Errol Morris’ new film, Tabloid, opens this Friday.
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Official trailer:
Morris discusses Tabloid in 2010 at Toronto:
More Errol Morris posts:
Tags: Errol Morris
In the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson, who worked on nuclear-propelled spaceships among other great and scary things, reviews two new books about Richard Feynman (one, a gekiga). In the piece, he ranks science icons of the last century. The article’s opening:
“In the last hundred years, since radio and television created the modern worldwide mass-market entertainment industry, there have been two scientific superstars, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Lesser lights such as Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson and Richard Dawkins have a big public following, but they are not in the same class as Einstein and Hawking. Sagan, Tyson, and Dawkins have fans who understand their message and are excited by their science. Einstein and Hawking have fans who understand almost nothing about science and are excited by their personalities.
On the whole, the public shows good taste in its choice of idols. Einstein and Hawking earned their status as superstars, not only by their scientific discoveries but by their outstanding human qualities. Both of them fit easily into the role of icon, responding to public adoration with modesty and good humor and with provocative statements calculated to command attention. Both of them devoted their lives to an uncompromising struggle to penetrate the deepest mysteries of nature, and both still had time left over to care about the practical worries of ordinary people. The public rightly judged them to be genuine heroes, friends of humanity as well as scientific wizards.
Two new books now raise the question of whether Richard Feynman is rising to the status of superstar.”
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Dyson talks science at the Big Thin
k:
Tags: Freeman Dyson, Ricahrd Feynman
A passage about the nature of prisons from Bill James’ new book, Popular Crime, which I previously posted about:
“Build smaller prisons.
… Large prisons become ‘violentocracies’ — places ruled by violence and by the threat of violence. In a violentocracy, the most violent people rise to the top.
In any prison of any size, the prisoners are going to be pushed toward the level of the most violent persons in the facility. … In a prison 3,000 people, the entire prison is pushed toward the level of violence created by the five most violent people in the joint. The most violent person finds the second-most violent person and the third-most violent person, and they form an alliance to exploit the weak. Everyone else is compelled to avoid looking weak. …
Large prisons promote paranoia in the prisoners. You never know who in here is waiting for you with a homemade knife.
… A prison of 20 people is, by its very nature, extremely different. You know who is in there with you; you know who you have to stay away from. … Plus, if you have many small prisons, you can contain the violent people in a limited number of those prisons, the preventing their violent tendencies from infecting the rest of the prison population.
… What you would do, with a network of small prisons, would be to place each prisoner in a facility that is appropriate to the threat that he represents. You grade the prisoners on the threat of violence that they represent, one through ten. You put the tens with the tens and the ones with the ones.
Plus, when you move to a system in which some prisoners have more rights and live in more humane conditions, you create a powerful incentive to get into one of the less restrictive prisons..
In a large and horrible prison, the new prisoner thinks ‘I’ve got to show everybody here how tough and vicious I really am, so that nobody will mess with me.’ But when you put a new prisoner in a 24-man prison with 23 other tough guys, and he knows that there are other prisons that are not like this, his natural thought is ‘I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to show these people that I am not a crazy, vicious sociopath, so they will move me to some other facility that is not populated by crazy, vicious sociopaths.'” (Thanks iSteve and Marginal Revolution.)
Tags: Bill James
Alain Resnais’ 1958 Technicolor paean to plastic is a great find by the Documentarian. No English subtitles, but none needed.
Tags: Alain Resnais
In this classic 1910 photograph, New York City Mayor William J. Gaynor, a Tammany reformer, had just been wounded in an assassination attempt by a disgruntled former city employee who’d lost his job. Gaynor was headed on a vacation cruise when the bullet entered his throat. He survived the attempt on his life, but oddly enough, in 1913, when Gaynor was finally able to take that cruise, he died quietly in a deck chair. An excerpt from the September 13, 1913 New York Times article announcing the Mayor’s death:
“Mayor William J. Gaynor of New York died in his steamer chair on board the steamship Baltic early Wednesday afternoon when the liner was 400 miles off the Irish Coast. His death was due to a sudden heart attack.
The news reached London a little before 4 P.M. to-day, coming by way of New York, and half an hour later a message was received from Liverpool saying that the White Star Line offices had been advised by wireless of his death.
