Albert Camus: The Madness of Sincerity — 1997 Documentary Revisits the Philosopher’s Life & Work

in Literature, Philosophy | November 30th, 2014

Open­ing with a child­hood sto­ry from his life, the doc­u­men­tary above, Albert Camus: The Mad­ness of Sin­cer­i­ty, tells us that the philosopher/journalist/novelist’s first love was “the howl­ing and the tumult of the wind.” It’s a beau­ti­ful image for a writer who con­front­ed the pain, joy, and con­fu­sion of human exis­tence with­out the ready-made props of reli­gious belief, nation­al­ist alle­giance, or ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty. Camus’ “mad­ness of sin­cer­i­ty” pro­duced endur­ing work like The Stranger, The Plague, The Rebel, The First Man, and The Fall and won him a Nobel Prize in 1957.

His con­vic­tion also cost him friend­ships as he turned away from mass move­ments and pur­sued his own path. It was a cost he was pre­pared to bear. As he would write in The Fall in 1956, “How could sin­cer­i­ty be a con­di­tion of friend­ship? A lik­ing for the truth at all costs is a pas­sion that spares noth­ing and that noth­ing can with­stand.”

After the wind, of course, Camus had many more loves, and many lovers. A few of them appear above, along with Camus’ daugh­ter Cather­ine and son Jean to dis­cuss the great themes of his work in three chap­ters: the Absurd, Revolt, and Hap­pi­ness. With dis­cus­sion and excerpts—read by nar­ra­tor Bri­an Cox—from Camus’ work, the doc­u­men­tary traces his life from birth and a dif­fi­cult child­hood in French Alge­ria, to his dai­ly edi­to­ri­als for Com­bat dur­ing the French Resis­tance, his turn against Com­mu­nism and deci­sion to live in near-exile in the ‘50s, and his pre­ma­ture death in a car acci­dent in 1960 at the age of 47. All in all, the doc­u­men­tary leaves us with the impres­sion of Camus as a mag­net­ic indi­vid­ual, and a deeply prin­ci­pled one, who held true to the words quot­ed from his Nobel accep­tance speech ear­ly in the film about the writer’s task, which is always, he said, “root­ed in two com­mit­ments… the refusal to lie about what one knows, and resis­tance to oppres­sion.”

Find more thought-pro­vok­ing films in our col­lec­tion, 285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Albert Camus Deliv­er His Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech (1957)

Albert Camus Wins the Nobel Prize & Sends a Let­ter of Grat­i­tude to His Ele­men­tary School Teacher (1957)

Albert Camus Writes a Friend­ly Let­ter to Jean-Paul Sartre Before Their Per­son­al and Philo­soph­i­cal Rift

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

16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writing on Evolution Now Digitized and Available Online

in Archives, Biology, History, Science | November 30th, 2014

The Dar­win­ian the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion is an amaz­ing sci­en­tif­ic idea that seems, at least to a layper­son like me, to meet all the cri­te­ria for what sci­en­tists like Ian Glynn praise high­ly as “elegance”—all of them per­haps except one: Sim­plic­i­ty. Evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry may seem on its face to be a fair­ly sim­ple expla­na­tion of the facts—all life begins as sin­gle-celled organ­isms, then changes and adapts in response to its envi­ron­ment, branch­ing and devel­op­ing into mil­lions of species over bil­lions of years. But the jour­ney Dar­win took to arrive at this idea was hard­ly straight­for­ward and it cer­tain­ly didn’t arrive in one eure­ka moment of enlight­en­ment.

The process for him took over two decades, rep­re­sent­ed by the hun­dreds of pages of notes he left behind, all of which will be freely avail­able online at the Dar­win Man­u­scripts Project at the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry in 2015. This means 30,000 dig­i­tized doc­u­ments, like the naturalist’s first “Tree of Life” at the top of the page, from a July 1837 note­book entry, and Trans­mu­ta­tion Note­book D above, the first note­book in which Dar­win began work­ing on the the­o­ry of nat­ur­al selec­tion.

