"There is enough genius in their hatred to kill you." (Image by Commonurbock23.)
THE GENIUS OF THE CROWD
there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day
and the best at murder are those who preach against it and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
those who preach god, need god those who preach peace do not have peace those who preach peace do not have love
beware the preachers beware the knowers beware those who are always reading books beware those who either detest poverty or are proud of it beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you to kill anybody not wanting solitude not understanding solitude they will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own not being able to create art they will not understand art they will consider their failure as creators only as a failure of the world not being able to love fully they will believe your love incomplete and then they will hate you and their hatred will be perfect
like a shining diamond like a knife like a mountain like a tiger like hemlock
"The presence of such an enclave of graceless pleasures in such an environment is so improbable that only science fiction can manage it." (Image by Matthew Field.)
I was looking at The Browser and came across a book about American deserts by the late architectural critic Reyner Banham, a British expat who adored the buildings of Los Angeles. A quote from this seemingly eccentric book that I’ve yet to get my hands on:
“Las Vegas is a symbol, above all else, of the impermanence of man in the desert, and not least because one is never not aware of the desert’s all pervading presence; wherever man has not built nor paved over, the desert grimly endures – even on some of the pedestrian islands down the center of the Strip! The presence of such an enclave of graceless pleasures in such an environment is so improbable that only science fiction can manage it; the place is like the compound of an alien race, or a human base camp on a hostile planet. To catch this image you need to see Las Vegas from the air by night, or better still, late in the afternoon, as I first saw it, when there is just purple sunset light enough in the bottom of the basin to pick out the crests of the surrounding mountains, but dark enough for every little lamp to register. Then – and only then – the vision is not tawdry, but is of a magic garden of blossoming lights, welling up at its center into fantastic fountains of everchanging color. And you turned to the captain of your spaceship and said, ‘Look Sir, there must be intelligent life down there,’ because it was marvelous beyond words. And doomed – it is already beginning to fade, as energy becomes more expensive and the architecture less inventive. It won’t blow away in the night, but you begin to wish it might, because it will never make noble ruins . . . .”
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Previously posted, this playful 1972 BBC doc captured Banham in his favorite element: Los Angeles. There’s a fun passage in which Edward Ruscha opines on L.A. gas stations:
Walter Cronkite anchors a look at the first Earth Day in 1970, with this segment focusing on New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. As Cronkite says, cities were thought of at the time as “major population and pollution centers,” when, in fact, populous cities are now known to bevery green.
There have long been rumors that in 1973Jackie Gleason accompanied President Richard Nixonto Homestead Airforce Base in Florida and was shown what were supposedly the pickled bodies of extraterrestrials who had reached Earth. Perhaps it was a payoff for Gleason supporting Nixon in 1968.
From “Hacking,” a 1996 Wired article by the excellent reporter Ted Conover about Roy Eric Wahlberg, a Minnesota drug dealer who surreptitiously became a tech millionaire while spending 17 years in prison for a vicious murder:
“The year was 1975 and the place was Ely, Minnesota, near the Canadian border in the region known as the Iron Range. Cold and insular, the range is a land of deep woods and open-air mines, brought down from boom times by the decline of American steel. Wahlberg, 23, sold milk during the day for his parents’ dairy distribution company and at night sold drugs: LSD, speed, cocaine, PCP, tranquilizers. ‘I celebrate every Saturday night,’ he told the court during his trial; that Saturday in March he celebrated with beer, rum and Coke, speed, marijuana, and, right before attending a party in a trailer home with his girlfriend, Roxanne Ahlstrand, some LSD.
The LSD annoyed Roxanne, who said it left Wahlberg ‘hard to get along with … hard to communicate with.’ His drug use occasionally led to rages-smashed windshields (usually his own) and trashed apartments (sometimes Roxanne’s). Roy and Roxanne argued at the party, and after several mixed drinks, he left with her younger sister. Fights between them were common, in part because Wahlberg fooled around on the side-often with underage girls. Once, caught naked in the back of a car with a minor, he had been thrown into jail.
