The "Little Flower," as the Mayor was known, with a big fish. (Image by C. M. Stieglitz.)
C.M Stieglitz of the long-defunct World Telegram took this classic 1939 photograph of New York’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia with a 300-pound halibut. LaGuardia, a commanding presence to say the least, was famous for everything from being one of Hitler’s earliest and most outspoken critics to reading comic strips to local children on the radio. He was also known to not be allergic to cameras. LaGuardia passed away from pancreatic cancer eight years after this photo was snapped. An exceprt from his New York Times obituary:
“A city of which he was as much a part as any of its public buildings awoke to find the little firebrand dead. Its people had laughed with him and at him, they had been entertained by his antics and they had been sobered by his warnings, and they found it difficult to believe that the voice he had raised in their behalf in the legislative halls of city and nation, on street corners and over the radio, was stilled forever.
Mayor O’Dwyer, his successor, expressed this feeling. Although Mr. La Guardia’s death was expected, the Mayor said, his passing brought with it ‘a shock of awful finality.’
‘In his death the people of the city, the State and nation have lost a great, patriotic American citizen,’ the Mayor said.”
"Each year, between 7,000 and 8,000 college students and recent graduates work full-time, minimum-wage, menial internships at Disney World." (Image by NASA.)
From “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” Ross Perlin’s fun inside look at the Disney World intern program, just published in Guernica:
“At Disney World, interns are everywhere. The bellboy carrying luggage up to your room, the monorail ‘pilot’ steering a train at forty miles per hour, the smiling young woman scanning tickets at the gate. They corral visitors into the line for Space Mountain, dust sugar over funnel cakes, sell mouse ears, sweep up candy wrappers. Mickey, Donald, Pluto and the gang may well be interns, boiling in their furry costumes in the Florida heat. Visiting the Magic Kingdom recently, I tried to count them, scanning for the names of colleges on the blue and white name tags that all ‘cast members’ wear. They came from public and private schools, community colleges and famous research universities, from across America. International interns, hailing from at least nineteen different countries, were also out in force. A sophomore from Shanghai greeted customers at the Emporium on Main Street, U.S.A. She was one of hundreds of Chinese interns, she told me, and she was looking forward to ‘earning her ears.’ Disney runs one of the world’s largest internship programs. Each year, between 7,000 and 8,000 college students and recent graduates work full-time, minimum-wage, menial internships at Disney World. Typical stints last four to five months, but the ‘advantage programs’ may last up to seven months.” (Thanks Longform.)
••••••••••
Mickey Mouse debuts in 1928:
The great Robert Smigel takes aim at the Mouse House:
Several decades ago, Manhattan had a cachet the other boroughs didn’t enjoy, and bridge-and-tunnelers, as they were called, had one strike against them based on their home address. But during the 1970s, when class was a real and palpable thing in NYC, the outsiders from the outer boroughs began storming the city on Saturday nights and made it their own with the help of leisure suits and strobe lights. Nik Cohn captured the class consciousness of the city’s disco revolution in “Tribal Rites of a New Saturday Night,” an article in the June 7, 1976 issue of New York magazine, although he later acknowledged falsifying facts. At any rate, it became the basis of Saturday Night Fever, and that sensation made disco explode all over again. The opening of Cohn’s article:
“Within the closed circuits of rock & roll fashion, it is assumed that New York means Manhattan. The center is everything, all the rest irrelevant. If the other boroughs exist at all, it is merely as a camp joke—Bronx-Brooklyn-Queens, monstrous urban limbo, filled with everyone who is no one.
In reality, however, almost the reverse is true. While Manhattan remains firmly rooted in the sixties, still caught up in faction and fad and the dreary games of decadence, a whole new generation has been growing up around it, virtually unrecognized. Kids of sixteen to twenty, full of energy, urgency, hunger. All the things, in fact, that the Manhattan circuit, in its smugness, has lost.
They are not so chic, these kids. They don’t haunt press receptions or opening nights; they don’t pose as street punks in the style of Bruce Springsteen, or prate of rock & Rimbaud. Indeed, the cults of recent years seem to have passed them by entirely. They know nothing of flower power or meditation, pansexuality, or mind expansion. No waterbeds or Moroccan cushions, no hand-thrown pottery, for them. No hep jargon either, and no Pepsi revolutions. In many cases, they genuinely can’t remember who Bob Dylan was, let alone Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary. Haight Ashbury, Woodstock, Altamont—all of them draw a blank. Instead, this generation’s real roots lie further back, in the fifties, the golden age of Saturday nights.