In the evening a wireless dispatch from the Baltic was received from the Mayor’s son, Rufus Gaynor, describing his father’s death in these words:
‘My father, William J. Gaynor, died on board the White Star liner Baltic at seven minutes past 1 o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. His death was due to heart failure, and he was seated in his chair when the end came.
‘The deck steward had been with the Mayor a few moments before his death and had taken his order for luncheon, the Mayor marking the menu to indicate the dishes he desired.
‘I was on the boat deck and went below at the lunch call to tell my father that his lunch was ready. He had been taking his meals in one of the staterooms, and he was seated in the chair apparently asleep. I shook him gently but he did not respond.
‘His trained nurse, who had been with him ten minutes previously, was summoned and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Hopper, was called. The Mayor was given a hypodermic injection, and artificial respiration was resorted to, but it was quickly apparent that he was beyond any aid. An examination with a stethoscope showed that the heart was no longer beating. The body was taken in charge by the ship’s officers, embalmed and placed in a sealed casket.'”
Tags: William J. Gaynor'
Making any economic system work is trouble enough, but creating a socialist collective that produces great wealth is particularly elusive. The Chinese village of Huaxi is an exception, however, with its shared wealth and opulent new skyscrapers. Every villager owns a house worth at least $150,000 and at least one car. An excerpt from Michael Wines’ New York Times piece about a tower soon to open in Huaxi:
“Huaxi’s so-called New Village in the Sky — at 1,076 feet, a bit taller than the Chrysler Building in Manhattan — is getting finishing touches this summer in preparation for an October opening. Among other attractions, it will have a five-star hotel, a gold-leaf-embellished concert hall, an upscale shopping mall and what is billed as Asia’s largest revolving restaurant. Also, it will have five life-size statues of a water buffalo, Huaxi’s symbol, on every 12th floor or so.
That this half-billion-dollar edifice is a good 40-minute drive from a city of any size is part of the plan. For though not many foreigners have heard of Huaxi, Chinese far and wide know it as the socialist collective that works — the village where public ownership of the means of production has not just made everyone equal, but rich, too.
Two million tourists come annually to view the Huaxi marvel, no small number of them officials from other villages who yearn to know how Huaxi did it. The enormous skyscraper, topped with a gigantic gold sphere, will never win architectural awards. But it will add to Huaxi’s allure, the village fathers confidently predict — and soak up tourist money as well.
‘We call it the three-increase building,’ said Wu Renbao, 84, the town’s revered patriarch, meaning that it will increase Huaxi’s acreage (by half), increase its work force (by 3,000) and, hardly least of all, increase its wealth.
If he is right, all 2,000 villagers will get a little richer. They all own a piece of the building — just as they own the town’s steel mill, textile factory, greenhouse complex, ocean shipping company and other ventures. That is Huaxi’s carefully curated narrative: by rigidly adhering to socialism with Chinese characteristics, the citizens of this little village have created an oasis of prosperity and comfort that is the envy of the world.”
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China’s richest village:
Tags: Michael Wines, Wu Renbao
Former major leaguer Bernie Williams played a beautiful rendition of the National Anthem on guitar over the weekend in Phoenix for the minor league Futures Game. The first time an American artist played a personal version of the Star-Spangled Banner, before Hendrix or Gaye or anyone, it was also at a baseball game. At the 1966 World Series in Detroit, Joes Feliciano turned out a gorgeous, touching take on the song–and his career was nearly ruined.