The Muse­um has cur­rent­ly announced that it is a lit­tle over the halfway point, with just over 16,000 dig­i­tized doc­u­ments that cov­er, they write, “the 25-year peri­od in which Dar­win became con­vinced of evo­lu­tion; dis­cov­ered nat­ur­al selec­tion; devel­oped expla­na­tions of adap­ta­tion, spe­ci­a­tion, and a branch­ing tree of life and wrote the Ori­gin [of Species].” Direc­tor of the project David Kohn describes that lat­ter famous work as “the mature fruit of a pro­longed process of sci­en­tif­ic explo­ration and cre­ativ­i­ty that began toward the end of his Bea­gle voy­age… and that con­tin­ued to expand in range and deep­en in con­cep­tu­al rig­or through numer­ous well-marked stages.”

Now his­to­ri­ans of sci­ence can trace those stages as though they were a fos­sil record, start­ing with that famous H.M.S. Bea­gle voy­age, in which the young Dar­win sailed from South Amer­i­ca to the Pacif­ic Islands—stopping at numer­ous sites, includ­ing the Gala­pa­gos Islands of course, and col­lect­ing sam­ples and mak­ing obser­va­tions. The jour­ney pro­duced a live­ly account, 1839’s Voy­age of the Bea­gle, pre­lude to the ful­ly devel­oped the­o­ry pre­sent­ed 20 years lat­er in On the Ori­gin of Species. Look­ing into the Bea­gle voy­age sec­tion, you’ll find hun­dreds of pages of notes, like that above on Gala­pa­gos mock­ing­birds. Darwin’s hand­writ­ing will present a chal­lenge, which is why, Hyper­al­ler­gic tells us, the project is “adding tran­scrip­tions and a schol­ar­ly struc­ture to its high-res­o­lu­tion images.”

Hyper­al­ler­gic also sums up the remain­ing con­tents of the huge archive, which in addi­tion to the Bea­gle mate­r­i­al will fea­ture every­thing “from the rest of his life, which he spent defend­ing his work.” This means “scrib­blings in books he stud­ied, abstracts, his own book drafts, arti­cles and their revi­sions, jour­nals he read, and his note­books on trans­mu­ta­tion.” You’ll also find “some charm­ing odd­i­ties” like draw­ings by the scientist’s chil­dren (above) on the back of orig­i­nal Ori­gin man­u­script pages. Learn much more about the archive, and Darwin’s life­long work, at the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al History’s Dar­win Man­u­script Project site.

via io9/Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Did Charles Dar­win Read? See His Hand­writ­ten Read­ing List & Read Books from His Library Online

Read the Orig­i­nal Let­ters Where Charles Dar­win Worked Out His The­o­ry of Evo­lu­tion

Trace Darwin’s Foot­steps with Google’s New Vir­tu­al Tour of the Gala­pa­gos Islands

New Ani­mat­ed Web Series Makes the The­o­ry of Evo­lu­tion Easy to Under­stand

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

A Haunting Drone’s-Eye View of Chernobyl

in Current Affairs | November 30th, 2014

Back in August, Col­in Mar­shall remarked that drones “have drawn bad press in recent years: as the intru­sive tools of the com­ing sur­veil­lance state, as deliv­er­ers of death from above in a host of war zones, as the pur­chase-deliv­er­ing har­bin­gers of world dom­i­na­tion by Amazon.com.” “But as with any tech­nol­o­gy,” Col­in went on to note, “you can also use drones for the good, or at least for the inter­est­ing.” Like cap­tur­ing mes­mer­iz­ing aer­i­al footage of major cities around the world, cities such as Los Ange­les, New York, Lon­don, Bangkok & Mex­i­co City. Now let’s add Cher­nobyl to the list.

While work­ing on a recent 60 Min­utes episode, film­mak­er Dan­ny Cooke vis­it­ed Cher­nobyl, and, using a drone (a DJI Phan­tom 2 and GoPro 3+, to be pre­cise), he cap­tured haunt­ing footage of the city dev­as­tat­ed by the nuclear melt­down of April 26, 1986. Cher­nobyl has cooled off enough that jour­nal­ists and sci­en­tists can now vis­it the area for short peri­ods of time. (Biol­o­gists, for exam­ple, are active­ly study­ing the crip­pling effects radi­a­tion has had on Cher­nobyl’s ani­mal life, and pro­duc­ing dis­turb­ing videos show­ing how birds are devel­op­ing tumors, and spi­ders are spin­ning asym­met­ri­cal webs.) As for when Cher­nobyl will be tru­ly hab­it­able again, the best guess is anoth­er 20,000 years. By that time, the detri­tus will have ful­ly giv­en way to nature, and, if peo­ple still roam the earth, they’ll get some­thing close to a fresh start.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Lynda Barry’s Wonderfully Illustrated Syllabus & Homework Assignments from Her UW-Madison Class, “The Unthinkable Mind”

