The more things change, the more they stay the same.
At another turning point in U.S. history–when LBJ ran against Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election–Martin Luther King, Jr. urged voters to stand up and be counted. To set the scene, the UCLA Film & Television Archive writes:
King, who had just been named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his commitment to nonviolent resistance, embarked on a cross-country get-out-the-vote campaign in support of incumbent Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. Republican challenger Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in favor of states’ rights and represented, for King, a setback for the civil rights movement and “a great dark night of social destruction” (Los Angeles Times). King also advocated for more African American representation in Congress and spoke against ballot measures that would perpetuate discrimination. To vote was not only a civic duty, it was a moral imperative.
His words speak to our moment today as much, if not more, than they did to the events of 56 years ago. Speaking to a crowd in LA, King said:
“Suffice it to say that we stand in one of the most momentous periods of human history. And in these days of emotional tension, when the problems of the world are gigantic in extent and chaotic in detail, all men of good will must make the right decisions.”
“We must decide whether … we will allow our nation to be relegated to a second-rate power in the world with no moral voice.”
“We must decide next Tuesday whether America will take the high road of justice and peace, compassion for the poor and underprivileged, or whether this nation will tread the low road of man’s inhumanity to man, of injustice, of short-sightedness.”
“Each of us has a moral responsibility, if we are of voting age and if we are registered, to participate in that decision. I come here to urge every person under the sound of my voice to go to the polls on the 3rd of November and vote your convictions.”
I felt the need for me to somehow or another, use humanity to get people to become aware of how people suffered. That was what drove me to it.
Poet, novelist, jazz pianist, classical composer, co-founder of Essence magazine, and first Black director of a major Hollywood film, based on a book he himself wrote.… Oh, and he also directed Shaft, the high watermark of Blaxploitation film and a production, says Evan Puschak, the Nerdwriter, above, “that helped to save MGM and the larger studio system from bankruptcy.” Gordon Parks lived “enough for ten lives,” but the resume above misses out on Parks’ “greatest contribution to American art in the 20th century… his photography.”
The self-taught Parks began taking pictures at 25, inspired by newsreel footage of the bombing of an American gunship. After seeing the film, he purchased his first camera and soon moved to Chicago, where he honed his craft in the early 40s and developed the skills that would bring him to the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration. There he worked under the legendary Roy Stryker, the former Columbia economist who also hired Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Edwin Rosskam, and other photographers who went on to have long careers in photojournalism.
None of these Depression-era government photographers neglected the Black experience in America; under Stryker’s direction, the FSA did its best to faithfully document working-class and poor Americans of all backgrounds. Before being commissioned to do so, however, Parks, the only Black photographer in the group, was already seeking out candid, intimate images of life on the South Side of Chicago. When he began working for the FSA, he produced one of the most iconic images of the period, “American Gothic,” a solo restaging of the Grant Woods painting featuring a cleaning woman named Ella Watson, broom in one hand, mop in the other.
Stryker, one of the most daring photo editors of the time, helped establish the bold documentary style that dominated in the coming decades of Look and Life magazines. But even he saw Parks’ “American Gothic” as too incendiary. As Parks remembers in a clip above, “he says, ‘Well, you’re getting the idea, but you’re going to get us all fired. (Laughs) He says, ‘This is a government agency, and that picture is an indictment against America.’” Parks did not get fired. Instead, he went on to work for the FSA’s successor, the Office of War Information, and photographed the Tuskegee Airmen.
Parks’ skills as an artist were wide-ranging: his vision took in everything. He documented the Black experience in the 20th century with more sensitivity and depth than any other photographer. His photo essay of a Harlem gang leader earned him the first staff appointment for a Black photographer at Life in 1948. He would go on to document the Civil Rights movement and both celebrated and ordinary people around the country and the world for the next several decades, returning often to the fashion photography in which he got his start. He was a renaissance artist with an activist’s heart. Parks once called the camera a “weapon against poverty and racism,” but he tended to wield it much more like a paintbrush.
Viewed head on, it appears to be a somewhat unconventional landscape in which one of the few remaining branches of a mutilated tree spreads over a city, far in the distance. Streaky clouds suggest heavy weather is brewing.
Stroll to the end of the corridor and take another look. You’ll find that the tree has contracted, and the clouds have reconfigured themselves into a portrait of Saint Francesco of Paola, praying beneath its boughs.