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Jose Feliciano has no idea at the time that his reading of the National Anthem will cause a furor in Vietnam-era America:
The full version of Feliciano’s soulful 1968 song:
Tags: Bernie Willaims, Jose Feliciano
From a 1996 Tom Wolfe essay, a pithy explanation about how Freudianism and Marxism cratered and neuroscience became ascendant:
“The demise of Freudianism can be summed up in a single word: lithium. In 1949 an Australian psychiatrist, John Cade, gave five days of lithium therapy—for entirely the wrong reasons—to a fifty–one–year–old mental patient who was so manic–depressive, so hyperactive, unintelligible, and uncontrollable, he had been kept locked up in asylums for twenty years. By the sixth day, thanks to the lithium buildup in his blood, he was a normal human being. Three months later he was released and lived happily ever after in his own home. This was a man who had been locked up and subjected to two decades of Freudian logorrhea to no avail whatsoever. Over the next twenty years antidepressant and tranquilizing drugs completely replaced Freudian talk–talk as treatment for serious mental disturbances. By the mid–1980s, neuroscientists looked upon Freudian psychiatry as a quaint relic based largely upon superstition (such as dream analysis — dream analysis!), like phrenology or mesmerism. In fact, among neuroscientists, phrenology now has a higher reputation than Freudian psychiatry, since phrenology was in a certain crude way a precursor of electroencephalography. Freudian psychiatrists are now regarded as old crocks with sham medical degrees, as ears with wire hairs sprouting out of them that people with more money than sense can hire to talk into.
Marxism was finished off even more suddenly—in a single year, 1973—with the smuggling out of the Soviet Union and the publication in France of the first of the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Other writers, notably the British historian Robert Conquest, had already exposed the Soviet Union’s vast network of concentration camps, but their work was based largely on the testimony of refugees, and refugees were routinely discounted as biased and bitter observers. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, was a Soviet citizen, still living on Soviet soil, a zek himself for eleven years, zek being Russian slang for concentration camp prisoner. His credibility had been vouched for by none other than Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1962 had permitted the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s novella of the gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as a means of cutting down to size the daunting shadow of his predecessor Stalin. “Yes,” Khrushchev had said in effect, “what this man Solzhenitsyn has to say is true. Such were Stalin’s crimes.” Solzhenitsyn’s brief fictional description of the Soviet slave labor system was damaging enough. But The Gulag Archipelago, a two–thousand–page, densely detailed, nonfiction account of the Soviet Communist Party’s systematic extermination of its enemies, real and imagined, of its own countrymen, by the tens of millions through an enormous, methodical, bureaucratically controlled “human sewage disposal system,” as Solzhenitsyn called it— The Gulag Archipelago was devastating. After all, this was a century in which there was no longer any possible ideological detour around the concentration camp. Among European intellectuals, even French intellectuals, Marxism collapsed as a spiritual force immediately. Ironically, it survived longer in the United States before suffering a final, merciful coup de grace on November 9, 1989, with the breaching of the Berlin Wall, which signaled in an unmistakable fashion what a debacle the Soviets’ seventy–two–year field experiment in socialism had been. (Marxism still hangs on, barely, acrobatically, in American universities in a Mannerist form known as Deconstruction, a literary doctrine that depicts language itself as an insidious tool used by The Powers That Be to deceive the proles and peasants.)
Freudianism and Marxism—and with them, the entire belief in social conditioning—were demolished so swiftly, so suddenly, that neuroscience has surged in, as if into an intellectual vacuum. Nor do you have to be a scientist to detect the rush.” (Thanks to The Electric Typewriter.)
More Tom Wolfe posts:
- Wolfe explains New Journalism. (1972)
Tags: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Tom Wolfe
Most Americans probably never stop to think of it, but those handsome, chemically enhanced front-yard lawns are a fairly worthless waste of space, a paean to the color green that produces nothing but toil. That space could be an aesthetically pleasing and productive vegetable garden. From Corinne Asturias‘ San Francisco Chronicle essay:
“The truth is, we’ve never loved our lawn or the concept of lawns. They permeate the American dream and dominate our midcentury, suburban development in San Jose. Space hogs, water suckers and giant leaf collectors that have to be blown, mown and doused in chemicals with a great ruckus to look good, what is the point of a lawn other than to say: we have land, time and money to waste? When our kids were young the home turf had its benefits: a landing pad for soccer balls and dogs and skateboards, and a display carpet for the annual holiday tree.
But lately, its uselessness had started to gnaw at us. And staring at the newly dead zone out front, I realized that in all the years living in this home, I’d never even thought about what I wanted for the sunny space occupied by my lawn. My imagination started to roam and a rebellious vision took shape: the organic vegetable garden I’d always wanted but couldn’t plant out back because of three dogs, two tortoises and not enough sun.” (Thanks Time.)
Tags: Corinne Asturias
"What a great move by the Colonel."
