Note: Yesterday, Mad Magazine legend Al Jaffee died at the age of 102. Below, we present our 2016 post featuring Jaffee talking about how he invented the iconic Fold-ins for the satirical magazine.
Keep copying those Sunday funnies, kids, and one day you may beat Al Jaffee’s record to become the Longest Working Cartoonist in History.
You’ll need to take extra good care of your health, given that the Guinness Book of World Records notified Jaffee, above, of his honorific on his 95th birthday.
Much of his legendary career has been spent atMadMagazine, where he is best-known as the father of Fold-ins.
Conceived of as the satirical inverse of the expensive-to-produce, 4‑color centerfolds that were a staple of glossier mags, the first Fold-In spoofed public perception of actress Elizabeth Taylor as a man-eater. Jaffe had figured it as a one-issue gag, but editor Al Feldstein had other ideas, demanding an immediate follow up for the June 1964 issue.
Jaffe obliged with the Richard Nixon Fold-in, which set the tone for the other 450 he has hand-rendered in subsequent issues.
For those who made it to adulthood without the singular pleasure of creasing Mad’s back cover, you can digitally fold-in a few samples using this nifty interactive feature, courtesy of TheNew York Times.
With all due respect, it’s not the same, just enough to give a feel for the thrill of drawing the outermost panel in to reveal the visual punchline lurking within the larger picture. The print edition demands precision folding on the reader’s part, if one is to get a satisfactory answer to the rhetorical text posed at the outset.
Jaffe must be even more precise in his calculations. In an interview with Sean Edgar of Paste Magazine, he described how he turned a Republican primary stage shared by Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater into a surprise portrait of the man who would become president five years hence:
The first thing I did was draw Richard Nixon’s face, not in great detail, just a very rough establishment of where the eyes, nose and mouth would be, and the general shape. I did an exaggerated caricature of Nixon and then I cut it in half, and moved it apart. Once the face was cut in half, it didn’t have the integrity of a face anymore — it was sort of a half of face. Then I looked at what the eyes were like, and I said, ‘what can I make out of the eyes?’ He had these heavy eyebrows. I played around with many things, but I had to keep in mind all the time what the big picture was. So there they (Goldwater and Rockefeller) were up on a stage somewhere, doing a debate, and I thought, ‘What kind of stage prop can I put alongside these guys that would seem natural there?’ I decided that I could make eyes out of the lamps, and as far as the nose was concerned, that could come out of the figures — their clothing. Then I figured the mouth; I could use some sort of table that could give me those two sides. That’s how it all came about. You have to have some kind of visual imagination to see the possibilities. I had to concentrate on stuff that looked natural on a stage.
I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse…I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist. — Leonora Carrington
In some ways, Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s story is a familiar one, given her gender and generation.
A creative young woman, stifled by her conventional upbringing, escapes to Paris, falls in love with an older male artist, gains a degree of recognition destined always to be smaller than that of her celebrated lover’s, suffers hardships, continues working, lives a very long time and is the subject of nearly as many exhibitions in the decade and a half following her death as in the 70 years preceding it.
Certainly, Carrington, who died in 2011, would be deeply rankled by this, or any attempt to condense her narrative into an easily-grasped package. Witness the brusque way she rejects her younger cousin Joanna Moorhead’s invitations, above, to describe the inspiration behind various canvases:
You’re trying to intellectualize something, desperately, and you’re wasting your time! That’s not a way of understanding to make …a sort of mini logic. You’ll never understand by that road.
The story of how Moorhead connected with her notorious cousin is a fascinating one.
Growing up in England, Moorhead knew next to nothing about the family’s absent black sheep — who had taken up with the 46-year-old Max Ernst at the age of 20, hobnobbed with Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton in Paris, and wound up in Mexico City after WWII.
All she was told was that Carrington, known to the family as Prim, had “run off with an artist to become his model.”
…there were occasional snatches: a hushed phone call where the word ‘Mexico’ was just audible; a whispered conversation on the sofa after Sunday lunch between (great aunt) Maurie and (grandmother) Miriam. There were guffawas occasionally from (uncle) Gerard and my father: “And then she painted a creature with three breasts!”
In 2006, Moorhead was at a party, making polite conversation with another guest, an art historian who lived in Mexico, “scrap(ing) together a few questions about the only Mexican artist I knew anything about — Frida Kahlo”, when she suddenly remembered her bohemian and seldom spoken of relative, who might even be dead by now for all she knew…
Her fellow guest was amazed by both the blood connection and Moorhead’s ignorance, describing Carrington as Mexico’s most famous living artist, and a “national treasure” who Mexico happily claimed as one of its own.
