Great find byBrendan Koerner (viaLongform) in digging up “The Boys in the Bank,” the September 1972 Life magazine article about the unusual Brooklyn heist that inspired Dog Day Afternoon, the amazing 1975 film by the recently deceased Sidney Lumet.
From Life: “By now, John Wojtowicz wants to talk to the police. He wants to talk about negotiations, about hostages, about producing a plane which will carry him to distant places. But more than this, he wants to talk to the person who matters most of all. As worried married men will do, he asks to be allowed to talk to his ‘wife.’ The police send a squad car to the mental ward of a nearby hospital and pick up a 26-year-old male named Ernest Aron.
There was nothing in John Wojtowicz’s early years to suggest that he would ever find himself holding off police at the doors of a bank and haggling with them for a meeting with a homosexual spouse. For most of his 27 years his life seemed pointed to nothing more than a routine job, a faithful female wife, and someday a move to the suburbs.
His mother, Theresa, remembers a good boy who didn’t smoke, rarely drank. He played softball, collected stamps, and carefully clipped out newspaper stories about politics. He finished Erasmus High School with a 97% average, shining in math and mechanical drawing. His favorite extracurricular activity was Monopoly.
Only an occasional flare-up of temperamental rage marred an otherwise studious and pedestrian mind. It seemed right to his moth- er that her son should take a job in a bank directly after high school and that he should find a girl friend-and an eventual wife -who was also a bank employee. The first Mrs. John Wojtowiez was loud, jolly Carmen Bifulco, a typist at the Chase Manhattan Bank. She playfully called her husband a dingbat. He dubbed her in return a ‘mouth.’ The couple met on a bank-sponsored ski trip to Massachusetts, were engaged as Wojtowicz was drafted and shipped to Vietnam, and were finally married just as soon as he got back to Brooklyn, safe and sound, one year later. And then the trouble began.”
Advertising legend David Ogilvy (of Ogilvy & Mather, of course) shares trade secrets with David Susskind in 1974. For better or worse, Ogilvy introduced market research to the movie business, which began way back in the days of Gary Cooper and Betty Grable.
From a Time magazine article about advertising in 1962: “Advertising is salesmanship—it is not fine art, literature or entertainment,’ insists David Mackenzie Ogilvy, 51, chairman of Manhattan’s Ogilvy, Benson & Mather. Yet it is Ogilvy’s flair for creating ads that are literate and entertaining while tugging at the purse strings that has made him the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry. It was Ogilvy who immortalized Hathaway shirts with Baron Wrangel’s eyepatch and bearded Commander Whitehead for Schweppes. Cultivated, charming and handsome enough to model occasionally in his own ads, British-born David Ogilvy studied history at Oxford, served a Depression stint as a chef in a Paris hotel, and sold stoves door to door in Scotland before coming to the U.S. to work for Pollster George Gallup. When he set up his agency in 1948, Ogilvy made a private list of the five clients he wanted most: General Foods, Bristol-Myers, Campbell Soup, Lever Bros, and Shell. Today he has some business from all five, and his agency’s billings ($47.5 million last year) are almost eight times greater than a decade ago. Recently he was selected by Washington to sing the charms of the U.S. to prospective tourists from Britain, France and West Germany. ‘Every advertisement I write for the U.S. Travel Service,’ he muses, ‘is a bread-and-butter letter from a grateful immigrant.'”
“Elizabeth Lahr, 38 years old, of 266 Johnson avenue, was sent to jail for sixty days this morning by Magistrate Teale, in the Manhattan avenue court, on the charge of being an habitual drunkard. John Lahr, the woman’s husband, was the complainant.
Lahr produced forty pawn tickets in court and stated that they represented articles pawned by his wife. Mrs. Lahr carried the ten weeks’ old infant in her arms when brought before the bar. She was permitted to take the infant to jail with her.”
"He never greeted the judges when he passed them on the street – everyone looked similarly blank to him – and he developed a reputation for arrogance.," (Image by Przykuta.)
