Albert Einstein had a theory of general relativity. Turns out, he had a theory of happiness, too.
While traveling in Japan in 1922, Einstein learned that he had won the Nobel Prize. Suddenly the object of unwanted publicity, he secluded himself inside the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. And while there, explains NPR, “a courier came to the door to make a delivery.” In lieu of giving the courier a small tip, Einstein handed the courier two handwritten notes, one of which read: “A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.“ ‘
Einstein also gave the bellhop another useful piece of advice: Don’t lose those handwritten notes. They might be worth something someday.
Sure enough, Einstein’s scrawled theory of happiness sold for $1.6 million at an auction on Tuesday.
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While performing in Denver this past weekend, Bob Dylan paid tribute to Tom Petty, playing a cover of his 1991 track, “Learning to Fly.” Most will remember their time together in the Traveling Wilburys. But really their relationship was cemented before that, when the musicians embarked on the long True Confessions Tour in 1986. That’s when Dylan lost his mojo and nearly ended his career, then suddenly found new inspiration again, all while Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers shared the same stage.
I’d been on an eighteen month tour with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It would be my last. I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever had been there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine. I couldn’t overcome the odds. Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore. There was a hollowing singing in my heart and I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent. One more big payday with Petty and that would be it for me. I was what they called over the hill.… The mirror had swung around and I could see the future — an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theatre of past triumphs.
Everything finally came to a head one night when Dylan performed with Petty and the Heartbreakers in Locarno, Switzerland. He writes again in Chronicles, “For an instant, I fell into a black hole… I opened my mouth to sing and the air tightened up–vocal presence was extinguished and nothing came out.” Panicked, Dylan used every trick to get started. Nothing worked, until, he then cast his own “spell to drive out the devil.” That’s when “Everything came back, and it came back in multidimension.” A complete “metamorphosis had taken place.” He adds: “The shows with Petty finished up in December, and I saw that instead of being stranded somewhere at the end of the story, I was actually in the prelude to the beginning of another one.” Without out it, we wouldn’t have Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, or Modern Times.
You can watch footage of the epiphany concert on Youtube. It took place on October 2, 1987–thirty years and three days before Petty’s death on October 5, 2017.
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As Halloween draws nigh, our thoughts turn to costumes.
Not those rubbery, poorly constructed, sexy and/or gory off-the-rack readymades, but the sort of lavish, historically accurate, home-sewn affairs that would have earned praise and extra candy, if only our mother had been inclined to spend the bulk of October chained to a sewing machine.
Press someone else’s seams with a straightening iron, then kick back and enjoy the vintage ads, photos of antique garments, and the period information that often accompanies these how-tos. And check out the 1913 patent application for Marie Perillat’s Bust Reducer, a miracle invention designed to “prevent flesh bulging while providing self adjustable, comfortable, hygienic support.”
I hated sports at camp, so at this camp I think we should reward every team that loses. This would be the camp where the fat people get picked first in dodge ball.
- Filmmaker-cum-Camp Director John Waters
I can think of many children who would scramble toward the refuge of the compassionate statement above, but Camp John Waters is a decidedly adult activity.
The Pope of Trash shares actor Bill Murray’s relish for oddball settings in which he can meet the public as something close to a peer. But whereas Murray specializes in surprise drop-in appearances—reciting poetry to construction workers, crashing parties—Waters favors more immersive experiences, such as hitchhiking coast to coast.
His latest stunt brought him and 300 fellow travelers to a rustic Connecticut facility (from Sept 22–24) that normally hosts corporate team building events, family camps, and weekend getaways for playful 20-to-30-somethings keen to make new friends while zip lining, playing pingpong, and partying in the main lodge.
The Waters camp combines two of the more absurd developments in contemporary leisure: the celebrity-based getaway (see also: the Gronk Cruise) and a certain recreational aesthetic that seems to advocate for a sort of developmental purgatory.
Here, there were no reluctant, homesick campers, weeping into their Sloppy Joes. This was a self-selecting bunch, eager to break out their wigs and leopard print, weave enemy bracelets at the arts and crafts station, and bypass anything smacking of official outdoor recreation, save the lake, where inflatable pink flamingos were available for aquatic lollygagging.
“Who really wants to go wall climbing?” the founder himself snorted in his welcoming speech, adding that he would if Joe Dallesandro, the Warhol superstar who according to Waters “forever changed male sexuality in cinema,” waited up top.
Naughty references to water sports aside, certain aspects of the camp were downright wholesome. Pine trees and s’mores. Canoes and cabins. Presumably there was a camp nurse. (In Waters’ ideal world, this position would be filled by Cry Baby’s Traci Lords.)
Waters’ recollections of his own stint at Maryland’s Camp Happy Hollow seem primarily fond. It makes sense. Anyone who truly loathed summer camp would be unlikely to recreate the experience for themselves and their fellow adults.
Camp Waters harkens back to the 1950s transgressions its director merrily fesses up to having participated in: unfiltered cigarettes and short sheeted beds, circle jerks and panty raids. From here on out the subversion will be taking place in the sunlight.
Another special camp memory for Waters is regaling his cabin mates with an original, serialized horror story. He retells it on Celebrity Ghost Stories, above:
At the end there was this hideous gory thing and then all the kids had nightmares and their parents called the camp and complained — and I’m still doing that! It was the beginning of my career…. It was a wonderful lesson for me as a 10-year-old kid that I think helped me become whatever I am today. It gave me the confidence to go ahead, to believe in things, to believe in behavior I couldn’t understand, to be drawn to subject matter I couldn’t understand.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She attended Gnawbone Camp in Gnawbone, Indiana, recapturing that happy experience three decades later as the Mail Lady of Beam Camp. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Our country’s bipartisan system ensures that every election will give rise to a winning side and a losing side—and depressingly, a sizable group who refrained from casting a vote either way.
There are times when the divide between the factions does not seem insurmountable, when leaders in the highest positions of authority seem sincerely committed to reaching across the divide….
And then there are other times.
Earlier in the year, the Women’s March on Washington and its hundreds of sister marches gave many of us reason to hope. The numbers alone were inspiring.
But history shows how great numbers can go the other way too.
With many American high school history curriculums whizzing through World War II in a week, if that, it’s doubly important to slow down long enough to watch the 7 minute documentary above.
What you’re looking at is the 1939 “Pro-American Rally” (aka Pro-Nazi Rally) sponsored by the German American Bund at Madison Square Garden on George Washington’s 207th Birthday. Banners emblazoned with such slogans as “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans,” “Wake Up America. Smash Jewish Communism,” and “1,000,000 Bund Members by 1940” decorated the great hall.
New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia—an Episcopalian with a Jewish mother—considered canceling the event, but ultimately he, along with the American Jewish Committee and the American Civil Liberties Committee decreed that the Bund was exercising its right to free speech and free assembly.
A crowd of 20,000 filled the famous sports venue in mid-town Manhattan to capacity. 1,500 police officers were present to render the Garden “a fortress impregnable to anti-Nazis.” An estimated 100,000 counter-demonstrators were gathering outside.
The most disturbing moment in the short film comes at the 3:50 mark, when another security force—the Bund’s Ordnungsdienst or “Order Service” pile on Isidore Greenbaum, a 26-year-old Jewish worker who rushed the podium where bundesführerFritz Julius Kuhn was fanning the flames of hatred. Valentine’s men eventually pulled them off, just barely managing to save the “anti-Nazi” from the vicious beating he was undergoing.
Reportedly he was beaten again, as the crowd inside the Garden howled for his blood.
The uniformed youth performing a spontaneous hornpipe in the row behind the Bund’s drum and bugle corps is a chilling sight to see.
Director Marshall Curry was spurred to bring the historic footage to Field of Vision, a filmmaker-driven documentary unit that commissions short films as a rapid response to developing stories around the globe. In this case, the developing story was the “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, which had occurred a mere two days before.
“The footage is so powerful,” Curry told an interviewer, “it seems amazing that it isn’t a stock part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory in part because it’s scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget. We’d like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled. But while the vast majority of Americans were appalled by the Nazis, there was also a significant group of Americans who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, anti-Semitic message. When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden you can be sure that many times that were passively supportive.”
Field of Vision co-founder Laura Poitras recalled how after meeting with Curry, “my first thought was, ‘we need to put this film in cinemas,’ and release it like a newsreel.”’ The Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain screened it before features on September 26 of this year.
About 90 miles north of here, a series of fires, fanned by high winds, have destroyed 191,000 acres and left 31 people dead. In the town of Santa Rosa alone, the fires consumed more than 2,800 homes overnight, turning entire neighborhoods into cinders and ash. Captured by a drone, the footage above shows the complete devastation. It also adds a surreal touch–the US Postal Service dutifully delivering mail to empty street addresses.
Tom Petty grew up in Gainesville, Florida, in the backyard of the University of Florida. On Saturday, during a football game against LSU, some 90,000 Gators fans gave Petty a raucous send off, singing “I Won’t Back Down” in unison. Don’t know about you, but it gave me the chills.
BTW, if you’re wondering what the occasional boos are all about, it’s the U. of Florida fans taking the LSU marching band to task for disrupting the Petty sing-along. Or so it was perceived.
What makes this panel the greatest? Woodring declined to elaborate, though his readers eagerly shared theories—and some befuddlement—in the comments section:
Sluggo has reached the perfect state of no-effort, the satori-like denial of the “small mind” and all of the suffering that comes with it.
… it’s the comic equivalent of a koan—something designed to tie our rational mind in knots so that we can glimpse enlightenment.
Sluggo smiles because he knows a secret. He says no because he rejects consensus reality. He floats along because he doesn’t fight life—he sees the maintenance of the harmony and is one with that harmony. He knows all paths lead away from home. Instead he goes within and knows freedom.
“I am content. I need nothing, I will do nothing, I am fine as I am.”
Another fan, Glyph Jockey’s Lex 10, took it one step further, removing the speech bubble before taking Sluggo on an animated trip through the cosmos, narrated by philosopher Alan Watts:
In the state of being in accordance with the Tao, there is a certain feeling of weightlessness, parallel to the weightlessness that people feel when they get into outer space or when they go deep into the ocean.
Gabby Pahinui’s “Pu’uanahulu” and Ramayana imagery bestow added hypnotic appeal.
Revisit this strange little animated gem the next time your head’s about to explode from stress. Don’t question or get too hung up on meanings, just go with the flow, like Sluggo and Watts.
Could other Nancy panels serve as vehicles for Taoist enlightenment? Mayhaps:
Bushmiller’s strong point was never the content of his comic strip’s jokey plots—a friend once described him as ‘a moron on an acid trip.’ In fact, the gags were even simpler than was necessary for a ‘children’s’ strip. That’s because they were just a vehicle for the controlled and brilliant manipulation of repetition and variety that gave the strip its unique visual rhythm and composition. Bushmiller choreographed his familiar formal elements inside the tightest frame of any major strip, and that helped make it the most beautiful, as a whole, of any in the papers.” — Tom Smucker, The Village Voice, 1982
Recently, Bushmiller’s Nancy has been enjoying a renaissance. The strip that many casual readers of the funny pages dismissed as boring or dumb is revered by many celebrated cartoonists, including Bill Griffith, Daniel Clowes, and Art Spiegelman.
This month sees the publication of Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s How to Read Nancy, a book length analysis of one single strip, which also functions as a how-to and history of the comic medium. This hotly anticipated volume has in turn given rise to a lively online How To Read Nancy Reading Group, a hotbed of fan art, altered panels, and Nancy strips from around the world.
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