At one point that evening Wahlberg passed through a local bar at the same time as a recent high school graduate named Jeff Goedderz (pronounced GED-derz). It was Goedderz’s 19th birthday, and he, too, had been drinking, beginning with a celebration before dinner at his sister’s house in nearby Babbitt. Trial testimony indicated that Goedderz had made a date that night with an Ely woman but it skipped his mind; at the jukebox in the bar he was soon making time with a college student home for the weekend from Duluth. When they and another couple went for pizza down the street at 1 a.m., Goedderz offered her his class ring.
No one remembers whether Goedderz and Wahlberg spoke at the bar; it is uncertain whether they even knew each other. But sometime after 2:30 a.m. they met up on the streets of Ely, two of the last people still awake on a cold night in winter. Goedderz, in poor condition to drive with a blood alcohol level later measured at 0.17 percent (almost twice the limit allowed by many states), let Wahlberg take the wheel of his Plymouth Gold Duster and climbed in back to sleep. They were joined by Wahlberg’s friend Red Nelson, a shoplifter and vandal who sold drugs to kids. The police theory was that Wahlberg murmured to Nelson his suspicion that Goedderz, who declined to take drugs besides alcohol, was a narc. (Nelson also suggested, years later, that Wahlberg was jealous of Goedderz, the outsider who was starting to date local girls.) As Goedderz slept, the two friends picked up a hatchet at Wahlberg’s truck and a stolen bowie knife at Nelson’s house. They drove to a remote logging road 8 miles north of town; the killing began when Goedderz stepped out of the car to pee. His last words, according to Nelson, were ‘Oh, no! Don’t do that!’
Goedderz’s car was found six days later under melting snow in the parking lot of the Ely Co-Op. Police noticed blood dripping into a puddle beneath the car and popped open the trunk to find Jeff Goedderz. Almost no blood remained in his body. According to officials, Goedderz died of loss of blood from multiple wounds. There were two long gashes to the head, both of which penetrated the brain, made by a hatchet. There were knife wounds to the face, arm, and neck. A knife blow to the left cheek had entered in front of the ear, broken the jaw, and knocked out two front teeth. And, in what the pathologist called a ‘defensive wound,’ Goedderz’s left thumb was missing: hair stuck to the hand indicated that Goedderz had probably had his hand to his head, trying to ward off blows. He said Goedderz had been alive when placed in the trunk.
As the people last seen with Goedderz, Wahlberg and Nelson were prime suspects in the murder, but it took 17 months of investigation before the case went to a grand jury. During those months Wahlberg freely talked with the lead investigator; parrying with the police as they tried to trip him up was like playing ‘mental chess,’ he later said. But Wahlberg lost the game when things he told the investigator confiicted with statements he made to others. Based on strong circumstantial evidence, Wahlberg was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.”
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In 2000, Conover discussed working as a Sing Sing prison guard with that kindly warden Charlie Rose:
Americans have always been paranoid about intruders, believing that there are Russians, Martians and Kenyans among us. Maybe the burden of an immigrant nation is that we’re never completely sure about our neighbors–or maybe it just gives us a handy scapegoat for what ails us internally, as individuals and collectively. Certainly the paranoia has only increased post-9/11, when it became clear that there really were malignant sleeper cells.
On a 1977 episode of In Search Of…, Leonard Nimoy looked at U.S. citizens who believed they’d sighted flying saucers. The host wonders if there really are UFOs. Of course there aren’t, you fucking idiot. Incredibly ridiculous and amusing. And some awesome incidental music.
It’s easy to dismiss Sofia Coppola’s work as thin dilettantism, with the plotting generally so spare and the characters so often rich and idle. But it’s unfair and lazy to do so, especially in the case of Somewhere, a gorgeous sliver of a film that almost operates as a poem.
Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is your average Hollywood star, turning out diverting formula films in between an endless summer of casinos, strippers and substances. He’s living hard and looking bad, having checked in for a stay of indeterminate length at the Chateau Marmont. The only semblance of normalcy in his life is his relationship with his 11-year-old daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning), who lives with her mom. Cleo is clearly the child of wealth, indulged with endless classes that make her expert at an impressive number of things, but she’s living an exciting life at a time when a stable one would be preferable.
When mom flakes out, Johnny gets full custody of Cleo until summer camp is to start. He’s only half-prepared for the task, providing for Cleo a mix of sweet underwater tea parties and quality time at craps tables. Cleo gets to see too much of the adult world and Johnny gets to see that he’s still really a child.
Coppola is so unusually observant and has such a unique way of creating milieu and communicating her feelings that all her movies are very personally hers. Her characters are often self-pitying and sometimes pitiable, but Coppola knows a secret: All people are exotic, not for the trappings of their lives but because of the traps they fall into. In Somewhere, she consistently reveals that knowledge with deceptive ease.•
The tennis player Renée Richards caused a sensation in 1976 when she revealed that she had been born a man and undergone a sex-change operation. She was quickly lambasted by critics who thought she had an unfair advantage over her female opponents, but it seemed like an excuse to unload on someone who made much of America uncomfortable. Michael Weinreb of Grantland has a smart new interview with Richards, who is today a septuagenarian Manhattan opthamologist conflicted about being a public figure. An excerpt:
“‘No, no, no, no,’ she says now, at age 76, sitting in her cozy examining room. Her voice is a rasp; her sweater is pink. She is surrounded by autographed photos of Martina Navratilova and Virginia Wade. ‘That was not my intention. It’s not so much the idea that I wanted to be a pioneer and a standard-bearer. It was a much more selfish reason. I’d gone through such an upheaval in my life, and they’re telling me I can’t play tennis? Suddenly I said to myself, ‘I can do anything any other woman is entitled to do. How dare they?’
‘I was a quiet person. I mean, I’m not a shrinking violet, but I was a very private person. I was very well-liked, and I was very well-respected. And a lot of that was thrown away because I became a caricature, a public notorious figure. I was undressed in front of the world.'”
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A new documentary about Richards:
The opening of the September 6, 1976 Sports Illustrated article about the Richards revelation: “At first, it seemed like a put-on. A transsexual tennis player? A 6’2” former football end in frilly panties and gold hoop earrings pounding serves past defenseless girls? A 42-year-old Yale graduate, Navy veteran, devoted father and respected eye surgeon reaching the semifinals of the $60,000 Tennis Week Open in South Orange, N.J. and demanding to play in the U.S. Open at Forest Hills? In women’s singles? Who ever heard of such a thing?
In the past month, practically everyone. And certainly last week there was no escaping the extraordinary spectacle of Renee Richards, nee Richard Raskind, and her assertion that ‘anatomically, functionally, socially, emotionally and legally I am a female.’ While conceding that her action might be ‘mind-boggling,’ Richards proclaims that she is embarked on a crusade for human rights, a quest ‘to prove that transsexuals as well as other persons who are fighting social stigmas can hold their heads up high.’
If tennis seems a rather fragile or inappropriate vehicle for carrying such a weighty message, it nonetheless provides, as Richards is well aware, the kind of exposure that attracts disciples. After one match last week, Dr. Roberto Granato, the urologist who performed the ‘sex-reassignment operation’ on Richards a year ago, rushed onto the court, embraced his former patient and exclaimed, ‘Oh, Renee, this is going to help so many people!’
While I have never had any interest whatsoever in J.R.R. Tolkien’s work–as a child or adult–I know I’m in the small minority. For the rest of you. (Thanks Open Culture.)