The opening of “Face Blind,” a 2007 Wired article by Joshua Davis about a neurological disorder that makes face recognition difficult–a confusing condition I myself have, though not quite as severely as the people in this article:
“BILL CHOISSER WAS 48 when he first recognized himself. He was standing in his bathroom, looking in the mirror when it happened. A strand of hair fell down – he had been growing it out for the first time. The strand draped toward a nose. He understood that it was a nose, but then it hit him forcefully that it was his nose. He looked a little higher, stared into his own eyes, and saw … himself.
For most of his childhood, Choisser thought he was normal. He just assumed that nobody saw faces. But slowly, it dawned on him that he was different. Other people recognized their mothers on the street. He did not. During the 1970s, as a small-town lawyer in the Illinois Ozarks, he struggled to convince clients that he was competent even though he couldn’t find them in court. He never greeted the judges when he passed them on the street – everyone looked similarly blank to him – and he developed a reputation for arrogance. His father, also a lawyer, told him to pay more attention. His mother grew distant from him. He felt like he lived in a ghost world. Not being able to see his own face left him feeling hollow.
One day in 1979, he quit, left town, and set out to find a better way of being in the world. At 32, he headed west and landed a job as a number cruncher at a construction firm in San Francisco. The job isolated him – he spent his days staring at formulas – but that was a good thing: He didn’t have to talk to people much. With 1,500 miles between him and southern Illinois, he felt a measure of freedom. He started to wear colorful bandannas, and he let his hair grow. When it got long enough, he found that it helped him see himself. Before that, he’d had to deduce his presence: I’m the only one in the room, so that must be me in the mirror. Now that he had long hair and a wild-looking scarf on his head, he could recognize his image. He felt the beginnings of an identity.
It gave him the confidence to start seeing doctors. He wanted to know if there was something wrong with his brain. His vision was fine, they told him – 20/20. One doctor suggested he might have emotional problems and referred him to a psychiatrist. In the medical literature, there were a few reports of head-injury and stroke victims who’d lost their ability to recognize faces. No one, as far as the doctors knew, had ever been born with the condition.
Conventional medicine, in other words, got him nowhere. So Choisser posted a message about his experiences on a Usenet group devoted to people with neurological problems. His subject line was ‘Trouble Recognizing Faces.’ After a few months, in late 1996, he received a solitary reply. ‘Hello, Bill,’ the email began, ‘I read what you wrote, and I think I have what you have.'” (ThanksLongreads.)
"It belongs to a species of gigantic lizards supposed to have been extinct many thousand years." (Image by Arthur Weasley.)
Iowa was overrun by giant, hog-eating lizards in 1885, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was only too happy to reprint ridiculous stories about them. An excerpt from a January 10 article of that year:
“A monster animal was killed near Oskaloosa, in this state recently. It measured from one end of tail to tip of nose eighty-one feet. Its heart weighed eight pounds and had four cavities. After being hunted for a long while it was finally killed with a twelve pound cannon loaded with railroad spikes. It required a team of twelve strong men to pull the monster to the river bank after its death.
It was skinned and a taxidermist is stuffing it, when it will be sent to the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia. The flesh is being carefully removed from the bones, and the skeleton will be properly wired and kept for the present on exhibition at Oskaloosa. Dr. Peck, of Davenport, calls it the Cardiff Giant, and says it belongs to a species of gigantic lizards supposed to have been extinct many thousand years.
The monster had been swallowing farmers’ hogs weighing 300 to 400 pounds each at one gulp. Thousands of people have been gunning for the monster, but it was proof against everything until the cannon brought it down.–Newton (Ia.) Herald“
"It has to be an eye sore." (Image by Philip Kromer.)
want to buy crapiest looking car-no joke (almost any where)
My town is screwing with my perfectly good car that needs work for an inspection, but they want me to get rid of it instead. So I am fighting back. I want a car that can pass a NY inspection and have it sit in my driveway. It has to be an eye sore. These people have so much money and they are trying to push me out of my home. I work for the government and they gave me a 2 year salary freeze. So please help me. As long as the car can be registered and inspected they can’t do anything to the car.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss probes the nexus between art and science in a conversation with one of my favorite novelists, Cormac McCarthy, and one of my favorite filmmakers, Werner Herzog. Listen here. (Thanks Open Culture.)
••••••••••
From Herzog’s look at the dark side of revolution, Even Dwarfs Started Small:
James Gray’s beautiful 2008 romantic drama was largely lost in the wreckage of Joaquin Phoenix’s misguided, well-calibrated and public “mental breakdown,” which served as a test run of sorts for Charlie Sheen’s sadly real and much more interesting one. Making the stupid stunt even more maddening is that Two Lovers contains the best performance of Phoenix’s career.
Leonard Kraditor (Phoenix) is recently out of a mental hospital but not nearly out of danger. A broken engagement led to a suicide attempt and once liberated from the facility Leonard spends time in between subsequent attempts to do himself in by working at his father’s Brooklyn dry cleaners and taking gorgeous black-and-white photographs of street scenes. Into his life come two very different women: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of his father’s business partner who yearns to tend to his wounded, sensitive soul; and his druggie next-door-neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is caught up in a destructive romance with a married man.
Leonard is trapped between what’s right and what feels right, dating the stable woman but longing for the one whose inner turmoil matches his own. But as he’s forced to make a choice he realizes that perhaps the choice isn’t his, and that the decisions made for us are almost always less satisfying than the ones we make ourselves, whether they’re for the best or not.•
Here we stand
Like an Adam and an Eve
Waterfalls
The Garden of Eden
Two fools in love
So beautiful and strong
The birds in the trees
Are smiling upon them
From the age of the dinosaurs
Cars have run on gasoline
Where, where have they gone?
Now, it’s nothing but flowers
There was a factory
Now there are mountains and rivers
you got it, you got it
We caught a rattlesnake
Now we got something for dinner
we got it, we got it
There was a shopping mall
Now it’s all covered with flowers
you’ve got it, you’ve got it
If this is paradise
I wish I had a lawnmower
you’ve got it, you’ve got it
Years ago
I was an angry young man
I’d pretend
That I was a billboard
Standing tall
By the side of the road
I fell in love
With a beautiful highway
This used to be real estate
Now it’s only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now, it’s nothing but flowers
The highways and cars
Were sacrificed for agriculture
I thought that we’d start over
But I guess I was wrong
Once there were parking lots
Now it’s a peaceful oasis
you got it, you got it
This was a Pizza Hut
Now it’s all covered with daisies
you got it, you got it
I miss the honky tonks,
Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens
you got it, you got it
And as things fell apart
Nobody paid much attention
you got it, you got it
I dream of cherry pies,
Candy bars, and chocolate chip cookies
you got it, you got it
We used to microwave
Now we just eat nuts and berries
you got it, you got it
This was a discount store,
Now it’s turned into a cornfield
you got it, you got it
Don’t leave me stranded here
I can’t get used to this lifestyle
This undated, classic 1800s photograph of sideshow attraction “Commodore Nutt,” along with his employer, P.T. Barnum, was taken by Charles DeForest Fredricks. An excerpt from the performer’s 1881 New York Times obituary:
“Commodore Nutt, the celebrated dwarf, died early yesterday morning at the Anthony House, after suffering nearly two months from a severe attack of Bright’s disease. He was born April 1, 1844, at Manchester, N.H., and at the age of 17 was brought to New-York by Barnum and exhibited in the old museum, corner of Ann-Street and Broadway. He was widely advertised as the ‘smallest man in the world.’ His full name was George Washington Morrison Nutt. His father was a New Hampshire farmer, over six feet in height and weighing 270 pounds. His mother was average size and healthy. When he engaged with Barnum in 1860 he was 30 inches high, but as years went by he grew somewhat, and at the time of his death his height was 3 feet seven inches. In girth his increase in size was even more marked, and it is not improbable that recently his average weight has been fully twice that when originally presented to the public. The ‘Commodore’ was originally known as ‘$30,000 Nutt,” Mr. Barnum claiming that such sum was paid the dwarf to go on exhibition. ‘The fact is, though,’ said Mr. Hutchings, who used to be known as the ‘Lightning Calculator,’ the old man paid the boy but $15 a week.'”
David Grann recently published an excellent piece in the New Yorker about a mysterious death in Guatemala. Here’s the opening of another great article for the same magazine, 2010’s “The Mark of a Masterpiece,” about an Oxford professor who authenticates art:
“Every few weeks, photographs of old paintings arrive at Martin Kemp’s eighteenth-century house, outside Oxford, England. Many of the art works are so decayed that their once luminous colors have become washed out, their shiny coats of varnish darkened by grime and riddled with spidery cracks. Kemp scrutinizes each image with a magnifying glass, attempting to determine whether the owners have discovered what they claim to have found: a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci.
Kemp, a leading scholar of Leonardo, also authenticates works of art—a rare, mysterious, and often bitterly contested skill. His opinions carry the weight of history; they can help a painting become part of the world’s cultural heritage and be exhibited in museums for centuries, or cause it to be tossed into the trash. His judgment can also transform a previously worthless object into something worth tens of millions of dollars. (His imprimatur is so valuable that he must guard against con men forging not only a work of art but also his signature.) To maintain independence, Kemp refuses to accept payment for his services. ‘As soon as you get entangled with any financial interest or advantage, there is a taint, like a tobacco company paying an expert to say cigarettes are not dangerous,’ he says.
Kemp, who is in his sixties, is an emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University, and has spent more than four decades immersed in what he calls ‘the Leonardo business,’ publishing articles on nearly every aspect of the artist’s life. “
"Exclamation points, sometimes as many as 50 a page, added empha." (Image by Allan Warren.)
From the New York Times obituary of the former schoolteacher who made a mint by selling David Cassidy and Leif Garrett to infatuated adolescent girls:
“Charles Laufer, who as a high school teacher in 1955 despaired that his students had nothing entertaining to read and responded with magazines aimed at teenage girls desperate to know much, much more about the lives of their favorite cute stars, died April 5 in Northridge, Calif. He was 87.
The cause was heart failure, his brother, Ira, said.
Mr. Laufer’s best-known magazine was Tiger Beat, published monthly. With its spinoff publications and its competitors, of which the most popular was 16 Magazine, Tiger Beat had it all covered — or at least what mattered most to girls from about 8 to 14. The Beach Boys’ loves! Jan and Dean’s comeback! The private lives of the Beatles!
Exclamation points, sometimes as many as 50 a page, added emphasis. Pix, as pictures were known, were glossy, glamorous and frequently poster-size. Fax, as facts were known, often included ‘101 things you never knew about (fill in star’s name)’: he uses a blue toothbrush!”
I am between jobs and looking for odd ones. Big or small, weird or mundane, I am at your service! I am looking for unusual jobs (maybe erotic) to perform when nothing but a handsome interesting guy with many skills will do. Prospective employers: JUST ASK.
Dutch artist Theo Jansen creates self-propelling sculptures that he calls “Strandbeests,” which are fashioned from recycled plastic tubing and bottles. The “creatures” are left on the shore to fend for themselves, using the wind to “walk.” Jansen wowed the crowd with this TED Talk several years ago.
"Backing them up will be an all-star cast of freaks, every one of them stoned." (Image by HammondCast.)
Before moving to his longstanding homestead in Aspen, Colorado, Hunter S. Thompson lived in Berkeley and was eyewitness to the Hippie phenomenon. An excerpt from “The ‘Hashbury’ Is The Capital of the Hippies,” Thompson’s account from the front lines of flower power and its brutally quick commodification, which ran in the May 14, 1967 New York Times:
“Those hippies who don’t work can easily pick up a few dollars a day panhandling along Haight Street. The fresh influx of curiosity-seekers has proved a great boon to the legion of psychedelic beggars. During several days of roaming around the area, I was touched so often that I began to keep a supply of quarters in my pocket so I wouldn’t have to haggle for change. The panhandlers are usually barefoot, always young and never apologetic. They’ll share what they collect anyway, so it seems entirely reasonable that strangers should share with them.
The best show on Haight Street is usually on the sidewalk in front of the Drog Store, a new coffee bar at the corner of Masonic Street. The Drog Store features an all-hippy revue that runs day and night. The acts change sporadically, but nobody cares. There will always be at least one man with long hair and sunglasses playing a wooden pipe of some kind. He will be wearing wither a Dracula cape, a long Buddhist robe, or a Sioux Indian costume. There will also be a hairy blond fellow wearing a Black Bart cowboy hat and a spangled jacket that originally belonged to a drum major in the 1949 Rose Bowl parade. He will be playing the bongo drums. Next to the drummer will be a dazed-looking girl wearing a blouse (but no bra) and a plastic mini-skirt, slapping her thighs to the rhythm of it all.
These three will be the nucleus of the show. Backing them up will be an all-star cast of freaks, every one of them stoned. They will be stretched out on the sidewalk, twitching and babbling in time to the music. Now and then somebody will fall out of the audience and join the revue; perhaps a Hell’s Angel or some grubby, chain-draped impostor who never owned a motorcycle in his life. Or maybe a girl wrapped in gauze or a thin man with wild eyes who took an overdose of acid nine days ago and changed himself into a raven. For those on a quick tour of the Hashbury, the Drog Store revue is a must.” (Thanks Kevin Kelly.)
From Italian television. The Fab Four was accompanied by Mia Farrow and Donovan. No Monkees were there, but lots of actual monkeys were. The whole trip to find enlightenment at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi didn’t pass the stink test, but the footage is still amazing.
"Research does indicate that some schizophrenics decline faster if they smoke hash." (Image by Zantastik.)
From “Running the Asylum,” Graeme Wood’s new Atlantic article about mental-health care in Pakistan, a land that’s suffered a dizzying succession of jihads, terrorism, floods and hashish, always hashish:
“Raja, in his early 30s, is a typical case. He has been out of his mind and addicted to hash for most of his adult life. He’s tall and skinny, with a film of dirt on his face that suggests he can’t quite look after himself. Wazir says Raja routinely relapses by leaving the hospital and hanging out at a nearby shrine close to a police station, where addicts gather to smoke hash and opium. (Wazir blames the hash for worsening Raja’s mental problems. Research does indicate that some schizophrenics decline faster if they smoke hash. Other research, however, shows that cannabidiol, one of the psychoactive chemicals in hashish, has antipsychotic properties. Perhaps it’s a wash.)
Today is a good day for Raja. His eyes bug out, and his lips are pulled back in a huge grin that reveals teeth the color of brown sugar, looking so rotten that a swig of water might wash them away entirely. On bad days, he flies into uncontrollable schizophrenic rages. ‘If he is violent or too talkative or too mischievous,’ Wazir says, ‘we put him again in the mental hospital, and if he requires it, he gets electric shocks.’ He has gone through about 15 rounds of shock therapy. ‘But he’s young, so he can sustain it.’
Wazir says his countrymen have been mentally traumatized more or less continuously for the past 35 years. ‘First it was Afghan jihad, then it was Kashmiri jihad, then it was the nuclear issue, then it was terrorism and suicide bombings, and now floods,’ he says. ‘I have not heard any good news coming to me in Pakistan’”
According to a newBBC article, retro computing enthusiasts will soon be able to purchase a retooled version of that old 1980s favorite, the Commodore 64. An excerpt.
“Commodore is making a Windows PC that fits inside a boxy beige shell that looks exactly like its original C64.
The 8-bit machine was released in 1982, had 64 kilobytes of memory and became one of the best-selling computers ever.
Commodore’s updated version will run Windows 7 but also has an emulator capable of playing games written for its ancestor.
Commodore has started taking orders for the C64x, priced at $595 (£364), and said the machines would ship between May and June. It is expected to appear in shops later in the year.”
"The newly arrived class, among whom incendiary fires occur, contains many people who are ignorant, filthy, dishonest and little appreciative as yet of American ways and American law."
There were many different reasons why people set fires during the 1890s, and the scary results didn’t always bring out the most enlightened responses from reporters at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, as the following quartet of pyromania-related articles prove.
••••••••••
“The Firebug, Zucker” (December 29, 1896): “The conviction of Zucker, the firebug, and his likelihood of serving the state in prison for the rest of his days, will tend to restore a measure of public confidence. There have been quite too many fires of late. They have a way of breaking out in places that are insured, and insured to at least the value of their contents. In order to avert suspicion themselves, some of the people who set fire to their shops and tenements have deemed it wiser to hire the work done by others, and Zucker, with some confederates made this his business. It is believed that he made $200,000 out of his fees for starting fires and out of his share of the insurance that was paid on burned buildings. The newly arrived class, among whom incendiary fires occur, contains many people who are ignorant, filthy, dishonest and little appreciative as yet of American ways and American law. The conviction of Zucker must serve to them as a warning and deterrent.”
••••••••••
“A Boy Firebug” (April 29, 1899): “The most youthful prisoner ever accused of the serious crime of arson in Queens County was arraigned to plead to an indictment before County Judge Moore to-day. The accused is George Spillett, 15 years old, of Flushing, L.I. He pleaded guilty to a charge of arson in the third degree, when he admitted that he had set fire to a barn in College Point several weeks ago. Young Spillett was caught redhanded with the torch in his possession after he had ignited a bundle of straw. The boy has been acting queerly for a long time past and it is believed that he is somewhat demented. About a year ago he was arrested for stabbing a playmate named Joseph Schuester during an altercation, but escaped punishment.”
••••••••••
"The girl is now under arrest, after having admitted that she set fire to the house no less than nine times, the last fire resulting in the complete destruction of the interior." (Image by Henry Mayhew.)
“Is the Little Firebug Mad?” (January 7, 1895): “The mystery surrounding the series of fires in the house of Adam Coldwell, at 84 Guernsey street, has been explained by the confession of Rhoda Carlton, the 14 year old daughter of Mrs. Coldwell, by a former marriage. The girl is now under arrest, after having admitted that she set fire to the house no less than nine times, the last fire resulting in the complete destruction of the interior, so that the family is now homeless and dependent on the charity of neighbors for shelter.
The girl made a full confession to Captain Rhodes of the Greenpoint police yesterday. She said that she was tired of living in the house and thought she could frighten her family into leaving. She said that she was not happy at all. The girl, who is not bad looking and is rather large for her age, cried as she told how she dropped lighted matches behind the wall paper and in the bed clothes.
Rhoda cried a great deal in court and when asked why she had started the fire she wailed: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to see my mamma.”
••••••••••
“A Peculiar Case” (July 14, 1898): “The Fire Marshal is to-day conducting an investigation into the circumstances attending a peculiar case of alleged arson which occurred yesterday in a two story frame house at 369 South Fifth street, in the Eastern District. The house is occupied by Mrs. Rose Gavin, her son, Isaac Morris, a bartender, his wife, Mrs. Antoinette Morris, and her niece, Annie Mitchell. Mrs. Morris has two children, one of whom died lately. Several years ago she met with an accident, injuring one of her legs. The wound proved intractable and since then it has been necessary to place the patient under the influence of ether no less than eighteen times in order that pieces of the putrefied bone might be removed from the limb without pain. Latterly it has been noticed that the injury and incidental worry has been affecting Mrs. Morris’ mind.
At the Bedford avenue station Mrs. Morris loudly protested against the charge of arson preferred against her. ‘As God as my witness,’ she said, ‘I am innocent of this charge. For a long time my mother has been acting in a strange manner toward me. I wish I were dead.'”