Gobsmacked, Moorhead Googled “Leonora Carrington”, discovering a wealth of photos from various phases of life, as well as the prodigious output from her brush:
A strange, Hieronymus Bosch-style world filed with horse-like creatures who floated, danced and curled their way across alien landscapes…Some of her pictures depicted unfamiliar and sinister-looking worlds: one showed a country with. Red sky and amber hills across which trapised a procession of people wearing white robes. More figures, wearing black, huddled around a huge eunuch like creature, while an outsize turquoise snake unfurled itself dramatically in mid-air. There seemed to be various elements competing to be the centre of the action in that painting: a globe, a God-like effigy and a cathedral all nestled below a rainbow. And the story, whatever it was, didn’t end there because (Carrington) had painted an underworld in which more people (dead, presumably) seemed to have been transformed into animals with pointy, black heads. They were crawling, or trying to crawl, and their efforts were being watched, ominously, by a sharp-toothed, one-eyed tiger.
Driven to find out more, Moorhead traveled to Mexico City, where Carrington had lived off and on since 1942. Her cousin was now in her late 80s, isolated with an infirm second husband, but still painting and championing Surrealism as a visual expression that couldn’t be captured with words:
There was no softness around the edges with Leonora; she had taken a hard path, suffered a great deal as a result, and she wore her toughness like a badge of honour she had earned from herself. It is far more of an honour than the certificate Blu-Tacked to her cupboard door, the honour the Mexican government had given her; it was certainly more of an honour than the OBE she had belatedly been awarded by the British, receiving it on a visit from Prince Charles on a visit he made to Mexico in 2000. She was bemused by these late accolades, but never impressed by them. Early on in her life, she had decided there was only one thing she could ever rely on, and that was the steeliness in her heart. External events, the trappings of wealth and success, the opinions of others, all these were swept away, dismissed, ignored. She was as unconcerned by the approval of others as by their disapproval.
Listen to Joanna Moorhead interviewed about Leonora Carrington on the Great Women Artists Podcast (with the understanding that the subject would have resisted that gender-based categorization…). And read more about her at The New Yorker.
That we spend much, if not most, of our lives working is, in itself, not necessarily a bad thing — unless, that is, we’re bored doing it. In the Big Think video above, London Business School Professor of Organizational Behavior Dan Cable cites Gallup polls showing that “about 70 percent of people are not engaged in what they do all day long, and about eighteen percent of people are repulsed.” This may sound normal enough, but Cable calls these perceptions of work as “a thing that we have to get through on the way to the weekend” a “humanistic sickness”: a bad condition for people, of course, but also for the “organizations who get lackluster performance.”
Cable traces the civilizational roots of this at-work boredom back to the decades after the Industrial Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, a shoe-shopper would go to the local cobbler. “Each of the people in the store would watch the customer walk in, and then they’d make a shoe for that customer.” But toward the end of the century, “we got this different idea, as a species, where we should not sell two pairs of shoes each day, but two million.”
This vast increase of productivity entailed “breaking the work into extremely small tasks, where most of the people don’t meet the customer. Most of the people don’t invent the shoe. Most of the people don’t actually see the shoe made from beginning to end.”
It entailed, in other words, “removing the meaning from work” in the name of ever-greater scale and efficiency. The nature of the tasks that result don’t sit well with a part of our brain called the ventral striatum. Always “urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know, urging us to be curious,” it sends our minds right out of jobs that no longer offer us the chance to learn anything new. One solution is to work for smaller organizations, whose members tend to play multiple roles in closer proximity to the customer; another is to engage in big-picture thinking by staying aware of what Cable calls “the why of the work,” its larger impact on the world, as well as how it fits in with your own purpose. But then, boredom at work isn’t all bad: a bout of it may well, after all, have led you to read this post in the first place.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
On the island of Crete, in the village of Vouves, stands an olive tree estimated to be 3,000 years old. Hearty and resilient, “the Olive Tree of Vouves” still bears fruit today. Because, yes, olives are apparently considered a fruit.
Archaeologist Ticia Verveer posted a picture of the tree on Twitter and noted: It “stood here when Rome burned in AD64, and Pompeii was buried under a thick carpet of volcanic ash in AD79.” That all happened during the tree’s infancy alone.
