The poem recited — or rather muttered in Murray’s inimitable style — is “Shelter from the Storm,” found on Dylan’s 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks. The scene comes from the film “St. Vincent,” which you can find in theaters on October 10. “Shelter from the Storm” begins:
’Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured
I’ll always do my best for her, on that I give my word
In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
You may never have heard much Yiddish, but we can’t call it a dead language. The tongue of the Ashkenazi Jews, one referred to in the 19th and part of the 20th century as simply “Jewish,” certainly did, however, have a near-death experience. Just before World War II, the number of Yiddish speakers alive numbered somewhere between 11 and 13 million; today we don’t even know the figure, though one estimate from the 1990s-era puts it under two million. The language, which first emerged in ninth-century Europe, has in recent decades come back from the brink of extinction, and resurgences of Yiddish education have happened in many historically Jewish parts of the world. But as in any less-common language, students may find themselves short of those most effective learning tools: fun things to watch. Now, to help with their acquisition of the still not especially popular Yiddish, they have a bit of the massively popular Seinfeld.
Thanks to that massive popularity, the quintessential 1990s sitcom has aired internationally, dubbed into a great many local languages. But when it comes to Yiddish, those interested in learning, speaking, and hearing it have had to take matters into their own hands — an ability celebrated throughout the annals of Jewish history, and just the sort of thing that revived the “Jewish” language in the first place. Vimeo user A Mishel has posted a series of Seinfeld clips educationally repurposed with Yiddish dialogue, often using old-favorite episodes covering culturally relevant territory: a bar mitzvah, for instance, or a briss. And as the one true “show about nothing,” Seinfeld specializes in the universally relevant stuff of everyday life: a dentist visit, or a dire singles mixer. Presumably, a coming advanced-studies segment will bring to Yiddish Seinfeld’s more recent adventures with קאָמעדיאַנס in קאַרס getting קאַווע.
Benjamin Franklin might have been a brilliant author, publisher, scientist, inventor and statesman, but he was pretty lousy at keeping state secrets. That’s the finding from a recently declassified CIA analysis of Franklin’s critically important diplomatic mission to France during the Revolutionary War.
In September 1776, Franklin was dispatched to Paris to enlist France’s support for the American Revolution. At the time, France was still smarting from losing the Seven Years’ War to Britain and was eager to do anything that could reduce its rival’s power and prestige. Franklin’s Commission ran all kinds of clandestine operations with tacit French aid, including procuring weapons, supplies and money for the American Army; sabotaging the Portsmouth Royal Navy Dockyard; and negotiating a secret treaty between America and France.
And according the CIA’s in-house publication, Studies in Intelligence, the British knew just about everything that was going on. “The British had a complete picture of American-French activities supporting the war in America and of American intentions regarding an alliance with France. The British used this intelligence effectively against the American cause.”
Some of the problems with the Commission seem head-slappingly obvious. “There was no real physical security at the Commission itself. The public had access to the mansion, documents and papers were spread out all over the office, and private discussions were held in public areas.”
One of Franklin’s fellow commissioners, Arthur Lee, was outraged over this lack of security.
[Lee] wrote that a French official “had complained that everything we did was known to the English ambassador, who was always plaguing him with the details. No one will be surprised at this who knows that we have no time or place appropriate to our consultation, but that servants, strangers, and everyone else was at liberty to enter and did constantly enter the room while we were talking about public business and that the papers relating to it lay open in rooms of common and continual resort.
Not surprisingly, the American mission was riddled with British spies; chief among them was Franklin’s long-time friend Edward Bancroft, who, as the Commission’s secretary, had complete access to all of its papers. He was reportedly paid a princely sum of 1000 pounds a year by the British Empire to play the part of an Enlightenment-era James Bond.
Lee suspected Bancroft of being a spy, but Franklin dismissed his concerns largely because he greatly disliked Lee. “[Franklin’s] attitude … is all too familiar among policymakers and statesmen,” writes the CIA. “His ego may have overwhelmed his common sense.”
In the end, the analyst lays the blame on these catastrophic lapses in intelligence on that inflated ego.
“By the time [Franklin] arrived in Paris in late 1776, he was elderly and had little interest in the administrative aspects of the Commission. Franklin was widely recognized as a statesman, scientist, and intellectual. While highly respected, he was also vain, obstinate, and jealous of his prerogatives and reputation. … The Commission was “under protection” of the French Government, and Franklin may have underestimated British capabilities to operate in a third country. In any event, he did nothing to create a security consciousness at the Commission.”
The portrait that the CIA paints is indeed a grim one that in different circumstances could have lost the war. Thankfully, Britain proved wholly unable to use this wealth of information to turn the tide of the war. As the CIA wryly notes: “Perhaps the greatest irony in the whole story of the penetration of the American Commission is that, while British intelligence activities were highly successful, British policy was a total failure.”
