R Crumb, the Father of Underground Comix, Takes Down Donald Trump in a NSFW 1989 Cartoon

in Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Politics | June 20th, 2016

Nature’s way is to take away from those that have too much and give to those that have too little. Man’s way, on the contrary, is to take away from those who have too little to give more to those who already have too much.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, circa 500 BC

Two and a half thousand years later, the ancient sage’s quote continues to resonate, especially in this election year.

Lest we get too gloomy, there is another quote I would like to submit:

And isn’t this a nutty kinda country where you can draw any irreverent, degrading thing about the most powerful people and nobody cares! You don’t get jailed. You don’t get persecuted. They just ice you out of the marketplace.

- R Crumb, Hup, 1989

Crumb is to underground comix as Lao Tzu was to Taoism, but the fame Crumb achieved in the late 60s and early 70s did not protect him from the 80s, “an awful decade” as he told the Observer. His astonishing creative output never flagged, but he hated the culture and struggled to make ends meet:

…it all gradually fell apart through the 70s, and by the 80s with the rise of the yuppies, Reagan’s election and the real estate boom. In California it was always about real estate ever since the Gold Rush, but the 80’s saw a new explosion of it. They went crazy. Everybody was getting their real estate license. They kept on building these hideous housing developments where we lived. It used to be farmland there when we first arrived, then everything became a fight. Dow Chemical tried to come there, we fought that. Then the Super Collider, we fought that. It was this constant battle against these forces of development and business.

In 1991, he fled America for a small village in Southern France, a prescient move, given “Point the Finger,” a comic published two years earlier in his short-lived Hup series. The semi-fictional five-pager pits Crumb himself against real estate developer Donald Trump, billed as “one of the more visible big time predators who feed on society,” as well as “one of the most evil men alive.”

The then-42-year-old Trump is quick to take Crumb’s bait, piling on some insults of his own. He may not be familiar with the cartoonist’s work, but he knows how to mount an attack, with labels like “crass,” “venal,” “some kind of self-styled terrorist,” “the picture of negativity,” and “filled with hate.” Had Crumb set this smack down on a beach, Trump would be the bully kicking sand in the scrawny nerd’s face, as a couple of hot babes look on, admiringly.

In fact, the comic comes very close to ending on such a note. Two of Crumb’s characteristically powerfully-thighed females are on hand, ostensibly as members of his camp. Their heads are quickly turned, however, by an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lavish Palm Beach estate. The Donald starts looking pretty good to Tracy and Marny, bedazzled by the promise of banquets, manicures, world-class entertainment, and a hedonistic after-hours romp with Trump and his then-wife Ivana.

The cartoonist, defeated, compares the tycoon to Trimalchio, the vulgar but loaded host of Petronius’ Satyricon, before preparing to take things out with the Lao Tzu quote at the top of this post.

It’s here that things take a turn for the meta, as Stan “the Man” Shnooter, the self-assured fictional producer of Hup, rallies Crumb to assert authorial control.

Crumb rewinds to a pivotal moment. In this redo, Tracy and Marny remain steadfast. The bully is frogmarched to the toilet to be given a taste of his own medicine. The saga draws to a close with the sort of acrobatic, questionably consensual, NSFW sex that has rained feminist ire on Crumb for years, as the unlikely conquerer savors victory in his preferred style.

Is it fantasy? Reality? All just a dream?

(Any way you slice it, I’m pretty sure Tracy and Marny aren’t the winners…)

You can check out Crumb’s 1989 Trump comic in its extremely NSFW entirety here or buy Hup, Issue 3 to read it the old fashioned way. Some of the tamer panels can be sampled here.

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instantly Discovered His Artistic Style

Noam Chomsky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resembles the Rise of Fascism in 1930s Germany

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Watch UC Berkeley’s Free “Edible Education 101” Lecture Course, Featuring Michael Pollan, Alice Waters and Other Sustainable Food Superstars

in Food & Drink, Health, Life, Online Courses, UC Berkeley | June 20th, 2016

Dinner at Berkeley’s famed Chez Panisse shows up on a lot of foodie’s bucket lists. Its founder, Alice Waters, has been promoting the importance of eating organically and locally for nearly half a century.