The End of The KFC $5.00 Meal
It was the end of an era last week when KFC decided to discontinue its 5 dollar meals and raise them to 5.49 and up. What a great move by the Colonel; just when people were getting used to enjoying an economical meal that is much cheaper than the4r competition. Now while they are still cheaper the gap has narrowed. With tax it is almost a 6.00 meal now. Also, KFC has been bragging about its Grilled Chicken coming in larger pieces now. Of course- and the price is going up so who are they kidding? Whats next- the end of the 5.00 Subway footlong?
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Soviet Union KFC ad from the 1960s:
Ambling clumsily, languorously, emotionlessly from graveyards all over the world, seventy million corpses have suddenly, inexplicably risen from the dead, filled their lungs with oxygen after an extended exhale and shuffled back into their mortal coils. Roughly 13,000 of these taciturn zombies slowly stream back into the small French city which was formerly their home, and the locals have to figure out how to accommodate the return of their dearly departed. “The unthinkable has happened,” says a bureaucrat, stating the obvious, to his colleagues. The newly immortal, disoriented and barely capable of speech, are warehoused in empty government buildings until they can be re-acclimated and reclaimed. But most people aren’t eager to reunite, even the aforementioned official whose wife is returned to his care. “I can’t stand her sweet smiles anymore,” he guiltily admits. “They scare me.”
In his 2004 avant zombie film, Robin Campillo turns out an arch allegory about how relationships can stagnate and love run cold, but he’s also examining the nature of neurology, how the brain adjusts to surprising situations and creates new realities as a means of survival. Scientists (and art critics) have noticed that the first time someone hears atonal music or sees a surrealist painting, the experience can cause emtional turmoil. But after the initial jolt, what’s unthinkable becomes acceptable. First you shock them, and then they put you in a museum. The same goes for shocking emotional episodes. In these cases, the brain is its own electrician, rewiring our ability to view the world.
The movie, while suitably somnambulant, doesn’t fully exploit its fantastic set-up, but it does make some provacative points, most notably that the zombies aren’t the only ones who’ve been altered by death. The survivors have grieved and mourned and moved on. Even if they were stuck in the past, that past isn’t what came home to them. That’s gone forever.
“His reality will never be yours,” says a doctor to a woman who is having trouble adjusting to her returned husband’s cold embrace. But you can’t really blame the zombies. They simply aren’t who they were. None of us are.•
Tags: Robin Campillo
From Barbara Ehrenreich’s new Guernica piece on whether the human face of warfare has reached a point of obsolescence:
“An alternative approach is to eliminate or drastically reduce the military’s dependence on human beings of any kind. This would have been an almost unthinkable proposition a few decades ago, but technologies employed in Iraq and Afghanistan have steadily stripped away the human role in war. Drones, directed from sites up to 7,500 miles away in the western United States, are replacing manned aircraft.
Video cameras, borne by drones, substitute for human scouts or information gathered by pilots. Robots disarm roadside bombs. When American forces invaded Iraq in 2003, no robots accompanied them; by 2008, there were 12,000 participating in the war. Only a handful of drones were used in the initial invasion; today, the U.S. military has an inventory of more than 7,000, ranging from the familiar Predator to tiny Ravens and Wasps used to transmit video images of events on the ground. Far stranger fighting machines are in the works, like swarms of lethal ‘cyborg insects’ that could potentially replace human infantry.
These developments are by no means limited to the U.S. The global market for military robotics and unmanned military vehicles is growing fast, and includes Israel, a major pioneer in the field, Russia, the United Kingdom, Iran, South Korea, and China. Turkey is reportedly readying a robot force for strikes against Kurdish insurgents; Israel hopes to eventually patrol the Gaza border with ‘see-shoot’ robots that will destroy people perceived as transgressors as soon as they are detected.”
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Cyborg insect demonstration:
Tags: Barbara Ehrenreich
"There is quite possibly only one man left in the world still pressing records for the Highway Hi-Fi." (Image by Bill McChesney.)
