Watch Harry Shearer’s Faithful Recreation of Nixon’s Resignation

in Comedy, History, Politics, Television | November 3rd, 2014

What role do these gifted performers have in common?

Langella and Sir Anthony resurrected the 37th president within the framework of carefully crafted screenplays. Shearer’s approach is just as actorly, but his material isn’t exactly scripted. Instead, he and Nixon scholar Stanley Kutler pieced it together from unofficial banter on the 3,700 hours of audiotape Nixon secretly recorded while in office, supplementing with notes by those who were there.

The result is Nixon’s The One, a fly-on-the-wall web series in which virtuoso improviser Shearer sticks scrupulously to the script, recreating every pause and awkward chuckle. Compare Shearer’s lead up to Nixon’s televised resignation above, to the real thing, below.

It’s uncomfortable, uncanny, dissociative, and strangely human.

The only false note is Shearer’s glaringly obvious prosthetic nose, though given the professional, period-accurate set, this may have been a deliberate choice. Despite his insistence on authenticity, a biopic is clearly not what creator Shearer had in mind.

He’s been in training for this project for close to half a century, long before the idea itself was hatched. His first turn as Nixon came as a young, make-up free member of the L.A. comedy group, the Credibility Gap.

The next was on Sunday Best, a 1991 mid-season replacement on NBC. “I did a sketch I don’t think ever aired,” he told the Wall Street Journal, “Nixon as a guest on an infomercial demonstrating a magical teeth-whitening preparation.”

Le Show, Shearer’s extremely funny radio show, provided a forum for yet another ridiculous exercise at Tricky Dick’s expense.

The one-time political science major has elected to play it straight with this verbatim, long form labor of love, in order let the weird, unintentional comedy of Richard Nixon shine through. Find all the videos in the Nixon’s the One series here.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She embarrassed her parents on a childhood tour of the Nixon White House uncharacteristically boisterous demands to see Tricky Dick and a queasy stomach that healed itself in time for a visit to a Lafayette Square hot dog vendor. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Vintage Photos of Veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, Taken Circa 1858

in History, Photography | October 31st, 2014

Historians have debated for centuries how Napoleon Bonaparte managed to turn the same men who once overthrew a king in the name of liberté, égalité and fraternité into a formidable fighting force devoted to an emperor. But that’s precisely what he did. As he swept through Italy, Spain and Egypt, his army grew rapidly and not just with French troops. Polish, German, Dutch and Italian soldiers took up arms under Napoleon’s banner. In 1805, in a French village facing the English Channel, Napoleon christened his massive multinational army the Grande Armée.

Originally, the diminutive despot from Corsica planned to use the force to invade Britain but that ultimately never happened. Instead, he directed his force to take out some of his continental rivals. The Grande Armée destroyed the Holy Roman Empire at Austerlitz. After it forced the Austrians into submission following the Battle of Wagram in 1809, the Grande Armée set out for Napoleon’s disastrous campaign in Russia. As it marched towards Moscow in 1812, its ranks swelled to over a half million troops. As it retreated, it was reduced to less than 120,000.

Napoleon and the Grande Armée were finally defeated in 1815 during the Battle of Waterloo. And though Napoleon was ignominiously exiled to Elba, he, and his army, continued to be revered by the French. On the anniversary of his death, May 5th, veterans of the Napoleonic wars would pay homage to the Emperor by marching in full uniform through Paris’ Place Vendôme.

In 1858, someone took portraits of the veterans using that newfangled technology called photography. The men were well into old age when the pictures were taken, and some were clearly struggling to stay still for the length of the camera’s exposure. But they all look impressive in their uniforms complete with epaulettes, medals, sashes and plumes. You can see some of the images above. Click on each to enlarge them.