The cause of this reversion is not hard to spot. The sixties, unlike previous decades, seemed full of teenage money. No recession, no sense of danger. The young could run free, indulge themselves in whatever treats they wished. But now there is shortage once more, just as there was in the fifties. Attrition, continual pressure. So the new generation takes few risks. It goes through high school, obedient; graduates, looks for a job, saves and plans. Endures. And once a week, on Saturday night, its one great moment of release, it explodes.” (Thanks to The Electric Typewriter.)
“Today Werner Herzog has chosen to be interviewed indoors. Perhaps it’s for the best. One of the more puzzling and improbable moments in the legendary 68-year-old German director’s career, and there have been many, came when he was doing a filmed interview for a BBC program called The Culture Show in 2006. He was standing a few miles from here on some barren scrubland in the Hollywood Hills, chosen so that the city of Los Angeles would be the backdrop falling away behind him, and he was explaining how nobody seems to care about his films in Germany when an unexpected noise interrupted him. Herzog flinched. Understandably so, because he had just been shot.
It has never been established who was doing the shooting—if it was more than just someone with an air rifle taking a random pop at a stranger for fun, it may have been because Herzog and the film crew were trespassing. Afterward, Herzog refused to call the police, fearing a SWAT-type overreaction, and he also declined, for the same reason, to seek medical help. Still, the pellet made its mark—under his mauve and pink windmill-motif boxer shorts, now blood-blotted, was a seeping entry wound near Herzog’s groin.
This shooting is an event he still chooses to play down—’It was kind of insignificant’—although I get the sense he also quite likes the opportunity to play it down. ‘It was just very silly,’ he insists. ‘I have been shot at, without being hit, much more seriously. What I experienced here was completely harmless.’ Barely worth noting. Though when I persist in challenging him to name one other person who has ever been shot in this way while doing a TV interview in America, he naturally has no answer. ‘The funny thing is, people sometimes believe I make things up, and nobody would believe it if it hadn’t been caught on tape. Nobody would have believed it.’
He is right. It seemed so unlikely, so preposterous, and yet somehow so perfectly Herzog. So much so, I tell him, that I think some people still suspect it was a great stunt he’d somehow arranged.
‘You may speculate as much as you want,’ says Herzog, a man whose own work frequently involves fascinating juxtapositions of fact and fantasy, and who is long accustomed to drawing such suspicions.”
Goddard, far left, was a rocket man. (Image by National Geographic Society.)
Known as the “Father of American Rocketry,” Dr. Robert H. Goddard believed even before the 1920s that we could reach the stars, though some scoffed at him. In this classic 1940 photograph, Goddard and his team labor over a rocket with turbopumps in his workshop in Roswell, New Mexico. An excerpt from a Time article about the naysayers who took aim at Goddard’s far-flung ambitions:
“Robert Goddard was not a happy man when he read his copy of the New York Times on Jan. 13, 1920. For some time, he had feared he might be in for a pasting in the press, but when he picked up the paper that day, he was stunned.
Not long before, Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., had published an arid little paper on an outrageous topic, rocket travel. Unlike most of his colleagues, Goddard believed rocketry was a viable technology, and his paper, primly titled ‘A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,’ was designed to prove it. For the lay reader, there wasn’t much in the writing to excite interest, but at the end, the buttoned-up professor unbuttoned a bit. If you used his technology to build a rocket big enough, he argued, and if you primed it with fuel that was powerful enough, you just might be able to reach the moon with it.
Goddard meant his moon musings to be innocent enough, but when the Times saw them, it pounced. As anyone knew, the paper explained with an editorial eye roll, space travel was impossible, since without atmosphere to push against, a rocket could not move so much as an inch. Professor Goddard, it was clear, lacked ‘the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.'”