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 vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Anna-Maria Hefele, a musician based in Munich, has an unusual talent. She can sing two notes at once. In the music world, it’s known as polyphonic overtone singing, and it’s believed that the practice originated and still endures in Mongolia. Above, Hefele offers a pretty captivating five-minute display of her technique. On her YouTube channel, you can also find a series of lessons (seven so far) where Ann-Maria teaches you the basics of polyphonic overtone singing here. Find the lessons here. Enjoy!
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He’s referring to the revival of his early 1990s cult classic show, Twin Peaks, on Showtime in 2016.
Showtime’s Youtube Channel adds this detail:
The groundbreaking television phenomenon, Golden Globe® and Peabody Award-winner TWIN PEAKS will return as a new limited series on SHOWTIME in 2016. Series creators and executive producers David Lynch and Mark Frost will write and produce all nine episodes of the limited series, and Lynch will direct every episode. Set in the present day, TWIN PEAKS will continue the lore of the original series, providing long-awaited answers and a satisfying conclusion for the series’ passionate fan base.
According to the fan site WelcometoTwinPeaks, David Lynch and Mark Frost are “trying to bring back as much of the original cast as possible, with Kyle MacLachlan definitely on board reprising his role as Special Agent Dale Cooper. Composer Angelo Badalamenti and Emmy Award-winning editor Duwayne Dunham will likely be involved as well.” You can rest assured that WelcometoTwinPeaks will keep you posted on new details as they come to light.
As you might expect from a vicious political movement fronted by a frustrated illustrator, the Nazi party had a complicatedly disdainful yet aspirational — and needless to say, unceasingly fascinating — relationship with art. We previously featured their philistine grudge against modernism that led to the “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937, their mega-budget propaganda film on the Titanic disaster that turned into a disaster itself, and their control-freak list of rules for dance orchestras. The Nazis, as you might expect, didn’t much care for jazz, or at least saw some political capital in openly denouncing it. Yet it seems they also saw some in embracing it, turning the quintessentially free art form toward, as always, their own propagandistic purposes. What if they could come up with their own popular jazz band and, using long-distance short- and medium-wave broadcast signals, turn the Allies’ own music against them? Enter, in 1940, Charlie and His Orchestra. Another Joseph Goebbels creation.
“The idea behind the Nazis’ Charlie campaign,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Will Friedwald, “was that they could undermine Allied morale through musical propaganda, with a specially devised orchestra broadcasting messages in English to British and American troops.” The groups’ featured singer, “Charlie” himself (real name: Karl Schwedler), would sing not just “irresistible” jazz standards but versions with anti-British, ‑American, and ‑Semitic lyrics. You can hear much of their catalog in the clips here, including what Friedwald cites as their “weirdest recordings”: “Irving Berlin’s ‘Slumming on Park Avenue,’ in which Schwedler, portraying a British pilot with a mock-English accent, sings ‘Let’s go bombing!’ ” and “So You Left Me for the Leader of a Swing Band” refashioned as “So You Left Me for the Leader of the Soviets.” Ultimately, not only did the outside world prove to have better taste than the Nazis, their own fighters did too: “Not only did the Charlie project fail to convert any Allies to the other side, but even Germany’s own troops couldn’t bring themselves to take Nazi swing seriously.” It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, I suppose — and Charlie and his Orchestra definitely didn’t have it. More audio samples can be heard over at WFMU.
When the Republican party struggles to determine its future direction, it often looks back to its intellectual and political leaders of decades past. And while we often hear about novel ways to think of those figures, we rarely hear much about what they thought of each other. Such inquiries can show us the historical fault lines visible in current debates between libertarian, small-government types and so-called “values voters,” conflicts that reach back at least to Barry Goldwater, who had no sympathy for the religious right in his heyday. Even in his old age, the conservative senator from Arizona was, for example, “pretty secure in feeling that discriminating against gays is constitutionally wrong.” In a 1994 interview, Goldwater resisted what he called the “radical right […] fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it.” “If that ever happens,” Goldwater said, “kiss politics goodbye.”
Thirteen years earlier, in 1981, another figure much-revered on the political right felt similarly about the rise of the “moral majority” after the election of Ronald Reagan. Asked what she thought of Reagan, Ayn Rand replied, “I don’t think of him. And the more I see, the less I think of him.” For Rand, “the appalling part of his administration was his connection with the so-called ‘Moral Majority’ and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling, apparently with his approval, to take us back to the Middle Ages via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.” Rand’s primary concern, it seems, is that this “unconstitutional union” represented a “threat to capitalism.” While she admired Reagan’s appeal to an “inspirational element” in American politics, “he will not find it,” remarked Rand, “in the God, family, tradition swamp.” Instead, she proclaims, we should be inspired by “the most typical American group… the businessmen.”