Starting in the mid-50s, some Chryslers had record players on the dashboard, called the Highway Hi-Fi, as chronicled in a new piece in the Believer. Of course the discs skipped no matter how good the car’s shock absorbers, and the automaker ceased manufacturing them in the 1960s. But some car collectors have maintained the systems, even though only one person still creates the special records they require. An excerpt:
“In the end, the RCA Victor Auto Victrola had an even shorter run than the Highway Hi-Fi, vanishing by 1961. The following year would bring the next serious attempt at car audio, a precursor to the 8-track deck by inventor Earl Muntz—’Madman’ Muntz, as he was known. But what could ever be half so mad as a dash-mounted turntable?
There is quite possibly only one man left in the world still pressing records for the Highway Hi-Fi, and he lives in Minneapolis.
‘I first had a guy come to me years ago who had an old Highway Hi-Fi, asking about making a record,’ says Kim Gutzke of Custom Records. Vintage car owners email Gutzke a music file, and he custom presses whatever they want onto a 16 2⁄3 rpm acetate disc. And what they want, he says, is simple: ‘’50s rock and roll. Not the crappy music Hi-Fi put out.'”
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1960 Plymouth Fury with a Highway Hi-Fi:
Tags: Kim Gutzke
David’s appliances function without him. (Thanks Krulwich Wonders.)
Ridiculously, chillingly elaborate.
One of the strangest chapters in baseball history took place during the early ’70s when Yankee pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich swapped families–wives, children and dogs. The episode has been revisited recently because Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are trying to make a movie about the tabloid-ready trade. An excerpt from the March 5, 1973 Toledo Blade:
Teammates Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich of the New York Yankees have “traded lives” through a mutual agreement that calls for the pitchers to exchange wives and families.
“It was not a wife swap,” said Peterson, “but a life swap.”
The situation developed last summer when the Petersons, Fritz and wife, Marilyn, and the Kekiches, Mike and his wife, Susanne, were drawn together and began discussing the possibility of an exchange.
‘There have been laughs, screams and tears throughout this whole thing,’ said Kekich.
Marilyn “Chip” Peterson and her two sons, Greg 5 1/2, and Eric, 2 1/2, changed places with Susan Kekich and her two daughters, Kristen, 6, and Reagan Leigh, 2 1/2. The arrangement apparently has worked for Peterson and Mrs. Kekich who are still together, but not for Kekich and Mrs. Peterson, who have separated.
In Rockford, Ill., Mrs. Arthur Monks, Marilyn Peterson’s mother, said: “Marilyn is not happy about this at all. She has started proceedings for a divorce, but only because he (Fritz) wanted her to. Mike Kekich has made no plans for a divorce.”
“Susanne was a perfect person for me,” said Peterson. “We will file for divorce in New Jersey under the no fault clause.”
“Pete and Susanne are great for each other,” said Kekich.
“I thought Chip and I were perfectly suited but things developed and we began to butt heads. She would have been the first of her family to get a divorce. It became too much for her and she began to worry.”
The two families switched places at the end of last season and then briefly returned to their original situations. After about 10 days they exchanged places again, this time permanently.
“The point of no return was reached December 14,” said Peterson. “Marilyn and our boys flew West to join Mike in California and Susan and the girls flew East to me. They must have passed mid-air.
“This was the biggest decision of my life,” he continued. “I’m not going back. I can’t go back.”
Peterson and Kekich have been Yankee teammates for four years and the two families have always been close.
When the exchange developed the two players advised the Yankees of the situation and General Manager Lee McPhail asked if they felt they could still function as teammates. They said they did and that satisfied the club.
“The players personal lives are their own,” said Manager Ralph Houk.•
Willie McCovey hits a frozen rope against Peterson at the 1970 All-Star Game.
Tags: Fritz Peterson, Mike Kekich
Vincent Fournier makes amazing space-travel–themed photos.
Tags: Vincent Fournier
"I can't pay pigloads of dosh for one."
Anyone want to sell me a decent starter ukulele?
Hey, I’m looking for a decent, workable ukulele suitable for a beginner. I do genuinely want to learn, rather than plonk around randomly on it when bored and/or drunk. I can’t pay pigloads of dosh for one – maybe up to $75?
One thing I will say is that I’d rather not get one that’s pink or that has flower decals or any of that nonsense on it.
Captain Thomas P. Warren, 1852-96.