Open Culture posted a bunch of Andy Warhol screen tests, including the Dennis Hopper one from 1965, which reminded me of “The Easy Rider Runs Wild in the Andes,” a great 1970 Life magazine article about Hopper that I came across on Google Books. At the time of the Life piece, Hopper had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted as a filmmaker thanks to the Easy Rider phenomenon. Such freedom poses dangers for a free spirit. Hopper went to Peru with a cast that included Samuel Fuller and Toni Basil, and embarked on a quixotic, confused project, eventually entitled The Last Movie, which pissed away all of his new capital. His career never completely recovered until his insane turn in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
From Brad Darrach’s Life article: “Peru has painfully learned to live with earthquakes, avalanches, tidal waves, jaguars and poisonous snakes. But Dennis Hopper was something else. When the director of Easy Rider arrived in Lima several months ago, a reporter from La Prensa asked his opinion of marijuana (illegal in Peru) and ‘homosexualism.’ Taking a long reflective pull on an odd-looking cigarette. Dennis said he thought everybody should ‘do his thing,’ and then allowed that he himself had lived with a lesbian and found it ‘groovy.’ No remotely comparable statement had ever appeared in a Peruvian newspaper. The clergy screamed, the ruling junta’s colonels howled. Within 24 hours the government denounced the article and issued a decree repealing freedom of the press.
Dennis Hopper was undisturbed. Furor trails him like a pet anaconda. At 34, he is known in Hollywood as a sullen renegade who talks revolution, settles arguments with karate, goes to bed with groups and has taken trips on everything you can swallow or shoot.
On the other hand, in the salons and galleries of Los Angeles and New York he is recognized as a talented poet, painter, sculptor, photographer and as a leading collector of pop-art. He is also, after eight years on the movie industry’s blacklist, the hottest director in Hollywood. Easy Rider, which cost only $370,000, is rapidly approaching a projected $50 million gross. In the process it has polarized a new film audience of under-30s, generated a new school of talented young directors such as Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Rush and Melvin Van Peebles, and established the style of a New Hollywood in which producers wear love beads instead of diamond stickpins and blow grass when they used to chew Coronoas.”
From a fun 1974 People article about the wedded life of roller derby royalty, “Dynamite” Mike Gammon and Judi McGuire, who married in their mid-teens and separated a few years after this piece was published:
Mike Gammon and his wife Judi McGuire are leading practitioners of one of the world’s most demeaning professions. They are stars of the New York Chiefs of the roller derby which is closer to third-rung Minsky or carny than organized sport. Their six-game-a-week 51-week season is an escape-less loop of one-night stands, in smoggy arenas, with nothing in between but smelly buses, crummy motels and junk food. The circuit is a demanding test of their family’s ability to stay intact. They get to see their 12-year-old daughter Sharilee only about once every six weeks. And the Gammons put up with all these indignities to perform before lunatic crowds, bellowing the foulest of four-letter abuse, pelting them with old sneakers and plastic cups full of beer, and generally carrying on in a manner that makes ice-hockey rinks seem, by comparison, like Wimbledon.
For nearly 16 years now, Mike, 31, Judi, 33, and their marriage have toughed out their little hell on roller skates with seemingly minimal damage. They look clean-cut enough to play a TV situation comedy. Physically they are not noticeably marked, because those skirmishes that bring out the animal in the audience are often artfully faked. (“The winning and losing team is predetermined before the match, but there can be a lot of jammings and other free-lance rough stuff along the way,” says one player.) Why do the Gammons put up with it all? “If you want a paycheck, you skate,” Mike explains. “We don’t like it much, but when you’re hungry, you’re hungry.” And because he dropped out of school after the eighth grade—it is one of the few ways to pull in $45,000. That is between them, though, and includes supplements for extra work: Mike is one of the roustabouts who install the track pre-game, and Judi stitches up the clawed and tattered uniforms during the endless bus trips.
Judi sometimes regrets that having started in the derby in their teens, “we had almost no time to grow up.” But she concludes stoically, “It’s been a good life, because we’ve been together nearly 24 hours a day, and that’s made us stronger.”•
__________________________________
“This is roller derby…they call it America’s fastest growing sport…that it is…15 million people watch it every week on television.”
From “David Hockney’s iPhone Passion,” a 2009 New York Review of Books article about an older artist becoming obsessed with new technology, by the brilliant non-fiction writer Lawrence Weschler:
“Hockney first became interested in iPhones about a year ago (he grabbed the one I happened to be using right out of my hands). He acquired one of his own and began using it as a high-powered reference tool, searching out paintings on the Web and cropping appropriate details as part of the occasional polemics or appreciations with which he is wont to shower his friends.
But soon he discovered one of those newfangled iPhone applications, entitled Brushes, which allows the user digitally to smear, or draw, or fingerpaint (it’s not yet entirely clear what the proper verb should be for this novel activity), to create highly sophisticated full-color images directly on the device’s screen, and then to archive or send them out by e-mail. Essentially, the Brushes application gives the user a full color-wheel spectrum, from which he can choose a specific color. He can then modify that color’s hue along a range of darker to lighter, and go on to fill in the entire backdrop of the screen in that color, or else fashion subsequent brushstrokes, variously narrower or thicker, and more or less transparent, according to need, by dragging his finger across the screen, progressively layering the emerging image with as many such daubings as he desires.
Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image.”
"There were greetings in many different languages on the disc, and my folks thought it would be nice to have a kid represent one."
IEEE Spectrum has aninterviewwith Nick Sagan, the writer and son of astronomer Carl Sagan, about NASA’s Voyager mission, a pair of unmanned space probes launched in 1977. The probes visited Jupiter and Saturn, before heading to the outer solar system. Each carried a golden record, which contained pictures, recordings and a greeting from Earth. Carl chose the record’s contents; Nick, who was then a child, taped a message for the disc on behalf of the planet’s children. An excerpt from the Spectrum piece:
“IEEE Spectrum: What do you remember of the Voyager project?
Nick Sagan: It was very quick and mysterious to me. There were greetings in many different languages on the disc, and my folks thought it would be nice to have a kid represent one. My dad plopped me down in front of a mic in a room at Cornell University, where he taught, and asked me what I would want a visiting extraterrestrial to know. I came up with ‘Hello, from the children of Planet Earth.’
IEEE Spectrum: None of it struck you as odd?
Nick Sagan: These questions were normal in my home. When your dad is an astronomer, there’s a certain focus on this. We’d go out and look at the stars, and there were often astronomers and science fiction writers, like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, over our house for dinner.
At the time, I was too young to fully understand what Voyager was. But now I’m humbled to be part of it. There’s a possibility that a piece of me will exist long after I’m gone and the Earth ceases to exist. It’s a kind of immortality.”
“Zizek is bearded and bearish, and restricts his wardrobe to proletarian shirts and bluejeans, with an occasional excursion into corduroy. He owns neither jacket nor tie. He speaks six languages, is made uncomfortable by conversational lapses, and avoids them through the ample use of animated monologue. He speaks English at high speed in an accent recalling that of Latka, the character of indeterminate Mitteleuropean origin played by Andy Kaufman on Taxi. If, in the progress of intellectual fashions, Jacques Derrida’s appeal was that he was fascinatingly difficult, and Michel Foucault’s was that he was sexily rigorous, then Zizek’s lies in his accessible absurdity. Unlike earlier academic superstars, however, Zizek has no disciples: there is no School of Zizek, no graduate students writing Zizekian readings of the novels of Henry James or of Star Trek for their theses. Such a thing would be impossible, since one of the characteristics of Zizek’s work is that he applies his critical methodology even to the results of his own critical inquiry, which is another way of saying that he contradicts himself all the time. Eric Santner, who teaches at the University of Chicago and is a dose friend of Zizek, says, ‘One of his fundamental gestures is this: he will present a problem, or a text, then produce the reading that you have come to expect from him, and then he will say, ‘I am tempted to think it is just the opposite.'” To a generation of students raised on Seinfeld, Zizek’s examination of the minutiae of popular culture – his observation, for example, that when he sees a tube of toothpaste advertising ‘thirty per cent free’ he wants to cut off the free third and put it in his pocket – could not be more familiar, and neither could the ironic, self-undermining gesture. As Zizek might put it, he may appear to be a serious leftist intellectual, but is it not the case that he is in fact a comedian?”
From Joan Didion’s 1966 article, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (originally entitled, “How Can I Tell Them There’s Nothing Left?”), which profiled Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller, a mother of three who murdered her husband in lovely San Bernardino one sun-drenched day:
Of course she came from somewhere else, came off the prairie, in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio. For this is a Southern California story. She was born on January 17, 1930, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the only child of Gordon and Lily Maxwell, both school teachers hers and both dedicated to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church whose members observe the Sabbath on Saturday, believe in an apocalyptic Second Coming, have a strong missionary tendency, and, if they are strict, do not smoke, drink, eat meat, use makeup, or wear jewelry, including wedding rings. By the time Lucille Maxwell enrolled at Walla Walla College in College Place, Washington, the Adventist school where her parents then taught, she was an eighteen-year-old possessed of unremarkable good looks and remarkable high spirits. “Lucille wanted to see the world,’ her father would say in retrospect, ‘and I guess she found out.”
