How will younger fans, who’ve never been exposed to the brash Murray of yore, react to his late 70s Santa, above, for the “National Lampoon Radio Hour”? This Grinch is a spiritual forefather of such department store baddies as Billy Bob Thornton and that guy from A Christmas Story.
Forget about Flexy the Pocket Monkey… Murray’s sham-Claus gleefully denies even the humblest of sweet-voiced little Gilda Radner’s requests — a Nerf Ball and a Pez dispenser.
Saturday Night Live fans of a certain vintage may detect more than a hint of Lisa Loopner’s boyfriend Todd De LaMuca in Murray’s vocal characterization. Instead of Noogies, he sends Radner giggling through “the trap door.”
The lyrics and silky vocal stylings conjure visions of a disco-gritty yuletide New York, where “every race has a smile on its face.”
This time Radner gets to do the rejecting, in an extended spoken word interlude that finds Christopher Guest showering her with offers ranging from a house in the South of France to a glass-bottomed boat. (“Didn’t you like that Palomino horse I bought you last year?”)
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
In a recent post on the mathematical-minded Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, Colin Marshall referred to David Auerbach’s short “Inquest on Left-Brained Literature.” Here, Auerbach situates Jorge Luis Borges among writers like Richard Powers, Umberto Eco, David Mitchell, Haruki Murakami and others, who exist “on a parallel track of literature that is popular specifically among engineers.” From his observations, Auerbach draws only “one obvious conclusion… that engineers tend to like novelists that deal in math and science material.”
Auerbach’s list seems legitimate (he mentions “another scholar who also works amongst engineers” and who “produced near-duplication of this list”). But it prompts one important question for me: How do these writers see themselves? As primarily literary authors? Genre writers? Engineers themselves, of a sort?
In the case of Borges, we have an eloquent self-description from the author in his introduction to the Selected Poems 1923–1967. “First and foremost,” writes Borges, “I think of myself as a reader, then as a poet, then as a prose writer.”
While Borges may hold tremendous appeal for left-brain thinkers like programmer Jamie Zawinski, he began his career as a very right-brained poet, and continued to see his work as primarily “addressed to the imagination” rather than “to the reason.”
I cannot say whether my work is poetry or not; I can only say that my appeal is to the imagination. I am not a thinker. I am merely a man who has tried to explore the literary possibilities of metaphysics and of religion.
Borges is inordinately modest. His work is poetry, especially, of course, his actual poetry—volumes of it, written over six decades of his life— from his first published collection in 1923, Fervor de Buenos Aires, to his last, Los conjurados in 1985. It has always seemed to me something of a tragedy that Borges is not better-known as a poet among his English-speaking readers. It’s not for lack of excellent translations, most of them guided by the multi-lingual Borges himself.
The situation is much different, in my experience, among Spanish-speakers. There is indeed a Latin-American—and specifically Argentine—resonance in some of Borges’ verse that is impossible to translate. For those who can appreciate Borges in his original language, we bring you the album above, 30 poems read by the author himself. You can hear one of those readings, “Arte Poetica,” in the video at the top of the post, with English subtitles. The director, Neels Castillon, describes the short film as “a journey around Argentina and Uruguay to illustrate words of Jorge Luis Borges.”
English speakers can also sample translations of Borges’ poetry here and here. Or dive into the translation of “Arte Poetica,” or “The Art of Poetry” here.
Very broadly speaking, all philosophy contains within it dialectical tensions: some ideas seem ennobling and consoling, others unsettling and alienating. Every school, movement, and individual thinker deals in some measure of both. Sometimes we feel unsettled because of historical and cultural distance. When Socrates talks about slavery or censorship in matter-of-fact ways, for example, we might be startled, but his audience didn’t see things the way we do. When it comes, however, to the Existentialists, the cultural and political milieu of these thinkers may resemble our own closely enough that statements which shocked their readers still shock most people today.
Take one of the bigger questions like, oh, the meaning of life. “We understand our lives as being meaningful,” says Hank Green above—brother of John Green, the other half of the Crash Course educational team. We might find purpose and fulfillment in a number of things, from religion to art, sports, careers, and politics.
Existentialists, Green tells us, would say that “any or all of these things can give your life meaning.” Consoling, eh? “But at the same time,” and here comes the downer, “they say none of them can.” These thinkers may be spread out over time and space—from the 19th century Denmark and Germany of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to the 1950s France of Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Camus. But Existentialist thinkers share at least one common trait: anti-essentialism.
As Green explains, classical philosophy offered the comforting explanation that everything contained an essence: “a certain set of core principles that are necessary or essential for a thing to be what it is.” Not only do chairs and tables have essences but so do human beings, they thought, and “your essence gives you a purpose.” Still a very widespread and commonplace belief, we can probably agree, and one people rarely think about critically unless they’re having… well, an existential crisis. So far so good when it comes to grasping the essence (sorry) of Existentialist thinking.