An estimated 20,000 people now visit the tree each year. If you can’t swing a trip to Crete, you can take a closer look with the video below, right around the three minute mark.
Across the Mediterranean, you can still find six other olive trees believed to be 2,000–3,000 years old–some of our last living ties to an ancient world. And beautiful ones at that.
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Punk is not only not dead, it’s getting a fresh burst of energy, thanks to The Unglamorous Music Project, a female collective in Leicester.
In accordance with punk tradition, musical ability is not a primary concern.
Shockingly, life experience is.
With five, six, and seven decades worth, Unglamorous Music Project participants have no illusions about how women their age — with the possible exception of Patti Smith — are perceived.
Rather than content themselves with crumbs and conform to societal expectations, they are going hard in newly formed bands like The Wonky Portraits, Dada Women, BOILERS, Velvet Crisis and The Verinos, above.
I’ve got no fucks to give any more about what anyone thinks of me…We write our own music and we’ve got a lot to say about everything we’re angry about. I’ve been enraged for years.
The Verinos’ 61-year-old Ruth Miller, founder of The Unglamorous Music Project, told RNZ how she tapped into an unexpectedly rich reservoir of previously unacted upon mature female musical impulse, when she mentioned her plan to form a band to the friend with whom she drank coffee and talked politics.
The friend confessed that she’d long wanted to take up the drums, and on the strength of that comment was drafted as drummer for the Verinos, after watching one instructional YouTube video.
A “really cool looking older woman” with “sticking up hair” whom Miller approached in a restaurant, asking, “Excuse me, are you in a band?” earned her place by answering “No, but I’ve always wanted to learn bass.”
I think as a woman, you hit a particular age and you think, “Well, I don’t care what anyone thinks. It’s my life, and I really want to do music again, and it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. They don’t have to listen…”
But they do like it! It’s incredibly appealing, that idea of seeing a group of older women who are just themselves.
Miller believes that rather than paying for private lessons and concentrating on the “proper” way to play music, beginners should let go of their inhibitions and have a go at playing communally.
The principles of the Unglamorous Music Project spell it out even more explicitly:
Choose an instrument that appeals and fits in with others
Find helpful people to lend you stuff and support unconditionally
Form a duo or band with other beginners straightaway
Explore very simple rhythms and sounds
Write your own words about your life
Sing great tunes and backing vocals
Play your song in a confident, cool, challenging way
Get encouragement and applause from friends
Start performing to audiences as soon as possible
Perhaps an unspoken principle, given the Project’s emphasis on fun, is assuming Ramones-style stage names, a la Vim, Vi, Volcano, Vixen and VeeDee Verino.
If you’re inspired to join the movement, mark your calendar for March, 8, International Women’s Day and join Miller’s Facebook group, 66 Days to your Debut.
Kurt Vonnegut is one of those writers whose wit, humanism and lack of sentimentality leave you hankering for more.
Fortunately, the prolific novelist was an equally prolific letter writer.
His published correspondence includes a description of the firebombing of Dresden penned upon his release from the Slaughterhouse Five POW camp, an admission to daughter Nanette that most parental missives “contain a parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice,” and some unvarnished exchanges with many of familiar literary names. (“I am cuter than you are,” he taunted Cape Cod neighbor Norman Mailer.)
No wonder these letters are catnip to performers with the pedigree to recognize good writing when they see it.
In addition to Slaughterhouse-Five, the board also consigned two other volumes on the syllabus — James Dickey’s Deliverance and an anthology containing short stories by Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck — to the fire.
Revisiting the event, the Bismarck Tribune reports that “the objection to (Slaughterhouse-Five) had to do with profanity, (Deliverance) with some homosexual material and the (anthology) because the first two rendered all of Severy’s choices suspect.”
A decade later, Vonnegut also revisited the school board’s “insulting” objections in the pages of the New York Times:
Even by the standards of Queen Victoria, the only offensive line in the entire novel is this: ”Get out of the road, you dumb m(———–).” This is spoken by an American antitank gunner to an unarmed American chaplain’s assistant during the Battle of the Bulge in Europe in December 1944, the largest single defeat of American arms (the Confederacy excluded) in history. The chaplain’s assistant had attracted enemy fire.
Word is Vonnegut’s letter never received the courtesy of a reply.
One wonders if the recipient burned it, too.
If that 50 year old letter feels germane, check out Vonnegut’s 1988 letter to people living 100 years in the future, a little more than 50 years from where we are now.