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Creativity, Life, Writing | November 28th, 2014

Our rev­er­ence for car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry, aka Pro­fes­sor Chew­bac­ca, aka The Near Sight­ed Mon­key is no secret. We hope some­day to expe­ri­ence the plea­sure of her live teach­ings. ’Til then, we creep on her Tum­blr page, fol­low­ing with home­work assign­ments, writ­ing exer­cis­es and les­son plans intend­ed for stu­dents who take her class, “The Unthink­able Mind,” at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin.

And now, those course mate­ri­als have been col­lect­ed as Syl­labus: Notes from an Acci­den­tal Pro­fes­sor, an old fash­ioned, tan­gi­ble book. It’s like a paper MOOC!

(Yes, we know, MOOCs are free. This will be too, if you add it to your hol­i­day wish list, or insist that your local library orders a copy.)

Barry’s march­ing orders are always to be exe­cut­ed on paper, even when they have been retrieved on smart­phones, tablets, and a vari­ety of oth­er screens. They are the antithe­sis of dry. A less acci­den­tal pro­fes­sor might have dis­pensed with the doo­dle encrust­ed, lined yel­low legal paper, after pri­vate­ly out­lin­ing her game plan. Barry’s choice to pre­serve and share the method behind her mad­ness is a gift to stu­dents, and to her­self.

As Hillary L. Chute notes in Graph­ic Women: Life Nar­ra­tive and Con­tem­po­rary Comics:

 The decon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of cheap, com­mon, or util­i­tar­i­an paper (which also harkens back to the his­tor­i­cal avant-garde) may be under­stood as a trans­val­u­a­tion of the idea of work­ing on “waste” –a know­ing, iron­ic acknowl­edg­ment on Barry’s part that her life nar­ra­tive, itself per­haps con­sid­ered insignif­i­cant, is visu­al­ized in an acces­si­ble pop­u­lar medi­um, comics, that is still large­ly viewed as “garbage.”

Work­ing on “garbage” must come as a relief for some­one like Bar­ry, who has talked about grow­ing up under a hos­tile moth­er who saw her daughter’s cre­ative impuls­es as a “waste” of paper:

I got screamed at a lot for using up paper. The only blank paper in the house was hers, and if she found out I touched it she’d go crazy. I some­times stole paper from school and even that made her mad. I think it’s why I hoard paper to this day. I have so much blank paper every­where, in every draw­er, on every shelf, and still when I need a sheet I look in the garbage first. I ago­nize over using a “good” sheet of paper for any­thing. I have good draw­ing paper I’ve been drag­ging around for twen­ty years because I’m not good enough to use it yet. Yes, I know this is insane.

Sam­ple assign­ments from “The Unthink­able Mind” are above and below, and you will find many more in Syl­labus: Notes from an Acci­den­tal Pro­fes­sor. Let us know if Pro­fes­sor Chew­bac­ca’s neu­ro­log­i­cal assump­tions are cor­rect. Does draw­ing and writ­ing by hand release the mon­sters from the id and squelch the inter­nal edi­tor who is the ene­my of art?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Join Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry for a Uni­ver­si­ty-Lev­el Course on Doo­dling and Neu­ro­science

Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry Reveals the Best Way to Mem­o­rize Poet­ry

Lyn­da Bar­ry, Car­toon­ist Turned Pro­fes­sor, Gives Her Old Fash­ioned Take on the Future of Edu­ca­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, home­school­er, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Crash Course Big History: John Green Teaches Life, the Universe & Everything

in History, Science | November 28th, 2014

If you don’t under­stand big his­to­ry, you’ll nev­er under­stand small his­to­ry. That idea has­n’t yet attained apho­rism sta­tus, but maybe we can get it there. Last month, we fea­tured a free, Bill Gates-fund­ed short course on 13.8 bil­lion years of “Big His­to­ry”. Back in 2012, we fea­tured well-known online edu­ca­tor (and now even bet­ter-known young adult nov­el­ist) John Green’s Crash Course on World His­to­ry. Now these worlds, or rather these his­to­ries of the world, have col­lid­ed in the form of  Crash Course Big His­to­ry, a web series “in which John Green, Hank Green, and Emi­ly Graslie teach you about, well, every­thing.” In true fash­ion of the biggest pos­si­ble his­to­ry, the Crash Course crew begins at the begin­ning — the real begin­ning, the Big Bang, which the first fif­teen-minute episode gets into above.