Even for the most experienced whaler, life on the sea trying to capture the gigantic mammals was a risky business. That lesson was learned the hard way by Captain Thomas P. Warren of Long Island, as evidenced by an article in the December 6, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“Southampton, L.I.–The news of the sudden death of Captain Thomas P. Warren of this village, while on a whaling voyage in the North Pacific, which reached here yesterday, has caused great sorrow among his many friends. The only details of the sad accident are contained in a letter received from one of his ship mates of the steam whaler Belvidere, who says that the remains will be sent home for burial in the family plot at Yaphank.
Captain Warren left for what he said would be his last whaling trip in 1892 and at its close he intended to come home and settle down for good, as he had a great attachment to his native place. With this end in view he planned the expedition of 1892. Taking as companions James and Steven Larry, whalemen from this village, whom he had known from boyhood, he engaged a vessel to leave them, with the necessary outfit, on St. Lawrence Island, near the mouth of the Behring Straits. It was their plan to whale from the shore, employing the native Esquimaux to assist them, but the natives took no interest in whaling and did not care to be employed, nor did whales come that way, so that when at the end of the season, the vessel returned by appointment to take them off, it found the men and their apparatus but no oil or bones to bring away.
"The whale struck and killed Captain Warren."
After the unsuccessful expedition Captain Warren and his friends decided to make one more venture. He left Southhampton with his two friends February 4, 1895, reaching Honolulu the 18th of the same month, where he joined the whaling steamer Belvidere of New Bedford bound for the Arctic Ocean. They wintered with the rest of the whaling fleet at the Herschel Islands off the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Late in July the ice broke up and they began their second season’s work. In the early fall they returned through the straits and cruised toward home, the hearts of all on board being made glad by a prosperous catch of ten good whales and the price of whalebone higher than ever before. Probably happiest among them was the boatheader, Captain Warren, now returning from his last voyage and bound home to his family to plan with them a convenient house to build and to stay at home with them hereafter. On October 14, the last before reaching port, another whale was captured to add to the good catch already on board but by some unlucky accident, the details of which have yet been learned, the whale struck and killed Captain Warren. Life lingered a few hours, long enough to send a last word to his family and to give directions as to the disposal of his remains.”
"The incantations, multiplied worldwide, may help usher in the long-awaited final days."(Image by Jonathan Baldwin.)
Strip mall turned faith center, the International House of Prayer in Kansas City is an evangelical and charismatic haven that was founded in 1999 by a self-styled reverend named Mike Bickle. At the heart of the growing perpetual prayer movement in America, IHOP has been criticized for its cultish end-of-days prognostications. An excerpt from an Erik Eckholm article in the New York Times:
“The International House of Prayer is ‘an important example’ of the proliferating nondenominational charismatic churches, said Catherine C. Bowler, a religious historian at the Duke University Divinity School. From megachurches with tens of thousands of members to more intense and unusual ministries like Mr. Bickle’s, these churches, which practice faith healing and speaking in tongues, make up one of the fastest-growing segments of American Christianity, attracting millions.
The staff and students here are required to spend at least 25 hours a week in the prayer room, and they also engage in weekly fasts of a day or more. The focused worship, Mr. Bickle says, affects real-world events by weakening the demons and strengthening the angels that swirl among us. Most important, he says, the incantations, multiplied worldwide, may help usher in the long-awaited final days: seven years of bloody battles and disasters that will end with the Second Coming, with true Christians spirited to eternal bliss and everyone else doomed to hellfire.
‘The Second Coming will probably happen within the lifetime of people living today,’ Mr. Bickle said in an interview — the sort of prediction that leads some pastors to say he is overstepping and using apocalyptic predictions to seduce eager young believers. Mr. Bickle adamantly rejects such charges, as do followers like Mai Fink, a woman in her early 20s who was helping to run the church summer camp. She and her husband moved to Kansas City, she said, because ‘the prayer makes our hearts come alive.'”