With the Edible Schoolyard Project, she found a way to share these beliefs in true hands-on fashion, by involving thousands of children and teens in kitchens and gardens across the country.

We will all benefit from this revolution, though I can’t help but envy the kids at its epicenter. Back when Waters was pioneering California cuisine, I was suffering under my school lunchroom’s mandatory “courtesy bite” policy. The remembered aroma of Salisbury steak and instant mashed potatoes still activates my gag reflex.

The University of California’s Edible Education 101 course has been continuing the Edible Schoolyard’s work at the collegiate level since 2011. It’s a glorious antidote to the culinary traumas experienced by earlier generations. UC Berkeley students can take Edible Education 101 for credit. The public is welcome to sit in on lectures featuring a pantheon of sustainable food superstars, including Waters, author Michael Pollan of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, above, and course leader Mark Bittman (you know him from The New York Times and his new startup The Purple Carrot).

Fortunately for those of us whose bucket list splurge at Chez Panisse requires such additional expenses as plane tickets and hotel rooms, many of the lectures are also viewable online.

The range of topics make clear that edible education is not simply a matter of learning to choose a locally grown portobello over a Big Mac. Transportation, technology, marketing, and pubic policy all factor into the goal of making healthy, equitably farmed food available to all at an a non-Chez Panisse price.

A complete playlist of 2015’s Edible Education 101 lectures is here, or stream them right above. A list of 2016’s topics and guest lecturers is here. The Edible Education lectures will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Michael Pollan Explains How Cooking Can Change Your Life; Recommends Cooking Books, Videos & Recipes

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Available Online: Japanese, Italian, Thai & Much More

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

1,000 Vintage Postcards Show Famous Actors Performing Shakespeare’s Plays from 1880 to 1914

in History, Photography, Theatre | June 20th, 2016

We’ll never fully know how anything looked in Shakespeare’s time, much less how the Bard’s own plays did when first performed on the stage of the Globe Theatre. Thorough scholarship of history in general and Shakespeare in particular has enabled us to imagine and reconstruct such a sight with reasonable credibility, but only so much direct accuracy, since the development of photography wouldn’t happen for a couple hundred years. But not long after humanity got its photographers did those photographers begin taking pictures of humanity’s best-known dramas, and a set of particularly vivid examples survives on Emory University’s relaunched web site Shakespeare and the Players.

The site describes itself as “an online exhibition of nearly 1,000 postcards featuring many famous English and American actors who performed Shakespeare’s plays for late Victorian and Edwardian audiences,” specificially from around 1880 to 1914. It “showcases postcards featuring the dominating actors of the time in roles from some of the more popular and oft-performed plays, like Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet, as well as those from plays not often performed, like Cymbeline and The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

Slate’s Rebecca Onion refers to scholar Lawrence W. Levine, who writes of how, in the 19th century, “many Americans, even if illiterate, knew and loved Shakespeare’s plays; they were the source material for endless parodies, skits, and songs on the American stage. Nor was Shakespeare fandom confined to the elite; in the first half of the 19^th century, theater ‘played the role that movies played in the first half of the twentieth … a kaleidoscopic, democratic institution presenting a widely varying bill of fare to all classes and socioeconomic groups.’ ”

Shakespeare and the Players first went live back in the 1990s, a project of English professor Harry Rusche, who has written an informative preface for the site in its recently redesigned form (with its images completely re-digitized). “Postcards on Shakespeare appeared in a dizzying array of contexts,” he explains, “some humorous and some serious; these cards of actors were only a small part of Shakespeare and of the card-industry as a whole.” A “mania for collecting” swept up their contemporary buyers, not to mention an appreciation for the stars of the day: “handsome men and beautiful women are always popular in any medium.”