“Mr. Green! Mr. Green!” exclaims Green at him­self, momen­tar­i­ly tak­ing on his sig­na­ture sec­ondary pushy-stu­dent per­sona. “That’s not his­to­ry, that’s sci­ence.” Return­ing to his cool-pro­fes­sor per­sona, Green lays it out for him­self: “Aca­d­e­mics often describe his­to­ry as, like, all stuff that’s hap­pened since we start­ed writ­ing things down, but they only start there because that’s where we have the best infor­ma­tion. The advent of writ­ing was a huge deal, obvi­ous­ly, but as a start date for his­to­ry, it’s total­ly arbi­trary. It’s just a line we drew in the sand and said, ‘Okay, his­to­ry begins now!’ ” In order to push that line as far back as pos­si­ble, his­to­ry must fuse with sci­ence, allow­ing the study of the past to best incor­po­rate and con­tex­tu­al­ize all it can about (and stu­dents of Green had to know he would quote Dou­glas Adams on this) “Life, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing.”

Sev­en episodes in and under­way right now, Crash Course Big His­to­ry has gone on to cov­er not just the uni­verse, but the sun and the Earth, the emer­gence of life, the epic of evo­lu­tion, and how that process pro­duced humans. Hav­ing arrived at the appear­ance of Homo sapi­ens, Green and com­pa­ny cov­er, in the fresh­ly released sev­enth episode, the process of “human­i­ty con­quer­ing the Earth. Or at least mov­ing from Africa into the rest of the Earth,” going on to reach “a crit­i­cal mass of inno­va­tors” and devel­op “col­lec­tive learn­ing.” And amid the grand sweep of plan­e­tary move­ment, evo­lu­tion, and mass migra­tion, we con­tin­ue to find new ways to col­lec­tive­ly learn all the time — of which the Crash Cours­es rep­re­sent only one par­tic­u­lar­ly enter­tain­ing vari­ety.

You can watch future Crash Course Big His­to­ry videos by fol­low­ing this playlist on Youtube. It’s also worth men­tion­ing that Bill Gates has helped fund these Crash Course videos, just as he has helped fund the larg­er Big His­to­ry Project men­tioned in our pre­vi­ous post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Free Down­load of The His­to­ry Man­i­festo: His­to­ri­ans New Call for Big-Pic­ture Think­ing

Down­load 78 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es: From Ancient Greece to The Mod­ern World

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.

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow Finally Gets Released as an Audio Book

in Audio Books, Literature | November 27th, 2014

A quick heads up for Thomas Pyn­chon fans. Four decades after its pub­li­ca­tion, you can final­ly get Gravity’s Rain­bow as an audio book — pos­si­bly even as a free audio book.

Accord­ing to The New York Times, “Since the mid-1980s, a George Guidall record­ing [of the 1973 nov­el] has been float­ing around, like some myth­i­cal lost rock­et part — no one had heard it, but all Pyn­chon fans knew some­one who knew some­one who had — but in Octo­ber a new ver­sion, autho­rized and rere­cord­ed… — hit the stands.”

The new release, which runs 40 hours and 1 minute, is also nar­rat­ed by Guidall. It’s avail­able on Audible.com. (Hear an audio sam­ple below.) And there’s a way to get it for free. As we’ve men­tioned before, Audi­ble lets you down­load an audio book for free if you sign up for their 30-Day Free Tri­al. And even if you decide to can­cel the tri­al, you can still keep the audio book and pay no mon­ey. That said, I dig Audi­ble’s sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, as I’ve spelled out before, pre­cise­ly because you can get big long audio books for a real­ly rea­son­able price.

Learn more about the Free Tri­al pro­gram here, and to get Grav­i­ty’s Rain­bow, sim­ply click here and then click the “Try Audi­ble Free” link on the right side of the page. NB: Audi­ble is an Amazon.com sub­sidiary, and we’re a mem­ber of their affil­i­ate pro­gram.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thomas Pyn­chon Edits His Lines on The Simp­sons: “Homer is my role mod­el and I can’t speak ill of him.”