The photographs, highlighted this week on Mashable, come from a website hosted by Brown University. There you can see more images from the collection.

via Mashable

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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.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Modern Art Was Used As a Torture Technique in Prison Cells During the Spanish Civil War

in Art, History | October 29th, 2014

We’ve all got those friends or family members who consider “modern art” a form of torture. Next time they complain about an exhibition you bring them to, just tell them how relieved they should feel that they didn’t fight in the Spanish Civil War — not just for the obvious reasons; they could have found themselves subject not just to actual torture, but torture directly inspired by modernist aesthetic principles. “A Spanish art historian has found evidence that suggests some Civil War jail cells were built like 3‑D modern art paintings in order to torture prisoners,” reports BBC News. “The cells were built in 1938 for the republican forces fighting General Franco’s Fascist Nationalist army, who eventually won power.” The finding comes from historian Jose Milicua, who discovered references to these modern-art cells among court papers from “the 1939 trial of French anarchist Alphonse Laurencic, a republican, by a Franco-ist military court.”

“During the trial,” the BBC article continues, “Laurencic revealed he was inspired by modern artists, such as surrealist Salvador Dali and Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky” to create the six-foot-by-four-foot cells placed secretly in Barcelona (see a re-creation above), which featured “sloping beds at a 20-degree angle that were almost impossible to sleep on,” “irregularly shaped bricks on the floor that prevented prisoners from walking backwards or forwards,” walls “covered in surrealist patterns designed to make prisoners distressed and confused,” and lighting effects “to make the artwork even more dizzying.” Evidence also indicates that, elsewhere in Spain, Nationalist prisoners “were forced to watch Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s film Un Chien Andalou,” especially an endless loop of its “graphic sequence of an eyeball being cut open” (at the top of the post).

Ironically, those imprisoned in such cells would have wound up there in the name of their fascist cause, which like the Franco-backing Nazi regime in Germany, considered modernism “degenerative.” Presumably, they didn’t leave their imprisonment with any more sympathetic idea of modern art than the one they’d gone in with. “A subcurrent of shock and provocation has always lurked within avant-garde art, which deliberately sets out to challenge bourgeois convention and to elicit a strong response” writes the New York Times’ John Rockwell. “My own experience has been that opponents of new art are much too quick to presume provocation, let alone provocation intended literally to torture. Still, there can be no doubt that outrage was and is a goal of some artists, even if they rarely pushed it to the logical extreme that Laurencic took it.” You can learn more about this unusually artistic form of warfare in this All Things Considered interview with art historian Victoria Combalia. (Listen below.) And do try to suppress those fantasies of throwing your more Philistine acquaintances in there for an hour or two.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Young Stanley Kubrick’s Noirish Pictures of Chicago, 1949

in Film, History, Photography | October 25th, 2014

When Stanley Kubrick was a mere high school student in April 1945, just after FDR died, he snapped a picture of a news vendor framed on either side by posters announcing the president’s death. He was so excited by the picture that he skipped school to develop it and then marched right into the office of Look magazine. Photo editor Helen O’Brian offered to buy the photo for $25. Displaying his trademark cockiness, Kubrick told her that he wanted to see what price he could get from The New York Daily News. They only offered $10, so Kubrick went with Look. Within a few months, at the age of 17, Kubrick became a staff photographer for the publication.

Below you can see some photographs that Kubrick took in 1949 while on assignment in Chicago. Using the same noirish high-contrast, low-light look that marked his first three movies, he documented all different strata of society from floor traders, to lingerie models, to meat packers to impoverished African-American families. Click on the images to view them in a larger format. Find a more extensive gallery of images here. To take a closer look at Kubrick’s photography, see the 2018 Taschen book Stanley Kubrick Photographs: Through a Different Lens and also Stanley Kubrick: Drama & Shadows.

Men working the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade

Lingerie model, wearing a girdle and strapless bra, smoking in an office; in the background a woman sits at a desk

Butcher holding slab of beef in a meat locker

African American mother and her four children in their tenement apartment

Overhead view of the “L” elevated railway

via Mashable

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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.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle & Other British Authors Sign Manifesto Backing England’s Role in WWI

in History | October 23rd, 2014

Thinkers have said a great deal about the relative might of the pen and the sword—often one well-known phrase in particular—but still, the subject of intellect versus might remains a matter of active inquiry. But what if might harnesses intellect? What if those who live by the pen pick up their writing tool of choice to endorse the national use of weaponry infinitely more powerful than all the swords ever forged? This very thing happened in the Britain of 1914: “FAMOUS AUTHORS DEFEND ENGLAND’S WAR,” read the headlines, and University of Ottawa English professor Nick Milne has more historical analysis of the event in the first post of “Pen and Sword,” a series focusing on British Propaganda at the open educational resource World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings.