It’s a prime example of oblique anamorphosis, an image that has been deliberately distorted by an artist well versed in perspective, with the end result that the image’s true nature will only be revealed to those viewing the work from an unconventional point.
The Quay Brothers’ documentary short, above, a collaboration with art historian Roger Cardinal, uses a combination of their delightfully creepy signature puppet stop motion, as well as animated 3‑D cut outs, to lift the curtains on how the human eye can be manipulated, using principles of perspective.
Anamorphosis may not seem like such a feat in an age when a number of software programs can provide a major assist, but why would Renaissance artists put themselves to so much extra trouble?
The Quay Brothers delve into this too.
Perhaps the artist was injecting a bit of social criticism, like Hans Holbein the Younger, whose 1533 portrait, The Ambassadors, includes a secret anamorphic skull. This could be taken as a jab at the excesses of the wealthy young diplomats who provide the painting’s subject, except that the one who commissioned the work, Jean de Dinteville, prized the motto “Memento mori.”
Maybe he knowingly ordered up the naked death’s head to go along with his ermine and bling, an example of having one’s cake and eating it too, and yet another dizzying head trip for those viewing the painting from the intended angle.
(Betcha didn’t have to work too hard to guess the skull’s location, though…)
Or an artist might choose to employ anamorphosis as a brown paper wrapper of sorts, as in the case of Erhard Schön’s erotic woodblock prints.
When Louis Armstrong appeared in his hometown of New Orleans for the first time in nine years in 1965, it was, Ben Schwarz writes, “a low point for his critical estimation.” A younger generation saw his refusal to march on the front lines of the civil rights movement, risking life and limb, as a “racial cop-out,” as journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote at the time. Armstrong was seen as “a breezy entertainer with all the gravitas of a Jimmy Durante or Dean Martin.”
The criticism was unfair. Armstrong only played New Orleans in 1965 after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, having boycotted the city in 1956 when it banned integrated bands. In 1957 after events in Little Rock, Arkansas, Armstrong refused a State Department-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union over Eisenhower’s handling of the situation. He spoke out forcefully, used words you can’t repeat on NPR, called governor Orval Faubus an “ignorant plowboy” and the president “two-faced.”
But he preferred touring and making money to marching, and was happy to play for the State Department and PepsiCo on a 1960 tour of the African continent to promote, ostensibly, the opening of five new bottling plants. When he arrived in Leopoldville, capital city of the Congo, in late October, he even stopped a civil war, managing “to call a brief intermission in a country that had been unstable before his arrival,” Jayson Overby writes at the West End Blog.
Unstable is an understatement. The newly-independent country’s first elected president, Patrice Lumumba, had just been deposed in a coup by anti-communist Joseph Mobutu, survived a “bizarre” assassination attempt by the C.I.A., and would soon be on his way to torture and execution after the UN turned its back on him. The country was coming apart when Armstrong arrived. Then, it stopped. As he put it in a later interview, “Man, they even declared peace in The Congo fighting the day I showed up in Leopoldville.”
“Just for that day,” writes Overby, “he blew his horn and played with his band the sweet sound of jazz for a large crowd. But no sooner after Louis departed, the war resumed.” This being a joint state/commerce operation during the Cold War, there is of course much more to the story, some which lends credence to criticism of Armstrong as a government pawn used during “goodwill” tours to test out various forms of cultural warfare. That was, at least, the official stance of Moscow, according to the AP newsreel at the top of the post.
The Soviets “blasted Armstrong’s visit as a diversionary tactic,” and it was. Ricky Riccardi at the Louis Armstrong House Museum covers the event in great detail, including highlighting several declassified State Department memos that show the planning. In one, from October 14th, the first U.S. ambassador to the country, Clare Hayes Timberlake, argues that “cooperation with private firm might soften propaganda implications.”
After the October 27th performance, Timberlake judged the appearance “highly successful from standpoint over-all psychological impact on this troubled city.” Clearly, the 10,000 Congolese who showed up to see Satchmo play needed the break. But the diplomats misread the audience reaction, thinking they didn’t like the music when they started to leave at dusk. “Given the climate in Leopoldville,” Riccardi writes, “one can’t blame the locals for not wanting to stay out longer than they had to.” But it was, nonetheless, the State Department declared, the “first happy event” in the city since the country’s independence.