The high spirits did not seem to lend themselves to an extended course of study at Walla Walla College and in the spring of 1949 Licille-Maxwell met and married Gorgon (“Cork”) Miller, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of Walla Walla and of the University of Oregon dental school, then stationed at Fort Lewis as a medical officer. “Maybe you could say it was love at first sight,” Mr. Maxwell recalls. “Before they were ever formally introduced, he sent Lucille a dozen and a half roses with a card that said even if she didn’t come outon a date with him, he hoped she’d find the roses pretty anyway.” The Maxwells remember their daughter as a “radiant” bride.
Unhappy marriages so resemble one another that we do not need to know too much about the course of this one. There may or may not have been trouble on Guam, where Cork and Lucille Miller lived while he finished his Army duty. There may or may not have been problems in the small Oregon town where he first set up private practice. There appears to have been some disappointment-about their move to California: Cork Miller bad told friends that he wanted to become a doctor, that he was unhappy as a dentist and planned to enter the Seventh-Day Adventist College of Medical Evangelists at Loma Linda, a few miles south of San Bernardino. Instead he bought a dental practice in the west end of San Bernardino County, and the family settled there, In a modest house on the kind of street where there are always tricycles and revolving credit and dreams about bigger houses, better streets. That was 1957. By the summer of 1964 they had achieved–the bigger house on the better street and the familiar accouterments of a family on its way up: the $30,000 a year, the three children for the Christmas card, the picture window, the family room, the newspaper photographs that showed “Mrs. Gordon Miller, Ontario Heart Fund Chairman.” They were paying the familiar price for it. And they had reached the familiar season of divorce.•
Joan Didion interviewed in Los Angeles in the 1970s by NBC News.
An excerpt from the 2009 GQ article, “Tent City, U.S.A.” an eyewitness account of a latter-day Hooverville in Fresno, California, by George Saunders, the fiercely humanistic short story writer who uses humor the way Twain and Vonnegut did:
“OH, LOTS OF PEOPLE die in here.
The Ho man died. Gladys died. Ferdinand over here died. A guy by the name of Tupac got ran over by a train right here. Richard died, the guy they called the Birdman. He got hit by a train, just back in January, January 31. Because the Mission denied him to stay overnight, he got a blanket from a friend and stayed behind one of the train cars, and lo and behold, they were switching at night, and he was asleep, and evidently they just popped him like a strawberry basically. Really a super guy. But mentally challenged. He would shoot birds, thinking they were there. Very strange fellow. Not with an actual gun, no. Just with his fingers.
There was Edson. He was alcoholic, a good man, but mind you, his son was a professional baseball player. He could have lived differently, but he chose to be out here drinking. There was a lady got hit on the freeway couple months ago. She was crossing the 99, wasn’t paying attention. We’ve had overdoses, stabbings. One homeless guy got burned in his blankets. Some juveniles poured gas on him. We had two people shot here in the past three months. One of them, I was sitting right here when I heard five sharp pops from under the bridge. Then here came this little gal, racing by, shrieking, I told you I’d do it! I told you I’d do it! And she disappeared from Tent City and was never seen again, and the guy she shot in the face died.” (Thanks Longform.)
Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Luce, 1954. (Image by Phil Stanziola.)
An outline of the idea behind Time magazine, which struggles for relevance in the endless news cycle of the Internet age, from “Untimely,” Jill Lepore’s smart 2010 New Yorker article about the feud between glossy Goliaths Henry Luce and Harold Ross:
“Time is an artifact of the Age of Efficiency. Americans, Luce and Hadden believed, were too busy to read the newspaper. The New York Times was ‘unreadable,’ too dense, too dull. Time would be everything, abridged: a week’s worth of news in twenty-odd pages that could be read in an hour. An early bid for subscribers read ‘Take TIME: It’s Brief.’ Each issue was to contain about a hundred articles, none more than four hundred words long. Luce and Hadden put together dummy issues by cutting sentences out of seven days’ worth of newspapers and pasting them onto pages. At first, Time was a kind of assembly-line news, manufactured in a Taylorized shop. But they wanted it to be more than a “digest” (the word has something alimentary in common with what’s now called a “feed”). They sorted the news into categories—National Affairs, Foreign Affairs, The Arts, Sport—which, amazingly, hadn’t been done before, or not nearly as crisply. ‘The one great thing was simplification,” Luce said. “Simplification by organization, simplification by condensation, and also simplification by just being damn well simple.’ The Simplified Spelling Board, endorsed by Theodore Roosevelt, had excised the extra ‘e’ from ‘abridgement.’ Turning the Times into Time saved a letter right there. No wasted letters, no wasted thought. As Luce and Hadden explained in the magazine’s prospectus, ‘TIME is interested—not in how much it includes between its covers—but in HOW MUCH IT GETS OFF ITS PAGES INTO THE MINDS OF ITS READERS.’” (Thanks Longform.)