“In September of 1914,” writes Milne in a version of the post up at Slate, “as the armies of Europe were engaged in the Race to the Sea and the stalemate of the trenches loomed, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and other British authors collaborated on a remarkable piece of war propaganda. Fifty-three of the leading authors in Britain — a number that included Thomas Hardy and H.G. Wells — appended their names to the ‘Authors’ Declaration.’ This manifesto declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime, and that Britain ‘could not without dishonour have refused to take part in the present war.’ ” Other men of letters the War Propaganda Bureau could convince to sign on, in addition to Kipling, a fellow rarely called insufficiently patriotic, included “defender of unorthodox thought by unorthodox methods” G.K. Chesterton.

You can take a close-up look at the complete list of signatories with their brief bios, as well as the signatures themselves, by clicking at the image of the New York Times page up above. (Then click again to zoom in.) England may not, in the event, have lost the First World War, but the buoyancy its writers provided its fighting spirit had little to do with it. Germany “responded to the declaration by bringing together an even larger assortment of artists, authors, and scientists to sign the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, an astounding document which denied any German wrongdoing in Belgium and bewilderingly accused the Allies of ‘inciting Mongolians and negroes against the white race.’ ”

Several of the British writers involved, most notably H.G. Wells, eventually developed a public cynicism toward the war. “The unity of vision and purpose the declaration so strongly implied,” as Milne mildly puts it, “did not endure.”

via Slate

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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

The C.I.A.‘s “Bestiary of Intelligence Writing” Satirizes Spook Jargon with Maurice Sendak-Style Drawings

in Comedy, Creativity, English Language, History | October 17th, 2014

Ten years in academia gave me a healthy dislike of clichéd jargon, as well as an appreciation for jokes about it. There are a few, like the academic sentence generator and Ph.D. Comics, that capture a bit of what it’s like to go to school and work in higher ed. Corporate drones, of course, have Office Space and Dilbert. But what about the spooks, those nameless, faceless agents who work tirelessly away in the basement of Langley, doing who knows what to whom? Where does the C.I.A. go to laugh at its peculiar brand of hackneyed doublespeak? Not that we were supposed to know this, but perhaps many of them turn to an article called “the Bestiary of Intelligence Writing” in a 1982 copy of internal agency newsletter Studies in Intelligence.

Medium describes this odd piece as a “zoo of fictional fauna,” and like that strange literary form, the medieval European bestiary (often a source of satire and critique), this 17-page article, with footnotes, singles out the most offensive spook buzzwords as though they were cardinal sins—naming 15 members of “the Collection” in all, each one represented by its own Maurice Sendak-like pencil-drawn beast and a description of its habits. The two-headed beast at the top, Multidisciplinary Analysis, is a “hybrid—the fruit of the casual mating of standard forms of Analysis.” Just above, we have Heightened Tensions, “the adult form of Conventional Tensions—Tensions that have acquired stilts by thriving on a rich diet of poverty, malnutrition and especially alienation.” Sounds like rough work, this spy game….

Most of the beasts are cuddly enough, some mischievous, some perhaps deadly. Above, we have Dire Straits and below, Parameters. “The Agency author and artist detailed 15 monsters in all—complete with illustrations,” writes Medium, “Both of their names are redacted in the document. We’ll never know just which CIA agents turned their hand towards snarky political satire.” The document comes to us via a cache of records declassified in a lawsuit filed by former agency employee Jeffry Scudder. We do know that the two anonymous lampoonists were inspired by A Political Bestiary, book by James Kilpatrick, cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, and former senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. See the full, bone dry article here, and think about the work talk that might drive you to such creative extremes.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Take Big History: A Free Short Course on 13.8 Billion Years of History, Funded by Bill Gates

in History, Online Courses | October 14th, 2014

Last month, The New York Times Magazine published a long piece called “So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class …”, which begins with these very words:

In 2008, shortly after Bill Gates stepped down from his executive role at Microsoft, he often awoke in his 66,000-square-foot home on the eastern bank of Lake Washington and walked downstairs to his private gym in a baggy T‑shirt, shorts, sneakers and black socks yanked up to the midcalf. Then, during an hour on the treadmill, Gates, a self-described nerd, would pass the time by watching DVDs from the Teaching Company’s “Great Courses” series. On some mornings, he would learn about geology or meteorology; on others, it would be oceanography or U.S. history.