But plenty of them actually used these postcards for their intended purpose, about which you can learn more on the site’s postcard backs section. It notes that “the philosopher Jacques Derrida, in The Postcard, encourages us to read the two conflicting, yet resonating scenes — in our case, the Shakespeare image and the handwriting on the back — two sides of the postcards together,” an experience that may “be especially interesting to those of us born in the age of email, video conferences, Twitter, and text messaging,” those who will now wonder when a set of Shakespeare emoji will come along, providing us a means of continuing to incorporate these eternal characters into our correspondence today.

via Slate

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Shakespeare’s Restless World: A Portrait of the Bard’s Era in 20 Podcasts

Take a Virtual Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

What Shakespeare Sounded Like to Shakespeare: Reconstructing the Bard’s Original Pronunciation

Hear What Hamlet, Richard III & King Lear Sounded Like in Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation

Drunk Shakespeare: The Trendy Way to Stage the Bard’s Plays in the US & the UK

Tolstoy Calls Shakespeare an “Insignificant, Inartistic Writer”; 40 Years Later, George Orwell Weighs in on the Debate

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Discover the First Horror & Fantasy Magazine, Der Orchideengarten, and Its Bizarre Artwork (1919–1921)

in Art, Literature, Magazines | June 17th, 2016

From the 18th century onward, the genres of Gothic horror and fantasy have flourished, and with them the sensually visceral images now commonplace in film, TV, and comic books. These genres perhaps reached their aesthetic peak in the 19th century with writers like Edgar Allan Poe and illustrators like Gustave Dore. But it was in the early twentieth century that a more populist subgenre truly came into its own: “weird fiction,” a term H.P. Lovecraft used to describe the pulpy brand of supernatural horror codified in the pages of American fantasy and horror magazine Weird Tales—first published in 1923. (And still going strong!)

A precursor to EC Comics’ many lurid titles, Weird Tales is often considered the definitive early twentieth century venue for weird fiction and illustration.

But we need only look back a few years and to another continent to find an earlier publication, serving German-speaking fans — Der Orchideengarten (“The Garden of Orchids”), the very first horror and fantasy magazine, which ran 51 issues from January 1919 to November 1921.

The magazine featured work from its editors Karl Hans Strobl and Alfons von Czibulka, from better-known contemporaries like H.G. Wells and Karel Capek, and from forefathers like Dickens, Pushkin, Guy de Maupassant, Poe, Voltaire, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. “Although two issues of Der Orchideengarten were devoted to detective stories,” writes 50 Watts, “and one to erotic stories about cuckolds, it was a genuine fantasy magazine.” And it was also a gallery of bizarre and unusual artwork.

50 Watts quotes from Franz Rottensteiner’s description of the magazine’s art, which ranged “from representations of medieval woodcuts to the work of masters of the macabre such as Gustave Dore or Tony Johannot, to contemporary German artists like Rolf von Hoerschelmann, Otto Lennekogel, Karl Ritter, Heinrich Kley, or Alfred Kubin.” These artists created the covers and illustrations you see here, and many more you can see at 50 Watts, the black sun, and John Coulthart’s {feuilleton}.

“What strikes me about these black-and-white drawings,” like the dense, frenzied pen-and-ink scene above, Coulthart comments, “is how different they are in tone to the pulp magazines which followed shortly after in America and elsewhere. They’re at once far more adult and frequently more original than the Gothic clichés which padded out Weird Tales and lesser titles for many years.” Indeed, though the format may be similar to its successors, Der Orchideengarten’s covers show the influence of Surrealism, “some are almost Expressionist in style,” and many of the illustrations show “a distinct Goya influence.”

