A Chuck Close interview from 1978, a decade before a spinal artery collapse left him severely paralyzed but no less brilliant an artist. I went to the press event when he had his major retrospective at MoMA some years back and came away as impressed with him as his work, which is amazing. I believe I referred to his portraiture as “pointillism for the computer age” in a subsequent article, but it’s much more complex than that description.
Chuck Close describing his arrival in NYC in 1967, to New York magazine: “I paid $150 a month for a raw loft on Greene Street, and all my friends who were already living here laughed, thinking it was outrageous to pay that much. The loft had no heat. I painted for an entire year with gloves on and just my trigger finger sticking out to the button on the airbrush. Literally, the coffee would freeze in its mug; the toilet would freeze overnight. We slept under a pile of blankets.
Soho was rats and rags and garbage trucks: There were occasional wars between one Mafia-owned waste-management company and another, during which one would burn the other’s trucks. There might have been twenty artists—or people of any kind—living between Houston and Canal; you could have shot a cannon down Greene Street and never hit anybody. But we all lived within a few blocks of each other: Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Phil Glass. We were in someone’s loft every night, either listening to a composer like Steve Reich or watching dancers like Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. A lot of us helped Richard make his lead prop pieces, because he needed muscle and brawn to roll the lead and stack it up. Phil was his only paid assistant, and the rest of us were this interesting group of writers, filmmakers, even Spalding Gray. After work we’d go over to this cafeteria in what is now the Odeon, and we’d sit around and dream up ideas on the back of napkins.”
"If you closed your corset/girdle/bra company and have your stock in the garage or storage - contact us please."
“New old stock” underwear (any)
Seeking to buy out “factory finds” or “warehouse finds” from the old NYC corset, foundations, underwear, brassiere, or hosiery companies.
Also seeking to buy the backroom inventory from the really old closed lingerie shops. We are looking for the made-in-USA undergarments from the 70’s and older.
If you closed your corset/girdle/bra company and have your stock in the garage or storage – contact us please.
If you are emptying out an old warehouse and discovered that it’s loaded with old underwear (or stockings, no pantyhose) – contact us please.
A couple years ago we made contact with a person whose garage was loaded with this stuff that we wanted but we lost his contact information. We think the company was Strouse but we’re not sure.
Please help save these cool old clothes from the landfills and get it recycled into the hands of people like our us who appreciate the old products! Let’s make a win/win deal!
Dick Cavett conducted a 1970 interview with a very drunk John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk, the latter of whom just passed away. Best known as Colombo, but much more diverse than that, Falk played a special role in the work of Cassavetes and Wim Wenders.
The first graph ofRichard Brody’s smart Falk postat the New Yorker blog: “It’s surprising to learn, from reading biographical sketches of Peter Falk on the occasion of his death, at the age of eighty-three, that he got a master’s degree in public administration and was working in Connecticut as an efficiency expert when, in his mid-twenties, he decided to take a chance on an acting career. It’s equally odd to note that he had two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor in consecutive years—1960 and 1961—for his roles in Murder, Inc. and A Pocketful of Miracles. They hardly helped. He was working mainly on television, doing some movies but not getting plum roles, when, in 1967, he met John Cassavetes at a Lakers game and then had lunch with him at the Paramount commissary. As Marshall Fine writes in his biography of Cassavetes, Accidental Genius, ‘Falk had a script by Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, that he thought Cassavetes would be perfect for.’ At the same time, Cassavetes pitched Husbands to Falk. Each actor thought the other had agreed to the projects, and each had misunderstood.'”
These classic 1862 Civil War photographs of Thaddeus Lowe’s balloons were taken in Virginia by Mathew Brady. Lowe, the father of American military aerial reconnaissance who had been designated Chief Aeronaut of the United States Balloon Corps by President Lincoln, deployed his crafts to gather information about the number and positioning of Confederate troops. Oh, and Lowe was also the first American to figure out how to make artificial ice, which is the odd choice for the lead of his 1913 New York Times obituary:
“Pasadena, Cal., Jan. 16–Dr. Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, scientist and experimenter, who invented an ice compressing machine in 1865, making the first artificial ice in the United States, died to-day at the home of his daughter in this place. Dr. Lowe was born in Jefferson, N. H., in 1832, of Pilgrim ancestry. He was educated in the common schools, and specialized in the study of chemistry. From 1856 to 1859 he was engaged in constructing balloons for the study of atmospheric conditions.