Take a Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney into the Mind of Thomas Pyn­chon and His New Book, Bleed­ing Edge

Behold a Beautiful Archive of 10,000 Vintage Cameras at Collection Appareils

in Archives, Photography | November 26th, 2014

Dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy has bestowed many gifts, and some few hor­rors: self­ies, nat­u­ral­ly, as well as even less dig­ni­fied self-por­traits, of the sort cer­tain politi­cians send out; mass sur­veil­lance, as well as the abil­i­ty of aver­age cit­i­zens to pro­duce impor­tant pieces of evi­dence and to doc­u­ment his­to­ry; hard times for pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers, as well as the full democ­ra­ti­za­tion of the medi­um. What it has almost ren­dered obso­lete is the mech­a­nism that enabled pho­to­graph­ic images in the first place. In place of cam­eras, we have smart­phones, the hat­ed Glass… maybe some­time in the future no exter­nal device at all. Giv­en this tra­jec­to­ry, it’s entire­ly under­stand­able that all sorts of people—steampunks, anti­quar­i­ans, Lud­dites, ana­log fetishists, mid­dle-age hip­sters, etc.—would grow nos­tal­gic not only for the cracked, stri­at­ed mono­chrome pati­na of vin­tage pho­tographs, but also for the boxes—large and small, sim­ple and high­ly complicated—that pro­duced them.

And what won­der­ful box­es they were! Before the onslaught of iden­ti­cal, cheap con­sumer point-and-shoots and (gasp!) dis­pos­ables, or the util­i­tar­i­an bricks of pro­fes­sion­al gear, the cam­era was very often a work of art in its own right. Today, we bring you a sam­pling of these objets—ele­gant, intri­cate, stream­lined, and down­right adorable. These are but a tiny frac­tion of the vin­tage cam­era trea­sures you’ll find rep­re­sent­ed at Col­lec­tion Appareils, an online ref­er­ence of 10,000 ana­log cam­eras run by Syl­vain Hal­gand, a French­man sore­ly afflict­ed with the “insid­i­ous dis­ease” of col­lect­ing.

Wit­ness at the top the Pho­to­s­phere No. 1, man­u­fac­tured by the Com­pag­nie Fran­caise de Pho­togra­phie in 1899—a tru­ly beau­ti­ful arti­fact. No less styl­ish, but far more cam­era-like to our eyes, see the Argus A above. Made in the U.S. between 1936 and 1941, this may have been the most pop­u­lar 35mm of all time. Though not as well known as the Leica A, “it’s a safe bet that Argus sold more cam­eras in their first twen­ty years than Leica has sold in their first 70 years.”

Above, we have the first “point and shoot,” the Gap Box 6x9, a curi­ous­ly attrac­tive device made in France in 1950. This cam­era “played a very impor­tant role by mak­ing pho­tog­ra­phy acces­si­ble to the gen­er­al pub­lic,” allow­ing “any­one to take pic­tures at the low­est price and in the most sim­ple way.”

Then there are the styl­ized and the stream­lined. Just above, see a very fine machine called The Com­pass, man­u­fac­tured by Swiss watch­mak­er Le Coul­tre between 1937 and 1940. And below, gaze upon the grace­ful Haneel Tri-Vision, made in Los Ange­les in 1946.

Almost equal­ly appeal­ing in their design sim­plic­i­ty are the irre­sistibly cute minia­ture cam­eras, such as the “Mick­ey Mouse” below. Man­u­fac­tured in Ger­many in 1958, these tiny things—despite the “copy­right” notice on the lens—may have dis­ap­peared quick­ly “due to them not actu­al­ly being sanc­tioned by the Dis­ney Cor­po­ra­tion.” They were, how­ev­er, sold with a “large card­board Mick­ey Mouse that ‘held’ the cam­era.”

See also the Coro­net Midget. Made in Eng­land in 1934, this 5‑shilling cam­era “must be one of the most pop­u­lar of all small cam­eras to col­lect.” The com­pa­ny mar­ket­ed its own 6‑exposure film for the Midget, which came in a choice of five col­ors.

From the cou­ture to the high-tech to the quirky and inven­tive (like the Lark “Sar­dine Can” below), the French vin­tage cam­era archive makes avail­able a visu­al his­to­ry of the cam­era that may exist nowhere else. It is the his­to­ry of an object that defined the 20th cen­tu­ry, and that may ful­ly dis­ap­pear some­time soon in the 21st. And while we can spend sev­er­al hours a day mar­veling over the prod­ucts of these fine devices, it’s a rare treat to see the things them­selves in such an aston­ish­ing vari­ety of shapes, sizes, col­ors, and degrees of design inge­nu­ity. Take some time to get acquaint­ed with the evo­lu­tion of the hand­held cam­era before dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy final­ly ren­ders it extinct.