From Winthrop Sargeant’s 1958 New Yorker profile of a young Richard Avedon, who used his camera to reimagine the fashion photograph, which lacked blithe spirit before he enlivened the scene:
About twelve years ago, this approach to fashion photography began to be subtly undermined by a sprightly and ingenious photographer for Harper’s Bazaar named Richard Avedon. As far as he was concerned, the statues and mummies went out the window. The model became pretty, rather than austerely aloof. She laughed, danced, skated, gambolled among herds of elephants, sang in the rain, ran breathlessly down the Champs-Elysées, smiled and sipped cognac at café tables, and otherwise gave evidence of being human. Whether she thereby sold more clothes is open to question. But the new trend certainly brightened the page of Harper’s Bazaar, and Avedon was widely conceded to have reached a previously unattained artistic level in fashion photography. A good deal of this accomplishment can be attributed to his imagination and resourcefulness in handling a camera, but some of it undoubtedly stems from the fact that his primary interest is not in fashion but in women.
The Avedon photograph—or, more broadly, the Avedon photographic style—has by now become a lively contribution to the visual poetry of sophisticated urban life. Nearly everybody is familiar with it, for it has long since overflowed the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and influenced the advertising in most of the slick-paper periodicals. It has been imitated by other photographers, but the imitations have seldom approached the animation of the originals; in any case, as soon as the imitators have mastered at least the surface elements of one of Avedon’s innovations, he has always popped up with some entirely new departure, for he has never been one to stand still. The world he depicts is an artificial one; his polished and rather romantic art flatly contradicts the bromide that the camera never lies. Avedon’s camera unquestionably lies, but it does so in such a poetic and ingratiating manner that the photographic fiction it produces has become a sort of folklore of the world in which fashionable elegance counts. The characters in this fiction are women of unbelievable beauty and grace, moving about in an environment that exists largely in the imagination. This is a composite of mists, glowing lights, the moods of nocturnal revellers, nostalgic memories of bars and gaming tables and theatres, and such ephemeral minutiae as the feeling of enchantment at the sight of a taxi in the rain whose door is opened to receive a suave and mysterious beauty, or the moment of gaiety when some lovely girl decides to throw dignity aside, or the magical second in which the casual motions of a beautiful woman are observed secretly across a restaurant table—all fragments of a metropolitan fairyland, glimpsed by ordinary mortals only at times of heightened illusion.•
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In 1999, Avedon is interviewed by that agreeable robot Charlie Rose.
Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill sell the drama in 1895.
The aura of the American West was created and commodified long before there was a Hollywood, as traveling stage shows brought an appealing version of gunslinging to the masses. From Rob Walker’s2007 Sunday Times Magazine articleabout how Buffalo Bill Cody packaged himself for the millions:
“While still a scout for the United States Army, Cody managed to hire himself out as a sort of celebrity hunting guide for well-to-do visitors to the American West. In 1869, when he was about 25, he impressed a writer calling himself Ned Buntline, who began a series of dime novels starring Buffalo Bill. These inspired a play, with Cody himself in the lead role. For the next several years, Cody switched off between actual scouting work in campaigns against Plains Indians — and appearing in plays with names like Scouts of the Plains.
But the great branding event of his career came in 1876, in the wake of George Custer’s disastrous defeat by Sioux Indians at Little Big Horn. Weeks later, Cody’s regiment engaged in a battle against a group of Cheyenne Indians, and Cody — there’s some disagreement on this — apparently killed one, obtaining what he pronounced ‘the first scalp for Custer.’ That fall, Cody starred in the play based on the incident. And by 1883, he and a couple of key collaborators — notably Nate Salsbury, a manager with wonderful showbiz instincts — had invented a show that ‘provided the template . . . for the early film western,’ Joy S. Kasson argues in her 2000 book Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory and Popular History. In the process, she writes, his Wild West ‘became America’s Wild West.’ Indeed, thanks to Salsbury, they actually copyrighted the phrase ‘Wild West’ (after a lengthy legal battle with rivals).
Live animals and blazing guns made the show more of a spectacle than a mere stage play. But a loose narrative and the vaguely educational content made it more respectable than a circus or a medicine show, and Salsbury kept gambling and drinking off the premises to attract the family demographic. At its height, the show included the sharpshooting of Annie Oakley, dramatic re-enactments of an Indian attack on the Deadwood stagecoach and a version of Little Big Horn. The organizers managed to include many actual Native Americans in the cast, including the Sioux chief Sitting Bull himself for part of its 1885 season.