"There was a time in Long Island's cultural history when the whole world looked here for the next big trend in rock 'n' roll." (Image by Malco23.)
In this classic photograph, the Siouxsie and the Banshees frontwoman performs at the legendary Long Island rock club, My Father’s Place. The Roslyn-based live-music venue was once a leading stage for unknown rock artists, from Bruce Springsteen to Meat Loaf to Hall & Oates. It closed its doors in 1987. From a 2000 New York Times piece recalling the cabaret:
“THERE was a time in Long Island’s cultural history when the whole world looked here for the next big trend in rock ‘n’ roll. That was between 1974 and 1980, the heyday of My Father’s Place, a cabaret in Roslyn.
And Michael Epstein, known as Eppy, ran the whole shebang.
Along with My Father’s Place, which opened on Memorial Day in 1971 with a concert by Richie Havens, a confluence of entities created a scene that would influence music for decades to come.
Dance-oriented rock ‘n’ roll, punk, singer-songwriters and New Wave music had become the rage — and it was essential for musicians to come here to perform. My Father’s Place, WLIR-FM and the dance club Malibu in Long Beach were at the center of popular music.
Today, 13 years after My Father’s Place closed, Mr. Epstein still longs for the club. ‘Once it’s in your blood, you never lose that feeling,’ he said.”
•••••••••
Talking Heads at My Father’s Place on May 10, 1978:
"They pulled out a pistol and a knife and stripped gamblers of more than $5,600." (Image by Immanuel Giel.)
An excerpt from Kirk Semple and Jeffrey E. Singer’s New York Times articleabout the city’s illegal Chinese gambling parlors, several of which have recently been hit by armed robbers:
“One popular mah-jongg parlor in Flushing thrived, until recently, in a two-bedroom apartment where as many as 20 people played at a time. Some regulars would stay for as long as two days, taking catnaps on a sofa. They would eat takeout food, and in the evening the boss would oversee the preparation of more elaborate meals.
At parlors devoted to mah-jongg, the stakes do not get very high, with maximum wins and losses usually amounting to no more than several hundred dollars per person in a session. In other parlors, however, players may experience swings involving tens of thousands of dollars.”
From the “1985” section of New York magazine’s fun oral history marking the 25th anniversary of the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill:
“Diamond: Yauch and I got an apartment in Chinatown—apartment might be an overstatement. It was on Chrystie Street when it was still really Chinatown, and it was an entirely sweatshop building. We could play music literally any time of the day or night.
Diamond: I did go [to Vassar] for a semester, and it was hard. I had to go [to my mom] and say, ‘It’s a total waste of your money and my time, because all I want to do is be in this band.’ Rick and Russell were like, ‘You’re gonna make a video for She’s On It.’ And in our minds, we were the biggest deal in the entire world. Our friends might not have agreed. But you know what I mean—all of a sudden we were making a video, and it started to get shown. We were big on the local video channel U68.
Ross: They went up to perform at the Apollo, and Beastie Boys shows at this point were a little haphazard at best. But by the second song, Mike D’s doing the Jerry Lewis, and the whole Apollo Theater is going, ‘Go, white boys! Go, white boys!’ In my head I’m like, ‘My friends are gonna be famous!’
Horovitz: And then the Madonna tour happened. We did like three songs, and then I did the electric boogaloo for a minute, and then we fucked with the audience. They hated us. Kids literally in tears, parents wanting to kill us. It was awesome. They wanted to kick us off the tour, and Madonna was like, ‘These guys are staying, these guys are great.’ We got back to New York, and we were really feeling ourselves. We were crushing our old spots.”
"The Atomic Gardening Society had the lofty goal of furthering scientific research. It was really an early crowd-sourcing, citizen-scientist movement." (Image by Nicosmos.)
American gardening took a turn for the unusual after WWII when some gardeners purposely irradiated plants to produce mutations which they hoped would be beneficial. In the wake of Japan’s nuclear disaster, Pruned interviews scientist and gardening historian Paige Johnson, who guesses at the results of these experiments, which were not well-documented, but may still be having an impact on our food chain. An excerpt from theQ&A:
“Pruned: What were some of the mutations these gardens produced?