Via Laugh­ing Squid/ Messy Nessy Chic/PetaPix­el

Images cour­tesy of Col­lec­tion Appareils.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Design­ers Charles & Ray Eames Cre­ate a Pro­mo­tion­al Film for the Ground­break­ing Polaroid SX-70 Instant Cam­era (1972)

Alfred Stieglitz: The Elo­quent Eye, a Reveal­ing Look at “The Father of Mod­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy”

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

Watch Dragnet’s 1967 LSD Episode: #85 on TV Guide’s List of the Greatest Episodes of All Time

in Television | November 26th, 2014

Jack Webb’s sem­i­nal cop show Drag­net, which first ran on tele­vi­sion through most of the ’50s, was known for its grit­ty real­ism. In every episode, the show’s robot­ic, lacon­ic lead, Detec­tive Joe Fri­day, would nav­i­gate the seedy under­world and even­tu­al­ly get his man.

Though Drag­net rivaled only I Love Lucy in pop­u­lar­i­ty, Webb pulled the plug on the series in 1959. But he could­n’t stay away.  In Jan­u­ary 1967, Webb launched a reboot of Drag­net. This time, Fri­day, quite pos­si­bly the squarest per­son on the plan­et, takes on youth cul­ture. Case in point, the series’ inau­gur­al show, which you can watch above, where Fri­day and his new part­ner Bill Gan­non stum­ble upon that strange new soci­etal scourge LSD. Inci­den­tal­ly, this is also the first episode of Drag­net to be shot in col­or. Make of that what you will.

When Fri­day and Gan­non inves­ti­gate a com­plaint about some­one eat­ing bark, they dis­cov­er a teenag­er who paint­ed his face Brave­heart-style and is bab­bling about the pilot light at the cen­ter of the Earth. This is Blue­boy AKA Ben­jamin Carv­er and clear­ly, he is trip­ping. He’s also sell­ing lousy acid to Mar­cia Brady look-alikes.

The show is a fas­ci­nat­ing time cap­sule on a num­ber of lev­els. First, this episode was made while LSD was still legal. (Acid was banned Cal­i­for­nia in Octo­ber 1966. Not long, one imag­ines, after the episode was shot.) Fri­day and Gan­non shake their heads in frus­tra­tion over their legal impo­tence, espe­cial­ly lat­er when they dis­cov­er Blue­boy dead from an over­dose. Just in case you didn’t get the show’s moral (drugs = bad) Webb lards the episode with ter­ri­fy­ing facts about the drug. “LSD is so potent that a sin­gle pound of the prepa­ra­tion can turn every per­son in Los Ange­les coun­ty into a total psy­chot­ic. The pop­u­la­tion of the coun­ty – sev­en mil­lion peo­ple.”

Media crit­ic Michele Hilmes argues, how­ev­er, that the show might just be speak­ing out of both sides of its mouth. To an old­er gen­er­a­tion, Drag­net is a cop show preach­ing law and order. To the younger gen­er­a­tion, Webb’s heavy-hand­ed­ness cross­es the line into par­o­d­ic camp.

Jack Webb so embod­ied the role of Joe Fri­day that he all but became the LAPD in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. When Webb died in 1982, he was buried with full police hon­ors and his badge num­ber, 714, was offi­cial­ly retired from the force. It’s curi­ous that a cop so unre­lent­ing­ly smug would become the paragon of LA’s finest.

Thom Ander­sen mem­o­rably summed up the series in his sem­i­nal essay film Los Ange­les Plays Itself. “Drag­net admirably expressed the con­tempt the LAPD had for the law-abid­ing civil­ians it was pledged ‘to pro­tect and to serve.’ It pro­tect­ed us from our­selves, and it served us despite our best efforts to make the job more dif­fi­cult. … Friday’s heavy-hand­ed irony nev­er lets up. None of the wit­ness­es or sus­pects he ques­tions pen­e­trates his wall of con­de­scen­sion. Of course, Drag­net isn’t a doc­u­men­tary por­trait of the LAPD, and its detec­tives weren’t real­ly like Joe Fri­day. What’s scary is that he rep­re­sent­ed the department’s ide­al.”

