by the famed muckraking journalist Jacob Riis. This impoverished section of the city was described (in the most offensive manner possible) in a 1879 New York Times article, “Flowers for the Poorest.” In that piece, a journalist tagged along with the well-meaning but dopey Ladies’ Flower and Fruit Mission, as members of the group visited the poorest quarters of Manhattan and handed out free flowers. An excerpt:
“The visitors shook loose from the crowd of children that clung to them begging for flowers, and made their way to Mulberry-street, in search of ‘Ragpicker’s Row.’ They found it at Nos. 56 and 59, and here encountered poverty in the most squalid and filthy aspects. In the little courts lying between the front and rear houses water stood in sickening fetid pools. The houses swarmed with the Italians who collect refuse, rags, bones, and bits of paper from the ash-barrels, or who work on the garbage scows, and bring back to the City much of the refuse matter once thrown away as worthless. In these houses and in these yards this reeking refuse is sorted, dried, and made up into bales. Men, women, and children engage in the work, and all are alike dirty and ragged to a degree. Most of the men are low-browed ugly-looking fellows, and many of the women are toothless hags. Occasionally there is to be seen among them a young woman holding her swathed bambino in her arms, whose face is so beautiful that, with the flat head-dress–which many of them still wear–she might be the original of the Italian Madonna. These people were the most clamorous for the flowers of any kind that had been met; nor did they wait to be bidden, but many of them helped themselves from the baskets, laughing at the efforts of the visitors to prevent them and to secure an even distribution. In this way the baskets were quickly emptied, and the visitors were glad when they were, and they were at liberty to escape from the filthy yard and their noisy occupants.”
The Atlantic tracked down(most of) Apple’s first ten employees to see what they’re doing today. An excerpt:
“#8 Chris Espinosa
Chris Espinosa was working at Apple part-time in high school.
Chris Espinosa joined Apple when he was 14, and still in high school. He’s still with the company today. On his personal blog he said he ended up with employee number eight because when CEO Michael ‘Scotty’ Scott was giving out numbers, he was at school. He arrived late and ended up with the number.”
Percy Fawcett, 1911, roughly 14 years before his disappearance.
From “The Lost City Of Z,” the 2005 New Yorker article by the great David Grann about Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who came to a mysterious end in the 1920s while exploring an isolated Amazonian civilization:
“In the first decades of the twentieth century, Fawcett had been acclaimed as one of the last of the great amateur archeologists and cartographers—men who ventured into uncharted territories with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. Fawcett survived in the jungle for years at a time, without contact with the outside world, often subsisting for days on a handful of nuts; he was ambushed by hostile tribesmen, many of whom had never seen a white man before; he emerged with maps of regions from which no expedition had returned.
Yet it was his ‘quest,’ as Fawcett called it, to find Z that most captivated Lynch. For centuries after the discovery of the New World, many Europeans believed that a fantastical kingdom of untold wealth was concealed in the ethereal landscape of the Amazon. In 1541, Friar Gaspar Carvajal, a member of the first European expedition to descend from the Andes into the Amazon, reported glimpses of white Indians and women warriors who resembled the mythical Greek Amazons. One early map of South America was adorned with minotaurs and headless beings with eyes in their chests, and well into the twentieth century the Amazon remained, as Fawcett put it, ‘the last great blank space in the world.’
Lynch’s research made him feel certain that Fawcett, unlike so many of his predecessors, was not a soldier of fortune or a crackpot. Fawcett was a recipient of the Gold Medal, the highest honor bestowed on an explorer by the Royal Geographical Society; a skilled mapmaker; and a decorated hero of the First World War. He knew the Amazon as well as anyone. His younger son, Brian, said of him, ‘True, he dreamed; but his dreams were built upon reason, and he was not the man to shirk the effort to turn theory into fact.'” (Thanks Electric Typewriter.)
•••••••••
Grann discusses the topic with that pretend pablum-puker Stephen Colbert:
