Certainly for me, and perhaps for many of you, there’s something eerily familiar about the scene that plays out in this animation. Here’s the backstory: Starting when he was 12, Mike Cohen, a kid growing up in Buffalo, began recording the arguments he had with his parents (unbeknownst to them). At least one of the tapes, recorded in 1985, recently ended up in the hands of Rodd Perry, a first time animator, who created the cartoon above. By the looks of things, Brother Mike is still part of the music scene today.
Some enthusiasts of 19th-century American psychological horror master (or, in a very real sense, 19th-century American psychological horror inventor) Edgar Allan Poe find his work best read aloud. Thus we’ve previously featured Poe delivered in the gravitas-filled voices of such noted thespians as Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Christopher Walken, Christopher Lee, and James Mason. Mason did the reading (above) as a narration for a 1953 animated short The Tell-Tale Heart, adapting Poe’s 1843 story of the same name, which drew both an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film and — perhaps more in line with the Poe sensibility — a rating of “X” from the British Board of Film Censors.
WFMU managed to dig up even more Poe as read by Mason, three tracks of which they posted to their blog one Halloween, all with “creepy and dramatic organ stylings by Buddy Cole, who no doubt wore an Inverness cape for the occasion.” They come from a 1958 release from Decca Records, featuring Mason’s readings of not just “The Tell-Tale Heart” [MP3] but Poe’s cryptic fable “Silence” [MP3—below] and haunting final poem “Annabel Lee” [MP3—bottom]. (The flip side of the album offers something completely different, in the form of Agnes Moorehead “and a supporting cast” performing Lucille Fletcher’s radio play “Sorry, Wrong Number.”)
Opinions on who reads Poe most effectively will differ from listener to listener, but if you’d like to make a partial but direct comparison for yourself, simply line up Mason’s rendition of “The Tell-Tale Heart” on a playlist with the ones we’ve previously posted by Christopher Lee, Basil Rathbone — and of course, Iggy Pop. It may have become Poe’s best-known story in the first place by having retained its impact over all these 172 years, but having such a range of performative personalities interpret it can’t hurt in keeping it as eerie as ever.
If there is any contemporary figure out there that resembles Charles Foster Kane, it is that real estate mogul and unlikely GOP front runner, Donald Trump. Like Kane, Trump was educated in, and thrown out of, some of the most elite private schools out there. Both have huge, larger-than-life personalities that readily turned them into media icons. Both had tumultuous relationships with women that ended up tabloid fodder. Both ostentatiously flaunted their wealth. And both have grandiose political ambitions.
Above you can watch The Donald expound on Orson Welles’s masterpiece in a clip directed by none other than master documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Trump is remarkably thoughtful in this piece compared to the campaign trail where he often sounds like a WWE barker channeling Mussolini. He comes to the movie from a vantage point that most of us just don’t have; namely, he knows what it’s like being obscenely wealthy.
Citizen Kane is really about accumulation. And at the end of the accumulation, you see what happens. And it’s not necessarily all positive. I think you learn in Kane that maybe wealth isn’t everything. He had the wealth; he just didn’t have the happiness. The table getting larger and larger and larger with he and his wife getting further and further apart as he got wealthier and wealthier, perhaps I can understand that…. Wealth isolates you from other people.
At the end of the piece, Morris asks Trump to give Kane some advice. His response, delivered with a smirk, is pure Trump – i.e. bombastic and misogynist. “Get yourself a different woman.”
The segment comes from an aborted project by Morris called Movie Movie, where he envisioned putting modern figures into the films they most admire. So imagine Trump actually in a re-enactment of Kane. Or, as also almost happened, imagine Mikhail Gorbachev starring in a reenactment of Dr. Strangelove. It’s a damned shame that Movie Movie never got made.
Below you can see more of Trump along with Gorbachev, Lou Reed, Walter Cronkite and others talking about their favorite movies in a video made for the 2002 Academy Awards.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
In 1962, during the height of the Cold War, the United States launched nuclear weapons (bigger than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) into space and detonated them. Ostensibly, the goal was to see what these high altitude nuclear blasts might do to the Earth’s magnetic field.
The explosions took place some 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. And, as the NPR video above describes it, folks living in the Pacific watched the light show while gathered on rooftops and blithely sipping drinks. Below, you can view arresting footage of the tests — without having to worry about getting radioactive fallout in your cocktail.
Every year for the past decade or so, we‘ve seen new, dire pronouncements of the death of print, along with new, upbeat rejoinders. This year is no different, though the prognosis has seemed especially positive of late in robust appraisals of the situation from entities as divergent as The Onion’s A.V. Club and financial giant Deloitte. I, for one, find this encouraging. And yet, even if all printed media were in decline, it would still be the case that the history of the modern world will mostly be told in the history of print. And ironically, it is online media that has most enabled the means to make that history available to everyone, in digital archives that won’t age or burn down.
One such archive, the British Library’s Flickr Commons project, contains over one million images from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. As the Library wrote in their announcement of these images’ release, they cover “a startling mix of subjects. There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.” Microsoft digitized the books represented here, and then donated them to the Library for release into the Public Domain.
One of the quirky features of this decidedly quirky assemblage is the Mechanical Curator, a bot-run blog that generates “randomly selected small illustrations and ornamentations, posted on the hour.” At the time of writing, it has given us an ad for the rather culturally dated artifact “Oriental Tooth Paste,” a product “prepared by Jewsbury & Brown.” Many of the other selections have considerably less frisson. Nonetheless, writes the Library, often “our newest colleague,” the Mechanical Curator, “plucks from obscurity, places all before you, and leaves you to work out the rest. Or not.”
Speaking of commerce, we also have an album devoted to advertisements, found by the community from, yes, the Mechanical Curator Collection. Here you will discover ads like “Oriental Tooth Paste” or that below for “Gentlemen’s & Boy’s Clothing 25 Per Cent. Under Usual London Prices” from 1894. Our conception of Victorian England as excessively formal gets confirmed again and again in these ads, which, like the random choice at the top of the post, contain their share of awkward or humorous historical notions.
Doubtless none of the proto-Mad Men of these very English publications foresaw such a marvel as the Mechanical Curator. Much less might they have foreseen such a mechanism arising without a monetizing scheme. But thanks to this free, newfangled algorithm’s efforts, and much assistance from “the community,” we have a digital record that shows us how public discourse shaped print culture, or the other way around. A fascinating, and at times bewildering, feature of this phenomenal archive is the requirement that we ourselves supply most of the cultural context for these austerely presented images.
The Rockford Files hit the airwaves in September 1974, and until the show ended in 1980, each episode began in the same way. During the title sequence, you’d hear a phone ring, and then an answering machine would start to play, “This is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message. I’ll get back to you.” With each new episode, a caller would leave a different message after the beep:
“It’s Norma at the market. It bounced. You want me to tear it up, send it back, or put it with the others?”
“It’s Laurie at the trailer park. A space opened up. Do you want me to save it or are the cops going to let you stay where you are?”
“It’s Audra. Remember last summer at Pat’s? I’ve got a twelve hour layover before I go to Chicago. How about it?”
“This is the message phone company. I see you’re using our unit, now how about paying for it?”
“I staked out that guy only it didn’t work out like you said. Please call me. Room 234. County Hospital.”
“Hey Rockford, very funny. I ain’t laughing. You’re gonna get yours.”
The short messages told you pretty much everything you needed to know about Jim Rockford. He’s a private detective living paycheck to paycheck. He cuts corners and bends rules when he needs to. He has friends among women, and enemies among men. He’s a quintessential private dick.
In total, 122 different answering machine messages were left during the run of the series. (Apparently, many featured the voices of 1970s celebrities and public figures.) You can play Season 1 above, and the remaining seasons below.
I remember thrilling, as a kid, to the envelope illustrations that the magazines I read ran on their letters pages. Not only would some of these readers (usually readers my age, with a lot of time on their hands) go to the trouble of writing and mailing a physical letter to their periodical of choice, they’d actually get as artistic as possible with the envelope as well. Some even did pretty impressive jobs, though as the envelope-illustrators of our time go, few rank up there with the likes of Maurice Sendak.
“This is how Maurice Sendak sometimes sent his letters,” wrote Letters of Note, tweeting out the image above. “Just imagine getting one.” The author of Where the Wild Things Areand In the Night Kitchen wrote the letter contained in this particular envelope to his fellow children’s book writer-illustrator Nonny Hogrogian, author of One Fine Day and The Contest. Sendak’s close colleagues might have got used to receiving such unconventionally illuminated correspondence, but he also wrote back to each and every one of his young readers, sometimes with similarly prepared correspondence.
Letters of Notealso tweeted a quote from a Fresh Air interview with Sendak in which Terry Gross asked for his favorite comments from his fans. Sendak told the story of a boy from whom he received “a charming card with a little drawing. I loved it.” In reply, he sent the child a postcard of appreciation and drew a Wild Thing on it, just as he did on the envelope of his letter to Hogrogian. The boy’s mother then wrote back to say her son “Jim loved your card so much he ate it,” which Sendak considered “one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
In late August, one of Tokyo’s grandest hotels, Hotel Okura closed its doors and its main wing will be demolished to make way for a $980 million reconstruction. The new hotel will open in 2019.
The move was met with howls of protest around the world. The original hotel was hailed as a modernist treasure. “It’s a masterpiece,” lamented noted architecture writer Hiroshi Matsukuma. “It has a cultural and historical value that can never be reproduced again.”
The hotel first opened its doors in 1962 at a pivotal time in Japanese history. Eager to distance itself from its militaristic past, the country put on a new internationalist face to the world. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were meant to be a sort of coming out party for a new, thoroughly modern nation. The Hotel Okura was designed in this same optimistic spirit.
Architect Yoshio Taniguchi said that he intended the hotel to be crisply modern though imbued with “a firm dignity impervious to fleeting fashion.” Five decades later, the hotel’s interiors still seem striking, elegant and wonderfully atmospheric. Taniguchi recruited master artisans Hideo Kosaka, Shiko Munakata and Kenkichi Tomimoto to craft the hotel’s look. The hotel’s murals, furniture, exterior facing, even the light fixtures, all draw upon elements of traditional Japanese design, re-imagined for the jet age.
“It’s the lighting fixtures, the furniture. What’s exciting is that you see this concept of Japanese design history play out across the lobby,” said Don Choi, professor of architecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “You wouldn’t see that in Paris or New York. That attention to detail makes it a complete work of art.”
Hotel Okura has played host to several US Presidents, from Ford to Obama, along with other international luminaries from the Dalai Lama to Mikhail Gorbachev. Even James Bond spent the night there in You Only Live Twice. Haruki Murakami later featured the place prominently in his beloved tome 1Q84.
For 50 years, the hotel has continued to operate largely unchanged. Even the menu for the hotel’s restaurant, the Orchid Room, serves up the same fare they had back in 1964 — from crepes suzette to wiener schnitzel. The place was the Kennedy era dipped in amber. For the 21st century visitor, that was no doubt much of its charm.
Monocle Magazine has produced a lovely video elegy to the hotel, which you can watch above.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Back in 1985, Douglas Adams teamed up with Infocom’s Steve Meretzky to create an interactive fiction video game based on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Designed before graphic-intensive video games really hit their stride, the original Hitchhiker’s Guide game (watch an unboxing above) was played with text commands on the Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, CP/M, DOS, Amiga, Atari 8‑bit and Atari ST platforms. And it found instant success. The adventure game sold 400,000 copies, making it one of the best-selling games of its time, and it was named the “Game Of The Year” by various magazines.
The game remains essentially unchanged and the original writing by Douglas Adams remains untouched. It is still played by entering commands and pressing return. Then read the text, follow your judgement and you will probably be killed an inordinate number of times.
Note: The game will kill you frequently. If in doubt, before you make a move please save your game by typing “Save” then enter. You can then restore your game by typing “Restore” then enter. This should make it slightly less annoying getting killed as you can go back to where you were before it happened. You’ll need to be signed in for this to work. You can sign in or register by clicking the BBCiD icon next to the BBC logo in the top navigation bar.
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The tale of an ailing New York-based playwright’s unwilling return to his ancestral home is a natural fit for Colbert, raised in Charleston, South Carolina by Northern parents. Recorded at the behest of Selected Shorts, a public radio program wherein well known performers interpret contemporary and classic short fiction, the story—hand picked by Colbert—is a risky choice for 2015.
Like all of O’Connor’s work, it’s darkly comedic, and rife with rich characterizations. It also makes repeated reference to “Negroes,” two of whom the reader—in Colbert’s case, a white man—is tasked with bringing to life. In this current climate, I suspect most white comedians would’ve played it safe with O’Connor’s lurid crowd pleaser, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a staple of high school reading lists, which you can hear O’Connor, herself, read here.
Colbert sails through by bringing his Northwestern University theater training to bear. (O’Connor was a favorite of the Performance Studies department during his time there.)
Having spent years embodying a right wing windbag on his satirical Colbert Report, the comedian clearly relishes the opportunity to tackle a variety of roles, including the main character’s willfully superficial mother, his sour sister, and the aforementioned pre-Civil Rights-era African-American men, workers in the hero’s mother’s dairy barn. The Catholic Colbert also has fun with an unexpectedly less-than-erudite Jesuit priest.
As for O’Connor, she gets in a not-so-subtle jab at Gone with the Wind, as well as the sort of reader who, trying to be helpful, counsels an aspirant Southern writer to “put the War in there.”
Something tells me these two would have hit it off…I would’ve loved to hear him interview her along with George Clooney, Amy Schumer, and other first week guests.
Some of the most rigorous moral thinkers of the past century have spent time on the wrong side of questions they deemed of vital importance. Mohandas Gandhi, for example, at first remained loyal to the British, manifesting many of the vicious prejudices of the Empire against Black South Africans and lobbying for Indians to serve in the war against the Zulu. Maya Jasanoff in New Republic describes Gandhi during this period of his life as a “crank.” At the same time, he developed his philosophy of non-violent resistance, or satyagraha, in South Africa as an Indian suffering the injustices inflicted upon his countrymen by both the Boers and the British.
Gandhi’s sometime contradictory stances may be in part understood by his rather aristocratic heritage and by the warm welcome he first received in London when he left his family, his caste, and his wife and child in India to attend law school in 1888. And yet it is in London that he first began to change his views, becoming a staunch vegetarian and encountering theosophy, Christianity, and many of the contemporary writers who would shift his perspective over time. Gandhi received a very different reception in England when he returned in 1931, the de facto leader of a burgeoning revolutionary movement in India whose example was so important to both the South African and U.S. civil rights movements of succeeding decades.
One of the writers who most deeply guided Gandhi’s political, spiritual, and philosophical evolution, Leo Tolstoy, experienced his own dramatic transformation, from landed aristocrat to social radical, and also renounced property and position to advocate strenuously for social equality. Gandhi eagerly read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, the novelist’s statement of Christian anarchism. The book, Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, “left an abiding impression on me.” After further study of Tolstoy’s religious writing, he “began to realize more and more the infinite possibilities of universal love.”
It was in England, not India, where Gandhi first read “A Letter to a Hindu,” Tolstoy’s 1908 reply to a note from Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das on the question of Indian independence. Tolstoy divides his lengthy, thoughtful “Letter” into short chapters, each of which begins with a quotation from the Vedas. “Indeed,” writes Maria Popova, the missive “puts in glaring perspective the nuanceless and hasty op-eds of our time.” It so affected Gandhi that, in 1909, he wrote to Tolstoy, thus beginning a correspondence between the two that lasted through the following year. “I take the liberty of inviting your attention to what has been going on in the Transvaal for nearly three years,” begins Gandhi’s first letter, somewhat abruptly, “There is in that Colony a British Indian population of nearly 13,000. These Indians have, for several years, labored under various legal disabilities.”
The prejudice against color and in some respects against Asians is intense in that Colony….The climax was reached three years ago, with a law that many others and I considered to be degrading and calculated to unman those to whom it was applicable. I felt that submission to a law of this nature was inconsistent with the spirit of true religion. Some of my friends and I were and still are firm believers in the doctrine of nonresistance to evil. I had the privilege of studying your writings also, which left a deep impression on my mind.
Gandhi refers to a law forcing the Indian population in South Africa to register with the authorities. He goes on to inquire about the authenticity of the “Letter” and asks permission to translate it, with payment, and to omit a negative reference to reincarnation that offended him. Tolstoy responded a few months later, in 1910, allowing the translation free of charge, and allowing the omission, with the qualification that he believed “faith in re-birth will never restrain mankind as much as faith in the immortality of the soul and in divine truth in love.” Overall, however, he expresses solidarity, greeting Gandhi “fraternally” and writing,
God help our dear brothers and co-workers in the Transvaal! Among us, too, this fight between gentleness and brutality, between humility and love and pride and violence, makes itself ever more strongly felt, especially in a sharp collision between religious duty and the State laws, expressed by refusals to perform military service.
The two continued to write to each other, Gandhi sending Tolstoy a copy of his Indian Home Rule and the translated “Letter,” and Tolstoy expounding at length on the errors—and what he saw as the superior characteristics—of Christian doctrine. You can read their full correspondence here, along with Tolstoy’s “Letter to a Hindu” and Gandhi’s introduction to his edition. Despite their religious differences, the exchange further galvanized Gandhi’s passive resistance movement, and in 1910, he founded a community called “Tolstoy Farm” near Johannesburg.
Gandhi’s views on African independence would change, and Nelson Mandela later adopted Gandhi and the Indian independence movement as a standard for the anti-apartheid movement. We’re well aware, of course, of Gandhi’s influence on Martin Luther King, Jr. For his part, Gandhi wrote glowingly of Tolstoy, and the model the novelist provided for his own anti-colonial campaign. In a speech 18 years later, he said, “When I went to England, I was a votary of violence, I had faith in it and none in nonviolence.” After reading Tolstoy, “that lack of faith in nonviolence vanished…Tolstoy was the very embodiment of truth in this age. He strove uncompromisingly to follow truth as he saw it, making no attempt to conceal or dilute what he believed to be the truth. He stated what he felt to be the truth without caring whether it would hurt or please the people or whether it would be welcome to the mighty emperor. Tolstoy was a great advocate of nonviolence in his age.”
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and 
wrote the letter contained in this particular envelope to his fellow children’s book writer-illustrator Nonny Hogrogian, author of 
and 
. Sendak’s close colleagues might have got used to receiving such unconventionally illuminated correspondence, but he also wrote back to each and every one of his young readers, sometimes with similarly prepared correspondence.