Dr. Lowe built the largest aerostat of his day, and in 1861 made a 900-mile trip in it from Cincinnati to the South Carolina coast in nine hours. Later he entered the Government services as Chief of the Aeronautics Corp, which he organized, rendering valuable service to the Army of the Potomac, from Bull Run to Gettysburg, by observations and timely warnings. Next he invented a system of signaling to field batteries from high altitudes. Other devices invented by him practically revolutionized the gas industry. He built the Mount Lowe Railway, 1891-1904, and established the Lowe Observatory in the Sierra Madre Mountains.“
"He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had."
In his provocative new Atlantic article, “The Brain on Trial,” David Eagleman investigates whether brain injuries and illnesses are sometimes the driving force behind criminality. In the piece, Eagleman raises the case of Charles Whitman, a heavily armed 25-year-old student who killed 16 people from his vantage point on a University of Texas observation tower on a blistering August day in 1966. Whitman, who kept killing until he himself was killed by police, left a note revealing his suspicions that his brain had somehow changed, causing his violent impulses–and he may have been right. An excerpt:
“Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.
For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had.
I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.
Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, the researchers Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of symptoms, including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage often neglected or physically abused their infants. In humans, activity in the amygdala increases when people are shown threatening faces, are put into frightening situations, or experience social phobias. Whitman’s intuition about himself—that something in his brain was changing his behavior—was spot-on.”
From David Remnick’s excellent 1991 Washington Post coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ignominious ouster from the Kremlin, which occurred after he dismantled the Cold War Soviet machinery, leaving the former superpower less a danger to the rest of the world but seemingly no less a danger to itself:
“Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose battle to reform socialism has ended with the collapse of Leninist ideology and the Soviet Union, left the Kremlin tonight an exhausted and bitter man.
In his final days, Gorbachev told aides that he felt ‘balanced’ and ‘at peace’ with his choices, his place in history. But as he sat in the eerie quiet of his office last weekend receiving visitors and watching news reports on television, he learned that the presidents of the former Soviet republics, who had met to form the new Commonwealth of Independent States, had discussed not only an end to the Soviet Union but, with unconcealed relish, the details of his pension. Down the hall, members of President Boris Yeltsin’s Russian government were already taking measurements and inventory for their imminent move into the Kremlin.
‘For me, they have poisoned the air,’ Gorbachev confided to one reporter. ‘They have humiliated me.’
Gorbachev has tried hard to conceal his emotions, to cover them over with pride and the language of political euphemism. Yet his sense of rejection and betrayal from all sides seems no less profound for him than it was for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was ousted in 1964, or for Winston Churchill when he was summarily voted out of 10 Downing St. after leading Britain to victory in World War II. Four months ago, Gorbachev’s closest aides in the Communist Party, the military and the KGB arrested him and made clear an implicit threat of murder. Once back in Moscow, Yeltsin and other republics’ leaders leached him of all authority, making him look hollow and weak.”
••••••••••
In 1996, Gorbachev is interviewed by noted male impersonator, Rosie Charles:
If you’d like, they can stuff the crust with cheese, comrade:
I have 2 pony tails 1 is 13 inches of thick dark brown hair $150 – 200 and the other is about 11 inches of thick dark brown hair $ 100 – 150 i dont want to just throw this perfectly good hair away so contact me if you are intrested greatly appreciate it. please dont email me asking why dont you just donate it because i need the money. so if anyone knows where i can sell my hair ill donate the other pony tail i just really need the money right now thank you .
"A few minutes later screams were heard in the orchard."
Children playing with firearms, always a recipe for disaster, led to tragedy on Long Island 110 years ago, as this article from the January 2, 1901 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle demonstrates. An excerpt:
“Northport, L.I.–The second accidental shooting within a week at Fort Saratoga occurred about noon yesterday, and though little Carlo Bertelsen, the victim, is yet alive at noon to-day with a .32-caliber bullet in his body, little hope is entertained of his recovery.
Peter Mortensen, the 10-year-old son of Andrew Mortensen, an oysterman, took a .32 caliber pistol belonging to his grandfather from a bureau drawer, and in company with his cousin, Willi Kasso, and his playmate, Carlo, the son of a farmer, 8 years of age, he went into an orchard near their home to practice shooting at a mark.