In many ways, its commonsense advice surpasses the evergreen words of those it namechecks — Shakespeare’s Polonius, St. John the Divine, and the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. The threat of environmental collapse it seeks to stave off has become even more dire in the ensuing years.
Vonnegut’s advice (listed below) clearly resonates with Cumberbatch, a vegan who leveraged his celebrity to bring attention to the climate crisis when he participated in the Extinction Rebellion Protests in London.
1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
7. And so on. Or else.
Vonnegut, who died in 2007 at the age of 84, never lost his touch with young readers. Who better to recite his 2006 letter to his fans in New York City’s Xavier High School’s student body than the ever youthful, ever curious actor and activist, Sir Ian McKellen?
Cumberbatch is a wonderful reader, but he’d require a bit more seasoning to pull these lines off without the aid of major prosthetics:
You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
Now if only these gents would attempt a Hoosier accent…
I never use a metal detector and I often walk little more than a mile in 5 hours, yet I can travel 2,000 years back in time through the objects that are revealed by the tide. Prehistoric flint tools, medieval pilgrim badges, Tudor shoes, Georgian wig curlers and Victorian pottery, ordinary objects left behind by the ordinary people who made London what it is today.
As she says in the short film above, her first find has become one of her most common — a clay pipe fragment.
The term mudlark was invented to describe the poverty stricken Victorians who scoured the foreshore for copper, wire, and other items with resale value, as well as things they could clean off and use themselves.
Today’s mudlarks are primarily history buffs and amateur archeologists.
The hobby has become so popular that The Port of London Authority, which controls the Thames waterway along with the Crown Estate, has started to require foreshore permits of all prospective debris hunters.
Permitted mudlarks can claim as souvenirs however many Victorian clay pipes and blue and white pottery shards they dig up, but are legally obliged by the Portable Antiquities Scheme to report items of potentially greater historic and monetary value — i.e. Treasure — to a museum-trained Finds Liason Officer:
Any metallic object, other than a coin, provided that at least 10 per cent by weight of metal is precious metal (that is, gold or silver) and that it is at least 300 years old when found. If the object is of prehistoric date it will be Treasure provided any part of it is precious metal.
Any group of two or more metallic objects of any composition of prehistoric date that come from the same find (see note below).
Two or more coins from the same find provided they are at least 300 years old when found and contain 10 per cent gold or silver (if the coins contain less than 10 per cent of gold or silver there must be at least ten of them). Only the following groups of coins will normally be regarded as coming from the same find: Hoards that have been deliberately hidden; Smaller groups of coins, such as the contents of purses, that may been dropped or lost; Votive or ritual deposits.
Any object, whatever it is made of, that is found in the same place as, or had previously been together with, another object that is Treasure.
How did all this historic refuse come to be in the Thames? Maiklem told Collectors Weeklythat there are many reasons:
Obviously, it’s been used as a rubbish dump. It was a useful place to chuck your household waste. It was essentially a busy highway, so people accidentally dropped things and lost things as they traveled on it. Of course, people also lived right up against it. London was centered on the Thames so houses were all along it, and there was all this stuff coming out of the houses and off the bridges. It was the biggest port in the world in the 18th century, so there was all the shipbuilding and industry going on.
And then of course, there’s the rubbish that was used to build up the foreshore and create barge beds. The riverbed in its natural state is a V shape, so they had to build up the sides next to the river wall to make them flatter so the flat-bottom barges could rest there at low tide. They did that by pouring rubbish and building spoil and kiln waste, anything they could find—industrial waste, domestic waste. When they dug into the ground further up, they’d bring the spoil down and use it to build up the foreshore, and cap it off with a layer of chalk, which was soft and didn’t damage the bottom of the barges.
One of the reasons we’re finding so much in the river now is because there’s so much erosion. While it was a “working river,” these barge beds were patched up and the revetments, or the wooden walls that held them in, were repaired when they broke. But now, they’re being left to fall apart, and these barge beds are eroding as the river is getting busier with river traffic.
There are numerous social media groups where modern mudlarks can proudly share their finds, and seek assistance in identifying strange or fragmented objects.
Maiklem’s London Mudlark Facebook page is an education in and of itself, a reflection of her abiding interest in the historic significance of the items she truffles up.
Witness the pewter buckle plate dating to the 14th or 15th-century that she spotted on the foreshore in late November, turned over to her Finds Liaison Officer and researched with the help of historic pewter craftsman Colin Torode:
Prior to c.1350 pewter belt fittings seem to have been rather rare, although a London Girdlers’ Guild Charter of 1321 which banned the use of pewter belt fittings does show that the metal was certainly in use. In 1344 the Girdlers’ guild again reiterated the ban on what they felt were inferior metals such as pewter, tin and lead. In 1391 however, a statute recognized that these metals had been in use for some time and that their use could continue without restriction
This ornate plate would have had a separate buckle frame attached to it and is probably a cheaper copy of the more upmarket copper alloy or silver versions that were produced at the time.Although the the openwork design is similar to those found in in furniture or church screens, it’s not religious or pilgrim related.
Maiklem also challenges fans to play along from home with “spot the find” videos for such items as a Tudor clothes hook, Georgian cufflink, and a German salt glazed, stoneware bottle’s neck embossed with a human face.
The river also spews up plenty of drowned rats, flushing them out with the sewage after a heavy rain. Other potential hazards include hypodermic needles and broken glass.
In addition to such safety precautions as gloves, sturdy footwear, and remaining mindful of incoming tides, Maiklem advises novice mudlarks to look for straight lines and perfect circles — “the things that nature doesn’t make.”
It takes practice and patience to develop a skilled eye, but don’t get discouraged if your first outings don’t yield the sort of jaw dropping discoveries Maiklem has made — an intact glass Victorian sugar crusher, a 16th-century child’s leather shoe and Roman era pottery shards galore.
Sometimes even plastic comes with a compelling story.
I’m still feeling quite giddy over this bit of plastic. I came to Cornwall this week to write and to beachcomb. I hoped I might find a small piece of Lost Lego, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. Calm weather means less plastic: good for the beach, bad for the Lego looker. Then I found this wedged between two boulders. It’s one of the black octopuses from the Lego spill of 1997 when, 20 miles from Land’s End, a huge wave hit the cargo ship Tokio Express. It tilted 45 degrees and 62 containers slid into the water. One container was filled with nearly 5 million pieces of Lego, much of which was sea themed. Little scuba tanks, flippers, octopuses, cutlasses, life rafts, spear guns, dragons and octopuses like this still wash up on the beaches of Cornwall and further afield.
Stay abreast of Lara Maiklem’s mudlarking finds here.
Try your hand at mudlarking the Thames in person, during a guided tour with the Thames Explorer Trust.
Attention young artists: don’t let your day job kill your dream.
In the mid-70s, David Godlis kept body and soul together by working as an assistant in a photography studio, but his ambition was to join the ranks of his street photographer idols — Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, to name a few.
As Godlis told Sergio Burns of Street Photography, “the 60’s and 70’s were great for photographers:”
The 35mm camera was kind of like the new affordable technology of the day. Like having an iPhone you couldn’t talk on. Cool to look at, fun to use. Photography was only just beginning to be considered an art form. Which left plenty of room for inventing yourself. The movie Blow-Up showed off the kind of cool lifestyle that could be had. Photography seemed both adventurous and artistic. There were obviously a million career paths for photographers back then. From the sublime to the ridiculous. But plenty of opportunities to experiment and find your own way.
Still, it’s a tough proposition, being a street photographer whose day job gobbles all available light.
Or rather, it was until Godlis blundered into New York’s late, great punk club, CBGB’s, and resolved to “take street pictures at night without a flash, and make all these people look as interesting as a Ramones’ song sounds.”
The Klosters, who were granted full access to Godlis’ digital archive (a request Lewie Klosters likened to “asking the president for the nuke codes”), breathe extra life into this bygone scene by hand-cutting and puppeteering images of such stalwarts as The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, Alex Chilton, and Blondie.
Those who inhabited the scene in an offstage capacity are also given their due, from the door attendant and the bartender with the Dee Dee Ramone haircut to owner Hilly Kristal, his dog, and the cool kid patrons packing the legendarily filthy establishment.
This seems to be a reflection of the irrepressible, and endlessly curious Godlis’ world view. As Lewie, who had 16 hours of audio interview to draw from, told the Vimeo blog’s Ina Pira:
Ken Burns could make his next 20 hour documentary on Godlis alone. If you ever bump into him, and you will — he’s everywhere all at once in the Village, ask him about some of our favorite stories that hit the cutting room floor: Jager at the Revlon Bar, the bum pissing out the window, when he was held at gunpoint in Boston, about Merv and the Heinekens, and seeing Bob Dylan window shopping. Just to name a few.
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