Popular fantasy and horror illustration has often leaned more toward the soft-porn of seventies airbrushed vans, pulp-novel covers, or the grisly kitsch of the comics. Rottensteiner writes in his 1978 Fantasy Book that this “large-format magazine… must surely rank as one of the most beautiful fantasy magazines ever published.” It’s hard to argue with that assessment. View, read (in German), and download original scans of the magazine’s first several issues over on this Princeton site.

via 50 Watts

The Pulp Fiction Archive: The Cheap, Thrilling Stories That Entertained a Generation of Readers (1896–1946)

The First Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: The Surreal & Horrifying Art of Henrique Alvim Corrêa (1906)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

A Handy Guide on How to Download Old Coursera Courses Before They Disappear

in Online Courses | June 17th, 2016

Image by Mathieu Plourd, via Wikimedia Commons

On June 30th, Coursera plans to wind down its old e‑learning platform. And according to this email the company sent around, any “courses and course materials on [that] old platform will no longer be accessible.” Concerned that dozens of older MOOCs could be lost, some have called this move a form of “cultural vandalism.” Others, like the good folks at Class Central, have created a very thorough and handy guide that will show you how to save the course materials (videos, slides, transcripts, etc.) before the June 30th deadline. You’re on notice. Start reading the guide and thank Dhawal Shah for putting it together.

For a list of MOOCs starting in the second half of June, click here.

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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Hear Ernest Shackleton Speak About His Antarctic Expedition in a Rare 1909 Recording

in History | June 17th, 2016

What more harrowing story has the history of twentieth-century exploration produced than that of Ernest Shackleton’s disastrous Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17? With one of their ships, the appropriately named Endurance, crushed by pack ice, Shackleton and company had to spend years far outside civilization, living in makeshift camps and ultimately using a lifeboat to make the grueling 800-mile journey to the hope of rescue. Though the heroic efforts of Shackleton and others ensured no loss of life among the men they led, making the expedition at least a success in survival terms, the famed explorer had had much better luck last time.

Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition of 1907-09, also known as the Nimrod Expedition, took him and his crew nearly to the South Pole, setting a record for the longest southern polar expedition to that date. Or, to describe the achievement in Shackleton’s own words, “We reached a point within 97 geographical miles of the South Pole; the only thing that stopped us from reaching the actual point was the lack of fifty pounds of food. Another party reached, for the first time, the South Magnetic Pole; another party reached the summit of a great active volcano, Mount Erebus. We made many interesting geological and scientific discoveries and had many narrow escapes throughout the whole time.”

You can even hear that account given in Shackleton’s own voice in the video above, which captures the playback of My South Polar Expedition, an Edison Amberol wax cylinder record he recorded in New Zealand just a week after re-entering civilization. He returned to great acclaim, but also in serious debt, and so putting out a piece of merchandise like this, and setting out on the extensive lecture tour that followed, only made good financial sense. But before long, the celebrated Shackleton found himself at loose ends, becoming, in the words of journalist and politician Sir Harry Brittain, “a bit of a floating gent,” one who must have felt more than ready to take on a challenge as an ambitious Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.

As vividly as history has remembered Shackleton’s Endurance experience, he himself came home from that second grueling voyage to little fanfare. He arrived in England not just during the news-dominating Great War but later than the rest of his crew, having given another lecture tour in America first. But this explorer, it seems, did not live for fanfare. Despite what happened in his second Antarctic expedition, he organized a third, the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition, in 1921, though he died of a heart attack the following year, with the journey still underway. Shackleton enthusiasts, and there are many, can only imagine what tales that expedition would have given their hero to tell — and how they might have sounded on the slightly higher-fidelity recording media developed by the time he’d planned to return.

To hear an audio version of Shackleton’s harrowing 1914–17 voyage, listen to Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, which you can download for free if you sign up for Audible.com’s 30-day Free Trial program.