Johnson: While the scientific experiments are documented pretty well in the journal literature we actually don’t know what mutations came from the home experiments. The Atomic Gardening Society had the lofty goal of furthering scientific research. It was really an early crowd-sourcing, citizen-scientist movement. Very ahead of its time!
But obviously there are issues around properly controlling experiments in people’s backyards, and there was no avenue to ‘publish’ results. A really interesting part of this investigation is what unknown progeny might be out there.
Pruned: So really there might be an atomic heirloom tomato that’s now growing on somebody’s allotment garden. They’re thinking that it’s strangely misshapen and uniquely pigmented because it’s an heirloom, but in fact it’s a gamma-mutated variety. It’s a kind of amnesia, one that’s actually fairly common when it comes to the foods that we eat. Pick any vegetable or meat at Wal-Mart or the local farmer’s market, and more likely than not, there’s a long history there of genetic manipulation that’s largely forgotten.
Johnson: The atomic plant varieties certainly fit it with your ‘food amnesia’ premise; it would be rare for the consumer to know anything about the genetic history of the food we consume, much less if it came out of the mid-century atomic experiments. But the path from an irradiated seed, or a gamma garden, to the table can be anything but straight.”
Any revolution that lasts longer than five minutes will be televised (with limited commercial interruption) on every screen the size of a pocket or a pin. But I would guess media is as bad as ever at anticipating protest signs going up and walls coming down. (Image by Adam Turner.)
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gil Scott-Heron
You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip out for beer during commercials, because the revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in 4 parts without commercial interruptions. The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary. The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia. The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal. The revolution will not get rid of the nubs. The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother.
There will be no pictures of you and Willie Mae pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run, or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance. NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32 on reports from 29 districts. The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting downbrothers on the instant replay. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young beingrun out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process. There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving for just the proper occasion.
Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and women will not care if Dick finally gets down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day. The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news and no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose. The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth. The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be no re-run, brothers. The revolution will be live.
"Avoid the 'cloud’ at all cost!" (Image by Saperaud.)
Professor Steffen Schmidt of Iowa State University provides an historical perspective on cloud computing, even though he fails to mention that the cloud has given us endless storage and much better stability than old mainframes ever did. His take:
“When computers started appearing at the university (Iowa State University in my case) they were large mainframes in a big building. We worked in a small ‘computer room’ down the hall. All there was in that room were a bunch of ‘dumb terminals,’ CRT screens and a keyboard that connected to the VAX mainframe computer (see picture). We used FORTRAN as I recall. Nothing was processed or stored in our ‘computer room’ it was just a connection. When the mainframe went “down” everyone at the university was down.
Also, everything was at turtle speed because someone in the mainframe center had to upload ‘your’ data tape (yup just like old school tape recording reel to reel only bigger) onto the computer which was a pain.
We were so glad when desktop computers appeared and later laptops (and now iPads and other devices). FREE from the tyranny of the mainframe!!! Self reliance and rugged individualism (albeit often crashing locally instead of at the center). Celebrate!
Now these fool idiots are selling us ‘back to the future’ mainframes again and calling them ‘The Cloud.’ Thank God for old timers like me who remember what a disaster that was! Avoid the ‘cloud’ at all cost! The end is near! Flee for the hills and take your laptops and iPads!”
"We had to stand there and watch it burn." (Image by Magnus Mertens.)
In a new article in Texas Monthly, Pamela Colloff tries to make sense of a recent rash of church burnings in the Lone Star state and the unlikely culprits behind the blazes. An excerpt:
“Two weeks passed uneventfully. Then, in the predawn hours of February 4, Russell Memorial United Methodist Church, in Wills Point, an hour’s drive west of Tyler, went up in flames. The church stood directly across the street from the local volunteer fire department. Four nights later, smoke was seen billowing from Dover Baptist Church, in a rural area northwest of Tyler. Not long after firefighters arrived, word came over the police scanner that another church, five miles down the road, Clear Spring Missionary Baptist, was ablaze. Texas Ranger Brent Davis and ATF special agent Larry Smith, the probe’s two lead investigators, raced from one fire to the next. Davis, a former trooper who had earned his Ranger badge two years earlier, and Smith, a veteran fire investigator who had worked the crash scene at the Pentagon after 9/11, looked on helplessly as Clear Spring’s roof buckled and fell, illuminating the night sky. Firefighters, who were still struggling to suppress the blaze at Dover, had not yet hauled their water and equipment to Clear Spring. ‘We had to stand there and watch it burn,’ Smith said.