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IHOP, where the prayer never ends:
Formerly lame, now amazing. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
The perfect opening of “Banksy Was Here,” Lauren Collins’ excellent 2007 New Yorker article about the inscrutable artist:
“The British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has a gold tooth. He has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He’s an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, England—no, Yate. The son of a butcher and a housewife, or a delivery driver and a hospital worker, he’s fat, he’s skinny, he’s an introverted workhorse, he’s a breeze-shooting exhibitionist given to drinking pint after pint of stout. For a while now, Banksy has lived in London: if not in Shoreditch, then in Hoxton. Joel Unangst, who had the nearly unprecedented experience of meeting Banksy last year, in Los Angeles, when the artist rented a warehouse from him for an exhibition, can confirm that Banksy often dresses in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. When Unangst is asked what adorns the T-shirts, he will allow, before fretting that he has revealed too much already, that they are covered with smudges of white paint.
The creative fields have long had their shadowy practitioners, figures whose identities, whether because of scandalous content (the author of Story of O), fear of ostracism (Joe Klein), aversion to nepotism (Stephen King’s son Joe Hill), or conceptual necessity (Sacha Baron Cohen), remain, at least for a time, unknown. Anonymity enables its adopter to seek fame while shielding him from the meaner consequences of fame-seeking. In exchange for ceding credit, he is freed from the obligations of authorship. Banksy, for instance, does not attend his own openings. He may miss out on the accolades, but he’ll never spend a Thursday evening, from six to eight, picking at cubes of cheese.
Banksy is a household name in England—the Evening Standard has mentioned him thirty-eight times in the past six months—but his identity is a subject of febrile speculation. This much is certain: around 1993, his graffiti began appearing on trains and walls around Bristol; by 2001, his blocky spray-painted signature had cropped up all over the United Kingdom, eliciting both civic hand-wringing and comparisons to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Vienna, San Francisco, Barcelona, and Paris followed, along with forays into pranksterism and more traditional painting, but Banksy has never shed the graffitist’s habit of operating under a handle. His anonymity is said to be born of a desire—understandable enough for a ‘quality vandal,’ as he likes to be called—to elude the police. For years now, he has refused to do face-to-face interviews.”
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Banksy’s very dark Simpsons couch gag:
Another Banksy post:
- Check out Exit Through the Gift Shop.
Tags: Banksy, Lauren Collins
The greatest electrician of them all, who died poor and alone at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan in 1943, was born on July 10, 1856.
More Nikola Tesla posts:
- Tesla predicts mobile phones. (1909)
Tags: Nikola Tesla
Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Receiving looks of rebuke from mimes since 2009.
- Classic Film: The Rapture (1991)
- Old Print Articles: Grisly July 4th accidents (1889) + People throwing tomato cans at people (1886) + Cactus thieves in Brooklyn (1890).
- Classic Photographs: Harriet Quimby pauses before takeoff (1911) + Auguste Rodin, mid-career (1893).
- Featured Videos: Jackie Gleason campaigns for Richard Nixon (1968) + Two 1970s movies about head transplantations + Robert Moog demonstrates the Minimoog (1980s) + Aftershave commercial by Jean-Luc Godard + First Earth Day comes to NYC (1970) + In Search of…UFOs (1977) + Testing the first cell phone network (1979).
- Recently Posted on Craigslist: Sell me your luxuriant hair + IKEA is a fantastic maze of shit + Please give me a boat + Worst conceptial art project ever.
- Venzuela’s San Antonio prison is like spring break with cockfights.
- Mexican migration to the United States has seriously ebbed.
- Baseball writer Bill James turns his eye to crime.
- Environmental predictions from 1970 that were far too dire.
- Charles Bukowski argues that crowds lack wisdom.
- Douglas Adams wrote a perceptive piece about the Internet in 1999.
- Ted Conover reports on a murderer who became a tech millionaire in prison.
- Joseph Mitchell writes about Native Americans building NYC in 1949.
- MIT’s Sherry Turkle examines identity in the Internet Age.
- Architectural critic Reyner Banham describes Las Vegas.
- If you mistreat pigeons, they will never forget your face.
- Marc Andreessen discusses wearable computing.
- CrowdOptic is using augmented reality to monetize audience behavior.
- Eyeglasses that can read human emotions.
- Terry Southern writes about William S. Burroughs in 1964.
- In 1998, David Gelernter preached about making computers beautiful.
- Before there was the Internet, there was the Mundaneum.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.