Still, the authenticity was always balanced against affirmation: Cody’s arrival on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the re-enacted version of Little Big Horn converted a debacle into what felt like a victory. ‘It’s not really wild — that’s why it can be entertaining,’ Kasson, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told me. ‘That’s where it leads to Hollywood: the idea that you can give people the feeling of danger, but it’s got to be basically tame.’ In several tours of Europe, the general theme of civilization triumphing over savagery went over well. (Indeed, Kasson cites the historian Richard White’s point that the Wild West shows essentially recast encroaching settlers as victims.) By the time Frederick Jackson Turner momentously declared that ‘the frontier has gone’ at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was in the midst of a monthslong stint right across the street; it was seen by an estimated six million people.”
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Edison captured the pageantry of the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show parade:
Judging by his last two films, Happy-Go-Lucky and Another Year, Mike Leigh has quietly become one of the most effective horror film directors in the world, though, of course, not in any typical sense. Always fond of grotesque caricature, Leigh has upped the ante even further recently, finding life at its cruelest, homing in on those deluded by dreams and those who have none, and playing with their wounds.
In Another Year, Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) are a long-married British couple who surround their lives with an assortment of tormented souls. Sure, they can’t get away from their depressing relatives, including Tom’s drunk, taciturn brother Ronnie (David Bradley) and combustible nephew Carl (Martin Savage), but they seem to invite sad-sack friends into their lives not entirely due to kindness but to reassure themselves of their middle-class contentedness. Their son, Joe, who seems similarly to tolerate those who increase his own self-worth, is hit on repeatedly by Gerri’s middle-age alcoholic friend, Mary (Lesley Manville). Neither encouraging nor discouraging, he stoically allows Mary to lavish attention on him, which can bring no good to her.
Introduced into this backdrop is Joe’s new girlfriend, Katie (Karina Fernandez), an ebullient young woman who’s full of life, essentially the polar opposite of Mary’s pathetic hopelessness. Like the character of Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, who was described by most critics as “spirited” or “bright” rather than clueless, which is what she is, Katie’s enthusiasm is heightened to the point of insensitivity, almost without regard for others. Despite working as an occupational therapist, which you would assume would giver her a perspective beyond herself, she has none. Late in the film, she and Joe discuss a romantic trip abroad together in front of Mary, who’s more broken than usual. As the depressed woman endures a massacre of dashed hopes, Joe and Katie make it clear that they will become just like his parents. It’s almost sinister.•
Sea-Monkeys don’t actually play volleyball, not even a little, but Evan Hughes of the Awl has anexcellent postabout the Insta-Pet’slate creator Harold von Braunhut, a Jewish man who had surprising ties to Aryan supremacists. An excerpt:
“An Assistant U.S. Attorney, Thomas M. Bauer, told the Washington Post that in a 1985 weapons case against a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Grand Dragon Dale R. Reusch, von Braunhut was prepared to testify that he had lent Reusch about $12,000 so he could buy 83 firearms. Bauer told the reporter that von Braunhut was ‘very pleasant and cooperative’ and ‘brought some of his little toys along,’ including Sea-Monkeys.
The general Aryan Nations view holds that Jewish people are directly descended from the devil. It seems clear that von Braunhut, who owned Nazi memorabilia and once said Hitler ‘just got bad press,’ signed on to these beliefs. But one has to wonder what brought him to the point of nodding along when his friend Butler, for instance, described Jews as ‘the bacillus of the decomposition of our society.’ Aryan Nations members might have been dismayed to hear that von Braunhut engaged a law firm called Friedman and Goodman early in his career. They might also have been puzzled that his name was listed on early patents as Harold N. Braunhut. The middle initial stands for Nathan. Harold von Braunhut was born and raised Jewish.”