The two lawmen finally caught a lucky break on Valentine’s Day, when a customer reported some unusual graffiti in the rest room of Atwoods Ranch and Home, a Tyler hardware and farm supply store. Etched into the metal partition of the handicapped stall was an inverted cross crowned with crudely drawn flames; above it, someone had scratched the words ‘Little Hope was arson.’ Davis and Smith were elated: Because the blaze had been thought to be accidental, Little Hope had never been mentioned in news reports of the church fires. Only someone intimately familiar with the crimes would make such a claim.
On the grainy footage recorded by Atwoods’ security cameras the previous day, one man seen entering the restroom was immediately recognizable to investigators: nineteen-year-old Jason Bourque. ATF agents had visited the chubby, curly-haired teenager just two days earlier, following up on a tip from a friend who believed he was involved in the fires. Bourque had been under surveillance ever since, though his graffiti had escaped the attention of the federal agents who were trailing him. A former honor student, Eagle Scout, and state debate champion, Bourque hardly fit the profile of a church burner—he had, in fact, been a devout Baptist for most of his life. But Davis and Smith were certain they had found who they were looking for.” (Thanks Longform.)
The opening of “The Squid Hunter,” David Grann’s exciting 2004 New Yorker account about the search for that inscrutable underwater creature, the giant squid:
“On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground. Kersauson turned the wheel one way, then the other; still, the gunwales shook inexplicably in the darkness. Kersauson ordered his crew, all of whom were now running up and down the deck, to investigate. Some of the crew took out spotlights and shone them on the water, as the massive trimaran—a three-hulled, hundred-and-ten-foot boat that was the largest racing machine of its kind, and was named Geronimo, for the Apache warrior—pitched in the waves.
Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. ‘It was bigger than a human leg,’ Ragot recently told me. ‘It was a tentacle.’ He looked again. ‘It was starting to move,’ he recalled.
He beckoned Kersauson, who came down and crouched over the opening. ‘I think it’s some sort of animal,’ Ragot said.
Kersauson took the flashlight, and inspected for himself. ‘I had never seen anything like it,’ he told me. ‘There were two giant tentacles right beneath us, lashing at the rudder.’
The creature seemed to be wrapping itself around the boat, which rocked violently.” (Thanks to The Electric Typewriter.)
"The RFID chip will trip an alarm that will instantly alert the staff." (Image by Jessica F.)
Swiping towels at check-out time just got tougher as hotels have begun embedding in their linen radio-frequency chips that sound an alarm if the items are removed from the premises. FromEndgadget:
“For many travelers, stealing hotel towels or bathrobes is more pastime than petty crime. Hotels, on the other hand, apparently take it more seriously. So seriously, in fact, that some have begun embedding specially crafted RFID tags within their linens, just to help us avoid ‘accidentally’ stuffing them in our suitcases before heading to the check-out desk. The chips, designed by Miami-based Linen Technology Tracking, can be sewn directly into towels, bathrobes or bed sheets, and can reportedly withstand up to 300 wash cycles. If a tagged item ever leaves a hotel’s premises, the RFID chip will trip an alarm that will instantly alert the staff, and comprehensively humiliate the guilty party.”
Water bubbles that are carbon neutral. (Image by Eriikson Architects.)
Buckminster Fuller famously designed unorthodox, environmentally friendly edifices and automobiles that were rarely realized. Finnish architects Eriiksson are, however, currently making a Fuller-esque vision come to fruition, creating an eco-city outside of Beijing from a cluster of geodesic domes that marries futurism to a sustainable future. An excerpt from Inhabit.com:
“The Miaofeng mountain area, located about 30 km west of Beijing, is slated to be reborn as a gorgeous new ‘Ecological Silicon Valley.’ Located close to the urban metropolis of Beijing, the new city will combine research institutes for modern science and innovation with environmentally friendly and eco-efficient urban living. The master plan for the eco-city was laid out by the Finnish firm, Eriksson Architects in collaboration with Finnish ecological expertsEero Paloheimo Eco City Ltd. With goals of carbon neutrality, respect for the environment, water and energy conservation, renewable energy, and housing and amenities for all employees and visitors, the Mentougou Eco Valley aims to reduce its environmental footprint to one third that of a typical city of similar size.”