Accord­ing to Andrew Gra­ham’s Drag­net blog, TV Guide vot­ed this episode #85 on its list of the great­est TV episodes of all time.

via Neatora­ma

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Artist Draws Nine Por­traits on LSD Dur­ing 1950s Research Exper­i­ment

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Ani­mat­ed

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 bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

George Orwell’s Final Warning: Don’t Let This Nightmare Situation Happen. It Depends on You!

in Books, History, Literature | November 26th, 2014

More than 60 years after his death and the close­ly pre­ced­ing pub­li­ca­tion of his best-known nov­el 1984, we look to George Orwell as a kind of prophet of the ills of cor­po­ratism, social­ism, author­i­tar­i­an­ism, total­i­tar­i­an­ism — any pow­er­ful ‑ism, essen­tial­ly, in which we can find nasty, free­dom-destroy­ing impli­ca­tions. The BBC doc­u­men­tary Orwell: A Life in Pic­tures, which we fea­tured a few years back, makes a point of high­light­ing Orwell’s “warn­ing” to what he saw as a fast corporatizing/socializing/authoriatarianizing/totalitarianizing world. In the film’s final dra­ma­tized scene above (watch the com­plete film here), the re-cre­at­ed Orwell him­self makes the fol­low­ing omi­nous pre­dic­tion:

Allow­ing for the book, after all, being a par­o­dy, some­thing like 1984 could actu­al­ly hap­pen. This is the direc­tion the world is going in at the present time. In our world, there will be no emo­tions except fear, rage, tri­umph, and self-abase­ment. The sex instinct will be erad­i­cat­ed. We shall abol­ish the orgasm. There will be no loy­al­ty except loy­al­ty to the Par­ty. But always there will be the intox­i­ca­tion of pow­er. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of vic­to­ry, the sen­sa­tion of tram­pling on an ene­my who’s help­less. If you want a pic­ture of the future, imag­ine a boot stamp­ing on a human face, for­ev­er. The moral to be drawn from this dan­ger­ous night­mare sit­u­a­tion is a sim­ple one: don’t let it hap­pen. It depends on you.

This fic­tion­al­ized Orwell — much like the real Orwell — does­n’t mince words. But as with most unminced words, these mask a more com­pli­cat­ed real­i­ty. Though Orwell fans may find each indi­vid­ual piece of this speech rec­og­niz­able, espe­cial­ly the bit about the boot and the face, the man him­self nev­er spoke it — not in this form, any­way.

It mix­es doc­u­ment­ed state­ments of Orwell’s with words from the text of 1984, and its dra­mat­ic clos­er [“Don’t let it hap­pen. It depends on you!”] comes, as writes Barnes and Noble’s Steve King, from a post-pub­li­ca­tion press release direct­ed by pub­lish­er Fredric War­burg toward read­ers who “had mis­in­ter­pret­ed [Orwell’s] aim, tak­ing the nov­el as a crit­i­cism of the cur­rent British Labour Par­ty, or of con­tem­po­rary social­ism in gen­er­al.” The quo­ta­tion from the press release was “soon giv­en the sta­tus of a last state­ment or deathbed appeal, giv­en that Orwell was hos­pi­tal­ized at the time and dead six months lat­er.”

You can read more at georgeorwellnovels.com, which pro­vides a great deal of con­text on this press release, which runs, in full, as fol­lows:

It has been sug­gest­ed by some of the review­ers of Nine­teen Eighty-Four that it is the author’s view that this, or some­thing like this, is what will hap­pen inside the next forty years in the West­ern world. This is not cor­rect. I think that, allow­ing for the book being after all a par­o­dy, some­thing like Nine­teen Eighty-Four could hap­pen. This is the direc­tion in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the polit­i­cal, social and eco­nom­ic foun­da­tions of the con­tem­po­rary world sit­u­a­tion.

Specif­i­cal­ly the dan­ger lies in the struc­ture imposed on Social­ist and on Lib­er­al cap­i­tal­ist com­mu­ni­ties by the neces­si­ty to pre­pare for total war with the U.S.S.R. and the new weapons, of which of course the atom­ic bomb is the most pow­er­ful and the most pub­li­cized. But dan­ger lies also in the accep­tance of a total­i­tar­i­an out­look by intel­lec­tu­als of all colours.