As Gates was working his way through the series, he stumbled upon a set of DVDs titled “Big History” — an unusual college course taught by a jovial, gesticulating professor from Australia named David Christian. Unlike the previous DVDs, “Big History” did not confine itself to any particular topic, or even to a single academic discipline. Instead, it put forward a synthesis of history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which Christian wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on earth.

Captivated by Dr. Christian’s ability to connect big and complex ideas, Gates thought to himself, “God, everybody should watch this thing!” And, soon enough, the philanthropist contacted the professor and suggested making “Big History” available as a course in high schools across the US (with Bill footing the bill.)

In 2011 the Big History Project, a course with a significant digital component, was piloted in five high schools. Now, a few years later, it’s being made freely available, says the Times, “to more than 15,000 students in some 1,200 schools, from the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies in New York to Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Mich., to Gates’s alma mater, Lakeside Upper School in Seattle. And if all goes well, the Big History Project will be introduced in hundreds of more classrooms by next year and hundreds, if not thousands, more the year after that, scaling along toward the vision Gates first experienced on that treadmill.”

Why do I tell you this? Partly because the Big History Project is open to you as well. On the Big History website, you will find a public course, offering a four-to-six hour tour of Big History. It’s an abbreviated introduction to 13.8 billion years of history. I could think of less efficient ways to spend an afternoon.

After you’re done, if you want to fill in a few gaps, don’t miss our collection: 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. It covers history, biology, physics and all of the rest.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Photos of Hiroshima by Hiroshima Mon Amour Star Emmanuelle Riva (1958)

in Film, History, Photography | October 14th, 2014

Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain Resnais’s landmark 1960 meditation on war and memory, was Emmanuelle Riva’s first starring role. She plays a married actress (catch a scene here) who, while making a movie in Japan, has an affair with a Japanese architect played by Eiji Okada. Screenwriter Marguerite Duras chisels away at the actress’s Gallic reserve over the course of the film as memories of the war, not to mention guilt over the affair, overwhelm her. Resnais lingers on Riva’s face as she comes apart. Her performance is as brave as it is exact. French film critic Jean Domarchi once stated, “Hiroshima is a documentary on Emmanuelle Riva.”

As it turns out, Riva was documenting Hiroshima too. While filming on location, she took a series of photographs of everyday life of a city still recovering from the war. They are a fascinating slice of life from a Japan that has long disappeared. The Hiroshima Riva captured was still dominated by dirt roads and wooden buildings. People still regularly wore traditional geta wooden shoes.

Children seemed to be a favorite subject for Riva. She photographs a flock of elementary school students walking to school; a pair of boys fishing before the genbaku dome – ground zero for the bomb; and a gaggle of kids staring agog into the lens, no doubt curious at the sight of a stylish French woman with an expensive camera.

Years later, Riva’s pictures were collected into a book called Hiroshima 1958, which, sadly, seems to be available only in Japan. Riva, of course, went on to a celebrated acting career, including an Oscar-nominated turn in Michael Haneke’s harrowing love story Amour.

via RocketNews24

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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.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Harry Shearer’s Faithful Recreation of Nixon’s Resignation

Vintage Photos of Veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, Taken Circa 1858

Modern Art Was Used As a Torture Technique in Prison Cells During the Spanish Civil War

Young Stanley Kubrick’s Noirish Pictures of Chicago, 1949

H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle & Other British Authors Sign Manifesto Backing England’s Role in WWI

The C.I.A.‘s “Bestiary of Intelligence Writing” Satirizes Spook Jargon with Maurice Sendak-Style Drawings

Take Big History: A Free Short Course on 13.8 Billion Years of History, Funded by Bill Gates

Photos of Hiroshima by Hiroshima Mon Amour Star Emmanuelle Riva (1958)

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