A few minutes later screams were heard in the orchard, and Bertelsen’s parents found their child lying upon the ground with a bullet wound in his stomach. The Mortensen child in the excitement had dropped the pistol and ran away.
Dr. George H. Donahue at Northport was called and he found that the bullet had entered the child’s body just below the lung, but he was unable to locate it.
Young Mortensen, who held the pistol, had a part of one finger taken off by the same bullet that wounded his playmate.
Coroner H.H. Davidson, last night took the ante-mortem statement of the injured child, who said they had already shot the pistol off once at a mark, and were getting ready to shoot the second time when Peter Mortensen could not move the trigger, so they all took a hand in trying and the pistol suddenly went off.
Dr. Walter Lindsay, who was called in consultation last night, does not think the boy can live. This accident occurred within one half mile of where Henry Webber was accidentally shot by his brother on Friday last and which resulted in his death.”
From Hunter S, Thompson’s essay, “The Hippies,” which was originally published in the Collier’s Encyclopedia 1968 Yearbook:
Everyone seems to agree that hippies have some kind of widespread appeal, but nobody can say exactly what they stand for. Not even the hippies seem to know, although some can be very articulate when it comes to details.
“I love the whole world,” said a 23-year-old girl in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, the hippies’ world capital. “I am the divine mother, part of Buddha, part of God, part of everything.
“I live from meal to meal. I have no money, no possessions. Money is beautiful only when it’s flowing; when it piles up, it’s a hang-up. We take care of each other. There’s always something to buy beans and rice for the group, and someone always sees that I get “grass” [marijuana] or “acid” [LSD]. I was in a mental hospital once because I tried to conform and play the game. But now I’m free and happy.”
She was then asked whether she used drugs often.
“Fairly,” she replied. “When I find myself becoming confused I drop out and take a dose of acid. It’s a short cut to reality; it throws you right into it. Everyone should take it, even children. Why shouldn’t they be enlightened early, instead of waiting till they’re old? Human beings need total freedom.
“That’s where God is at. We need to shed hypocrisy, dishonesty, and phoniness and go back to the purity of our childhood values.”
The next question was “Do you ever pray?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I pray in the morning sun. It nourishes me with its energy so I can spread my love and beauty and nourish others.”•
“On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing, a forty-one-year-old research scientist at Manchester University, was found dead by his housekeeper. Before getting into bed the night before, he had taken a few bites out of an apple that was, apparently, laced with cyanide. At an inquest, a few days later, his death was ruled a suicide. Turing was, by necessity rather than by inclination, a man of secrets. One of his secrets had been exposed two years before his death, when he was convicted of “gross indecency” for having a homosexual affair. Another, however, had not yet come to light. It was Turing who was chiefly responsible for breaking the German Enigma code during the Second World War, an achievement that helped save Britain from defeat in the dark days of 1941. Had this been publicly known, he would have been acclaimed a national hero. But the existence of the British code-breaking effort remained closely guarded even after the end of the war; the relevant documents weren’t declassified until the nineteen-seventies. And it wasn’t until the eighties that Turing got the credit he deserved for a second, and equally formidable, achievement: creating the blueprint for the modern computer.”
••••••••••
Alan Turing the Cat who, by the way, pretty much sucks at math:
Time magazine heralded the advent of the Digital Age in its March 1, 1995 issue, which included an essay by Stewart Brand called “We Owe It All to the Hippies.” The piece argued, quite rightly, that the impetus for our booming tech sector came from the counterculture, courtesy of dropouts, phreaks, and hackers. An excerpt:
“In the 1960s and early ’70s, the first generation of hackers emerged in university computer-science departments. They transformed mainframes into virtual personal computers, using a technique called time sharing that provided widespread access to computers. Then in the late ’70s, the second generation invented and manufactured the personal computer. These nonacademic hackers were hard-core counterculture types — like Steve Jobs, a Beatle- haired hippie who had dropped out of Reed College, and Steve Wozniak, a Hewlett-Packard engineer. Before their success with Apple, both Steves developed and sold ‘blue boxes,’ outlaw devices for making free telephone calls. Their contemporary and early collaborator, Lee Felsenstein, who designed the first portable computer, known as the Osborne 1, was a New Left radical who wrote for the renowned underground paper the Berkeley Barb.