Rand made these remarks in her last public lecture, delivered in 1981 at the National Committee for Monetary Reform conference in New Orleans. You can see excerpts at the top of the post and the full speech above. She clarifies her position on the moral majority in the second clip in the top video, claiming that the lobbying groups and voting blocks of the religious right were seeking to impose their “religious ideas on other people by force.” Rand also supported abortion rights, stating unequivocally that a politician who opposes the right to an abortion is “not a defender of rights and not a defender of capitalism.” It’s not entirely clear how Rand saw religious legislation as a threat to capitalism, but there can be no doubt that she did. And though—as NPR political blogger Frank James writes—many people think that a good deal of “cherrypicking of her ideas has to be done to claim her as a modern conservative hero,” there are also obviously plenty of religious conservatives who can admire Rand without denying or excusing her hostility to their faith. Yet, as the applause she received for her forceful rejection of the religious right suggests, there may have been—at least in 1981—no small number of conservatives who agreed with her.
Did she read them all? I don’t know. Have you read every single title on your shelves? (There’s a Japanese word for those books. It’s Tsundoku.)
Feminist biographer Oline Eaton has a great rant on her Finding Jackie blog about the phrase “Marilyn Monroe reading,” and the 5,610,000 search engine results it yields when typed into Google:
There is, within Monroe’s image, a deeply rooted assumption that she was an idiot, a vulnerable and kind and loving and terribly sweet idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. That is the assumption in which ‘Marilyn Monroe reading’ is entangled.
The power of the phrase Marilyn Monroe reading’ lies in its application to Monroe and in our assumption that she wouldn’t know how.
Would that everyone searching that phrase did so in the belief that her passion for the printed word rivaled their own. Imagine legions of geeks loving her for her brain, bypassing Sam Shaw’s iconic subway grate photo in favor of home printed pin ups depicting her with book in hand.
See below, dear readers. Apologies that we’re not set up to keep track of your score for you, but please let us know in the comments section if you’d heartily second any of Marilyn’s titles, particularly those that are lesser known or have faded from the public view.
1) Let’s Make Love by Matthew Andrews (novelization of the movie)
2) How To Travel Incognito by Ludwig Bemelmans
3) To The One I Love Best by Ludwig Bemelmans
4) Thurber Country by James Thurber
5) The Fall by Albert Camus
6) Marilyn Monroe by George Carpozi
7) Camille by Alexander Dumas
8) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
9) The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt-Farmer
10) The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
11) From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming
12) The Art Of Loving by Erich Fromm
13) The Prophet by Kahlil Gilbran
14) Ulysses by James Joyce
15) Stoned Like A Statue: A Complete Survey Of Drinking Cliches, Primitive, Classical & Modern by Howard Kandel & Don Safran, with an intro by Dean Martin (a man who knew how to drink!)
16) The Last Temptation Of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
17) On The Road by Jack Kerouac
18) Selected Poems by DH Lawrence
19 and 20) Sons And Lovers by DH Lawrence (2 editions)
Cambridge University Press has just published a new book called The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi (Assistant Professor, Brown University) and David Armitage (Chair of Harvard’s History Department). In a nutshell, the book argues that historians have lost their public relevance by writing histories of the “short term” — essentially “micro-scale” histories — when they could be writing bigger, deeper histories, covering longer periods of time, that help readers put our world into perspective. What Guldi and Armitage are calling for is a return to long, meaningful narratives and big-picture thinking — the kind of thinking that could perhaps pull the historical profession out of crisis. As someone who got his PhD in History during the “micro-scale” era, all I can say is — amen to that.
Print editions of The History Manifesto will come out in November. But you can already read the entire work online in both html and PDF formats. The book has been released under a Creative Commons license.
Back in 1991, Bradley Denton published Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede. The next year, it won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Writes Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing, Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede “is the great American comic science fiction novel, a book about the quest to exhume Buddy Holly’s corpse from Lubbock, TX to prove that he can’t possibly be broadcasting an all-powerful jamming signal from a hermetically sealed bubble on a distant, airless moon.”
Taking advantage of new innovations (new since 1991), Denton has made the novel available for free download on his website, publishing it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. You can access the text in four parts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
If you become a fan, keep an eye out for a film adaptation of the novel starring Jon Heder. It’s been in development for some time, but you can watch a trailer online.
When Frank Norris plays a guitar made by Wallace Detroit Guitars, he says it “feels like home.” And maybe that’s because Wallace Detroit Guitars are made with reclaimed wood from abandoned Detroit homes.
Following the financial crisis of 2008, perhaps no American city fared worse than Detroit. The city found itself with 10,000 vacant homes. And eventually the city purchased entire blocks and razed the houses to the ground. According to the Detroit web site Model D, a lot of the wood [from these structures] hasn’t gone to waste. The wood can be found, they write, in “trendy coffee houses, in table tops, even in the frames of sunglasses.” And now high-end electric guitars.
Wallace Detroit Guitars just launched its new web site two days ago, and its first guitars, made of century-old wood, can now be yours.
If you like playing guitars made of found objects, you might also want to check out another new company — Bohemian Guitars. They’ve started building electric guitars made of vintage oil cans, taking inspiration from South African musicians who turn used materials into playable instruments.
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