Green goes astray however, when he gets to Nietzsche, whom he claims embraced Nihilism, “the belief in the ultimate meaninglessness of life.” Not only did Nietzsche vehemently oppose nihilism as self-defeating, but he feared the consequences of its spread, even if he sometimes saw it as an inevitable product of modernity. Another important consideration when studying so-called Existentialist thinkers is that they themselves were deeply troubled by their troubling insights. Kierkegaard turned to a radical form of Christianity, Camus to an introspective individualism… and perhaps the most famous Existentialist, Jean Paul Sartre, came to embrace doctrinaire Marxism.
But first, he formulated the most quotable maxim of Existentialist thought: “Existence precedes Essence.” From this, he drew a conclusion both troubling and consoling: “It’s up to each of us to determine who we are. We have to write our own essence through the way we choose to live.” But this liberated condition is absurd: it means we are ultimately responsible for everything we do, even when we have no idea what’s going to happen when we do it, or any larger purpose for doing it at all. Whether ardently religious like Kierkegaard or ardently atheist like Nietzsche and Sartre, Existentialist philosophers who stared into the void found there all of the boundless freedom and terrifying vertigo we came to associate with the neurosis of the modern human condition.
Pick a place on the globe. Any place. Then tune in and hear what’s playing on the radio in that location.
The service is called Radio Garden, and here’s what it’s essentially all about:
By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. Radio Garden allows listeners to explore processes of broadcasting and hearing identities across the entire globe. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away – or using local community radio to make and enrich new homes.
While Radio Garden lets you tune into broadcasts across different geographies, another service previously featured here on OC–Radiooooo–lets you hear radio broadcasts across time. That is, historical broadcasts.
Between the two services, you’ll be covered spatially and temporally. What more could you want?
Update: Radio Garden is now apparently available as an app on Google and Apple.
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“A runaway train is heading towards five workers on a railway line. There’s no way of warning, but you’re standing near a lever that operates some points. Switch the points, and the train goes down a spur. Trouble is, there’s another worker on that bit of track too, but it’s one fatality instead of five. Should you do that?” Here we have the trolley problem, which since its first articulation in 1967 by Philippa Foot has become the classic example of an ethical dilemma as well as perhaps the best known thought experiment in all of philosophy.
“Uh oh, Nicholas,” says the two-year-old’s father from behind the camera, “this train is going to crash into these five people! Should we move the train to go this way, or should we let it go that way?” The elegance of the toddler’s solution, implemented without hesitation, must be seen to be appreciated.
The father, E. J. Masicampo of Wake Forest University, researches “the effortful mental processes that seem to separate humans from other animals: resisting temptations and impulses, reasoning and decision making, thinking about and simulating non-present events, and making plans for the future.” Among his professional goals, he lists working toward “a theory of the human consciousness” by uncovering “how conscious thought contributes to human functioning in light of its apparent limitations.” He’s taken on a problem even harder than the one with the trolleys; perhaps young Nicholas, what with his demonstrated gift of “thinking outside the box,” invaluable in the philosophical disciplines, can offer some assistance.
There was a time, fair children of the late 20th century, when every movie and television show had itself a board game. Most were bad. But we bought them, and then tried our best to make it work. You can see a collection here. Few ever recreated the spirit of the original work, but instead coasted by on a cynic’s heart hoping to harvest your pop culture memories.
However, the board game version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, created by designer, programmer, and artist J.R. Baldwin, is very much in the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson’s book and well-loved film adaptation by Terry Gilliam. It is also very dangerous to play, and is probably not survivable unless you are Hunter S. Thompson and you have traveled in time to 2009. That’s the year of our clip above, when Alana Joy interviewed Baldwin for a web channel called Life on Blast.
The game comes in a briefcase modeled after Thompson’s traveling apothecary, and uses a board, game pieces, and cards. The board is designed to look like a psychedelic trip, with the spaces and indeed the whole board modeled after peyote buttons, which were also part of Thompson’s Gonzo logo. The starting space quotes the famous first lines of the book (“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold”) and the goal space uses the quote “All energy flows according to the whims of the great magnet” written around a brain.
But it’s the other contents of the case that make the game special: drugs and alcohol, to be taken depending on what circle you land on the game board. Three different card groups dictate actions to take during the game. Yellow cards mean the player must measure out an amount of drugs (including stimulants, inhalants, or hallucinogens) or a shot of booze or absinthe and ingest. (The game helpfully comes with a scale.) Blue cards send the player on an adventure or activity. Red cards are challenges to be taken while under the influence of the substances.