The moral to be drawn from this dan­ger­ous night­mare sit­u­a­tion is a sim­ple one: Don’t let it hap­pen. It depends on you.

George Orwell assumes that if such soci­eties as he describes in Nine­teen Eighty-Four come into being there will be sev­er­al super states. This is ful­ly dealt with in the rel­e­vant chap­ters of Nine­teen Eighty-Four. It is also dis­cussed from a dif­fer­ent angle by James Burn­ham in The Man­age­r­i­al Rev­o­lu­tion. These super states will nat­u­ral­ly be in oppo­si­tion to each oth­er or (a nov­el point) will pre­tend to be much more in oppo­si­tion than in fact they are. Two of the prin­ci­pal super states will obvi­ous­ly be the Anglo-Amer­i­can world and Eura­sia. If these two great blocks line up as mor­tal ene­mies it is obvi­ous that the Anglo-Amer­i­cans will not take the name of their oppo­nents and will not dra­ma­tize them­selves on the scene of his­to­ry as Com­mu­nists. Thus they will have to find a new name for them­selves. The name sug­gest­ed in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is of course Ing­soc, but in prac­tice a wide range of choic­es is open. In the U.S.A. the phrase “Amer­i­can­ism” or “hun­dred per cent Amer­i­can­ism” is suit­able and the qual­i­fy­ing adjec­tive is as total­i­tar­i­an as any­one could wish.

If there is a fail­ure of nerve and the Labour par­ty breaks down in its attempt to deal with the hard prob­lems with which it will be faced, tougher types than the present Labour lead­ers will inevitably take over, drawn prob­a­bly from the ranks of the Left, but not shar­ing the Lib­er­al aspi­ra­tions of those now in pow­er. Mem­bers of the present British gov­ern­ment, from Mr. Attlee and Sir Stafford Cripps down to Aneurin Bevan will nev­er will­ing­ly sell the pass to the ene­my, and in gen­er­al the old­er men, nur­tured in a Lib­er­al tra­di­tion, are safe, but the younger gen­er­a­tion is sus­pect and the seeds of total­i­tar­i­an thought are prob­a­bly wide­spread among them. It is invid­i­ous to men­tion names, but every­one could with­out dif­fi­cul­ty think for him­self of promi­nent Eng­lish and Amer­i­can per­son­al­i­ties whom the cap would fit.

Read­ers can still find plen­ty to quib­ble with in Orwell, but sure­ly that counts as a point toward his sta­tus as an endur­ing­ly fas­ci­nat­ing writer. The les­son, how­ev­er much we may mis­in­ter­pret its deliv­ery — and indeed, how much Orwell him­self may some­times seem to mis­de­liv­er it — holds steady: don’t let it hap­pen. How not to let it hap­pen, of course, remains a mat­ter of active inquiry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

For 95 Min­utes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life

The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Cir­ca 1921)

George Orwell and Dou­glas Adams Explain How to Make a Prop­er Cup of Tea

George Orwell’s Five Great­est Essays (as Select­ed by Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Colum­nist Michael Hiltzik)

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.

A Year in the Life of Earth’s CO2: A Striking Visualization

in Environment, Science | November 25th, 2014

Dur­ing the same week when House Repub­li­cans passed a bill for­bid­ding sci­en­tists from advis­ing the EPA on its own research, NASA cli­mate sci­en­tists (coin­ci­den­tal­ly but maybe incon­ve­nient­ly) released a video doc­u­ment­ing A Year in the Life of Earth­’s CO2. Accord­ing to NASA, “The visu­al­iza­tion is a prod­uct of a sim­u­la­tion called ‘Nature Run,’ ” which “ingests real data on atmos­pher­ic con­di­tions and the emis­sion of green­house gas­es and both nat­ur­al and man-made par­tic­u­lates. The mod­el is then left to run on its own and sim­u­late the nat­ur­al behav­ior of the Earth’s atmos­phere.”  The video above visu­al­izes how car­bon diox­ide in the atmos­phere trav­eled around the globe from Jan­u­ary 2006 through Decem­ber 2006. Hope­ful­ly the take-away isn’t look at all the pret­ty col­ors. The video is in the pub­lic domain and can be down­loaded here.

To learn more about cli­mate change, see the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chicago’s course, Glob­al Warm­ing. It’s a free 23-lec­ture course pre­sent­ed by David Archer, a pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of The Geo­phys­i­cal Sci­ences.