As they followed the mantra ‘Turn on, tune in and drop out,’ college students of the ’60s also dropped academia’s traditional disdain for business. ‘Do your own thing’ easily translated into ‘Start your own business.’ Reviled by the broader social establishment, hippies found ready acceptance in the world of small business. They brought an honesty and a dedication to service that was attractive to vendors and customers alike. Success in business made them disinclined to ‘grow out of’ their countercultural values, and it made a number of them wealthy and powerful at a young age.
The third generation of revolutionaries, the software hackers of the early ’80s, created the application, education and entertainment programs for personal computers. Typical was Mitch Kapor, a former transcendental-meditation teacher, who gave us the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, which ensured the success of IBM’s Apple-imitating PC. Like most computer pioneers, Kapor is still active. His Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he co- founded with a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, lobbies successfully in Washington for civil rights in cyberspace. In the years since Levy’s book, a fourth generation of revolutionaries has come to power. Still abiding by the Hacker Ethic, these tens of thousands of netheads have created myriad computer bulletin boards and a nonhierarchical linking system called Usenet. At the same time, they have transformed the Defense Department-sponsored ARPAnet into what has become the global digital epidemic known as the Internet. The average age of today’s Internet users, who number in the tens of millions, is about 30 years. Just as personal computers transformed the ’80s, this latest generation knows that the Net is going to transform the ’90s. With the same ethic that has guided previous generations, today’s users are leading the way with tools created initially as ‘freeware’ or ‘shareware,’ available to anyone who wants them. Of course, not everyone on the electronic frontier identifies with the countercultural roots of the ’60s. One would hardly call Nicholas Negroponte, the patrician head of M.I.T.’s Media Lab, or Microsoft magnate Bill Gates ‘hippies.’ Yet creative forces continue to emanate from that period. Virtual reality — computerized sensory immersion — was named, largely inspired and partly equipped by Jaron Lanier, who grew up under a geodesic dome in New Mexico, once played clarinet in the New York City subway and still sports dreadlocks halfway down his back. The latest generation of supercomputers, utilizing massive parallel processing, was invented, developed and manufactured by Danny Hillis, a genial longhair who set out to build ‘a machine that could be proud of us.’ Public-key encryption, which can ensure unbreakable privacy for anyone, is the brainchild of Whitfield Diffie, a lifelong peacenik and privacy advocate who declared in a recent interview, ‘I have always believed the thesis that one’s politics and the character of one’s intellectual work are inseparable.’ Our generation proved in cyberspace that where self-reliance leads, resilience follows, and where generosity leads, prosperity follows. If that dynamic continues, and everything so far suggests that it will, then the information age will bear the distinctive mark of the countercultural ’60s well into the new millennium.”
••••••••••
As mentioned in the article, the Osborne I, the first portable computer:
My life is on an upswing. Saw Sade last night! ( she kicked ass ) Business is picking up. I’ve got a fantastic independant Woman who likes what we have. What’s left of the family is doing great. Divorced in less than 8 weeks, keeping the house/w custody of the children ( and I don’t want a damn dime from her )
Donald Barthelme’s reading list was originally published in 2003 by the Believer. In it, the postmodern short-story master made 81 suggestions to his students. Some are out-of-print, but pretty much all can be had online. You can add Barthelme’s own 60 Stories to the list.
Nothing counterintuitive about this Wired post by Brandon Keim about research that suggests that city dwellers are more stressed out than rural counterparts and more prone to mental illness. Our ability to handle social stress and stimuli isn’t very elastic, which is bad news since social stress and stimuli aren’t decreasing anytime soon, not with those wired gadgets tucked neatly in our pockets adding to the urban ills of noise, traffic and crowds. Still, I’d rather live in a city. An excerpt:
“Compared to their rural counterparts, city dwellers have higher levels of anxiety and mood disorders. The schizophrenia risk of people raised in cities is almost double. Literature on the effect is so thorough that researchers say it’s not just correlation, as might be expected if anxious people preferred to live in cities. Neither is it a result of heredity. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and mind.
What those causes are is unknown, but many researchers have speculated that urban social environments are partly responsible. After all, cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness.
‘Most people speculated that it had something to do with social environments, but there was never any direct data,’ said Meyer-Lindenberg. ‘We provide the first mechanism that links cities to mental illness via social stress.'”