So, okay, Baldwin’s game is not to be taken seriously…or taken orally. It’s actually a one-of-its-kind piece of art that can be purchased for $3,500. Drugs, like batteries, are not included. You must supply your own, possibly through your attorney.
“You could, theoretically, survive the entire game, on all these different substances” Baldwin says. “So why not?”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
We’re well into the backlash cycle of the post-election outrage over “fake news,” as commentator after commentator calls this phrase into question and celebrates the fall of the gatekeeper media. Taking a phrase from Tom Wolfe, Matthew Continetti at the conservative Commentary argues that “the press… is a Victorian Gentleman, the arbiter of manners and fashion, the judge of right conduct and good breeding.” We should not lament this gentleman’s loss of a “liberal, affluent, entitled cocoon.” He had long ago “changed his job description and went from telling his readers what had happened to telling them what to think.”
Likewise, The Intercept has shown how fake news panic produced a “McCarthyite Blacklist” of independent organizations lumped together by “shoddy, slothful journalistic tactics” of the kind used by “smear artists” and peddlers of disinformation. Politics aside, what we should at least gather from this firestorm is that the story of “fake news”—or of deliberate hoaxes, lies, and propaganda—is much older than the Internet, though the speed at which it spreads has increased exponentially with the dominance of social media. We’re left wondering how we might reclaim some orientation toward the truth in any media. If everything is potentially fake news, what can we trust?
With the professional vetting of information in crisis, we are thrown back on the popularization of Darwinism advanced by “British defender of capitalism” Herbert Spencer, who—writes Timothy Snyder in his New York Times bestseller Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning—described the market as “an ecosphere where the strongest and best survived.” In our information ecosystem, “strongest and best” is often determined not by natural forces, nor by expert adjudication of merit, but by algorithms… and cash. And as journalists at The Independent and elsewhere discovered last week, Google’s algorithms have decided that the best, most helpful answer to the question “did the holocaust happen?” comes from neo-Nazi hate site Stormfront, in a piece glibly titled “Top 10 reasons why the Holocaust didn’t happen.”
It should go without saying—and yet it must be said—that no serious historian of the period considers the systematic mass murder of millions of Jews and other “undesirables” to be an open historical question. The horror of the 30s and 40s, writes the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, is “one of the best documented events in history” and denials and distortions of these events “are generally motivated by hatred of Jews.” (See their video explaining denialism at the top.) There’s no question that’s the motive in Google’s top search result for Holocaust denialism. Google admits as much, writing this past Monday, “We are saddened to see that hate organizations still exist. The fact that hate sites appear in search results does not mean that Google endorses these views.”
And yet, writes Carole Cadwalladr at The Guardian, the search engine giant also “confirmed it would not remove the result.” Cadwalladr details how she displaced the top result herself “with the only language that Google understands: money.” Lilian Black, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, compared the tech giant’s response to “saying we know that the trains are running into Birkenau, but we’re not responsible for what’s happening at the end of it.” But they should bear some responsibility. Google, she says, shapes “people’s thinking… Can’t they see where this leads? And to have a huge worldwide organization refusing to acknowledge this. That’s what they think their role is? To be a bystander?”
The question forces us to confront not only the role of the press but also the role of the new gatekeepers, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., who have displaced Victorian systems of managing information and knowledge. The loss of status among academics and professional journalists and editors may have salutary effects, such as a democratization of media and the emergence of credible voices previously confined to the margins. But what can be done about the corresponding rise in deliberate misinformation published by hate groups and propaganda organizations? Moral considerations carry no weight when the figurative “marketplace of ideas” is reduced to the literal market.
Danny Sullivan, a search engine expert Cadwalladr cites, suggests that the reason the Stormfront result rose to the top of Google’s search may be nothing more than populism for profit: “Google has changed its algorithm to reward popular results over authoritative ones. For the reason that it makes Google more money.” The rising popularity of hate sites presents a growth opportunity for Google and its competitors. Meanwhile, racist hate groups spread their messages unimpeded, ordinary citizens are badly misinformed, and so-called “self-radicalized” individuals like mass killer Dylann Roof and Tommy Mair—who murdered British MP Jo Cox this past summer—continue to find the “strongest and best” cases for their homicidal designs, no matter that so much of the information they consume is not only fake, but designedly, malevolently false.
The clip above aired back in 2013 on “This Is Radio Clash,” a radio show hosted by the Clash’s Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon. “Hello everybody,” this is David Bowie making a telephone call from the US of A. At this time of the year I can’t help but remember my British-ness and all the jolly British folk, so here’s to you and have yourselves a Merry little Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you very much.”
It’s maybe not as memorable as his 1977 Christmas duet with Bing Crosby, but, hey, it’s still a fun little way to get the holiday season in swing.
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