A Beautiful Drone’s Eye View of Antarctica

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Best Drone Cinema in the World

in Film | June 17th, 2016

From the New York Drone Festival comes a montage of the best drone cinema in the world. Put drones in the hands of 32 filmmakers, and here’s what they can deliver. Pretty remarkable. Find more fine drone cinema in the Relateds below.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Coudal/WFMU

Auschwitz Captured in Haunting Drone Footage (and a New Short Film by Steven Spielberg & Meryl Streep)

A Beautiful Drone’s Eye View of Antarctica

A Drone’s Eye View of Los Angeles, New York, London, Bangkok & Mexico City

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Animated Intro to the Ideas of Jacques Lacan, “the Greatest French Psychoanalyst of the 20th Century”

in Philosophy, Psychology | June 16th, 2016

You may still suffer from painful memories of having had to read Jacques Lacan in school, but look past all that verbiage about, say, desire’s “frenzied mocking of the abyss of the infinite, the secret collusion with which it envelops the pleasure of knowing and of dominating with jouissance,” and you can find real insights into humanity. The animated primer from Alain de Botton’s School of Life just above will give you a clear sense — a much clearer sense than any you might get from Lacan’s own prose — of what “the greatest French psychoanalyst of the 20th century” understood about us all.

This video, as well as Lacan’s entry in The Book of Life, breaks the man’s thought down into three parts. First, identity: following his fascination with the distinctively human experience of recognizing one’s own image, Lacan ultimately suggests that “we accept that other people simply won’t ever experience us the way we experience ourselves; that we will be almost entirely misunderstood – and will in turn deeply misunderstand.” Second, love: though given to grand statements such as “Men and women don’t exist,” Lacan comprehended “the extent to which we don’t truly comprehend our lovers and simply peg a range of fantasies drawn from childhood experiences to their physical forms,” which supports the eminently practical advice “not to be upset when we don’t feel a perfect rapport with someone who initially seemed a soulmate.”

The third part deals with the arena in which Lacan’s writings remain most often considered: politics. He came into his own as an international “intellectual celebrity” in the 1960s, the time of “the sexual revolution, great interest in communism, and lots of protests.” But he actually took a dimmer view of all that agitation than many, telling those student protesters chomping at the bit to remake society that “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.” He saw early on what we still see in every election cycle: that “we desire to have someone else in charge who can make everything OK, someone who is, in a sense, an ideal parent – and we bring this peculiar-sounding bit of our psychological fantasies into the way we navigate politics.”

You can watch Lacan engaging with one particularly rebellious student in a 1972 video we featured a few years ago, and you can see an hourlong lecture he delivered at the Catholic University of Louvain that same year in this video we posted before that. Empowered by the kind of overview of Lacan’s ideas that the School of Life has put together, you can better confront his famously (or infamously) elaborate rhetoric and judge for yourself whether to consider him a thinker who “made some extremely useful additions to our understanding of ourselves” — or, in the judgment of Noam Chomsky, a mere practitioner of empty “posturing.” But then, having lived a life that, as de Botton puts it, mixed “intellectual truth with worldly success,” can’t he be both?

Jacques Lacan’s Confrontation with a Young Rebel: Classic Moment, 1972

Jacques Lacan Talks About Psychoanalysis with Panache (1973)

Noam Chomsky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Empty ‘Posturing’

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

R Crumb, the Father of Underground Comix, Takes Down Donald Trump in a NSFW 1989 Cartoon

Watch UC Berkeley’s Free “Edible Education 101” Lecture Course, Featuring Michael Pollan, Alice Waters and Other Sustainable Food Superstars

1,000 Vintage Postcards Show Famous Actors Performing Shakespeare’s Plays from 1880 to 1914

Discover the First Horror & Fantasy Magazine, Der Orchideengarten, and Its Bizarre Artwork (1919–1921)

A Handy Guide on How to Download Old Coursera Courses Before They Disappear

Hear Ernest Shackleton Speak About His Antarctic Expedition in a Rare 1909 Recording

The Best Drone Cinema in the World

An Animated Intro to the Ideas of Jacques Lacan, “the Greatest French Psychoanalyst of the 20th Century”

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