Much of the world has only recently discovered the Moomins, those lovable hippopotamus-like figures — given, it must be said, to moments of startling brusqueness and complexity — created in the 1940s by Finnish artist Tove Jansson. In forms ranging from dolls and school supplies to neck pillows and cellphone cases, they’ve lately become a full-blown craze in South Korea, where I live. Like any massively successful (and highly merchandisable) characters, the Moomins overshadow the rest of Jansson’s oeuvre. Hence exhibitions like Tove Jansson (1914–2001) at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, which “aims to rectify the fact that less attention has generally been paid to her range as a visual artist.”
That description comes from Simon Willis’ review of the show in the New York Review of Books. “In October 1944, Tove Jansson drew a cover for Garm, a Finnish satirical magazine, showing a brigade of Adolf Hitlers as pudgy little thieves,” Willis writes. These drawer-rifling, house-burning caricatures “were not unusual for Jansson, who had been belittling Stalin and Hitler in the magazine since the early days of World War II.” But “peeking out at the chaos from behind the magazine’s title,” there was also a “tiny pale figure with a long nose”: a proto-Moomin making an appearance the year before the publication of the first Moomin book. (And even he was forged in mockery, having first been drawn by Jansson, so the story goes, as a caricature of Immanuel Kant.)
Having started contributing to Garm, according to the official Moomin web site, “in 1929 at the young age of 15 (her mother Signe Hammarsten-Jansson had worked for the publication since it started),” she kept on doing so until the magazine folded in 1953.
“During that period she drew more than 500 caricatures, a hundred cover images and countless other illustrations for the magazine.” In them, writes Glasstire’s Caleb Mathern, “angels appear on battlefields. Reindeer prepare to rain TNT. An effete, undersized Hitler cries instead of eating slices of cake. Jansson even impugns Stalin’s manhood with an oversized scabbard/undersized sword joke.” To the young Jansson, the best part was the chance, as she later put it, “to be beastly to Stalin and Hitler.”
Even after the success of the Moomins, Jansson continued to draw on the imagery and emotions of war: “The first time we meet young Moomintroll and his Moominmamma in The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945), they are refugees, crossing a strange and threatening landscape in search of shelter. Moominpappa, meanwhile, is absent, as fathers often were during the war,” writes Aeon’s Richard W. Orange. In the next book “the world is threatened by a comet that sucks the water out of the sea, leaving an apocalyptic landscape in its wake.” With the Cold War heating up, the allegory would hardly have gone unnoticed. Like all master satirists, Jansson went on to transcend the solely topical — and indeed, so the increasingly Moomin-crazed world has demonstrated, the boundaries of time and culture.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
The Slo Mo Guys specialize in taking everyday occurrences and slowing them down … way down, so that we can see them in a new way. In this clip, they let you see what happens when you talk without a mask, and then with a mask–all in order to demonstrate why a mask helps prevent the transmission of COVID-19, a disease that’s mainly spread when people are exposed to respiratory droplets carrying infectious virus. Around the 4 minute mark, the host is joined by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who offers commentary on the footage.
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This video combines three things that make me happy: the voice of Sean Connery (who passed away today), the music of Vangelis (Blade Runner, Chariots of Fire), and the poetry of C.P. Cavafy. Put them all together and you get a blissful soundscape of rolling synth lines, rolling Scottish R’s, and a succession of Homeric images and anaphoric lines. And the video’s quite nice as well.
Cavafy, whose work, I’m told, is really untranslatable from the original Greek, always seems to come out pretty well to me in English. “Ithaca,” one of his most popular poems, expresses what in lesser hands might be a banal sentiment akin to “it’s the journey, not the destination.” But in Cavafy’s poem, the journey is both Odysseus’s and ours; it’s epic where our lives seem small, and it translates our minor wanderings to the realm of mythic history.
Anyway, it seems rude to say much more and drown the poem in commentary. So, follow along with Sean Connery.
Mark it on your calendars. Alex Winter’s new Zappa documentary will be released on November 23. To whet your appetite, here’s the official trailer for the film: “With unfettered access to the Zappa family trust and all archival footage, ZAPPA explores the private life behind the mammoth musical career that never shied away from the political turbulence of its time. Alex Winter’s assembly features appearances by Frank’s widow Gail Zappa and several of Frank’s musical collaborators including Mike Keneally, Ian Underwood, Steve Vai, Pamela Des Barres, Bunk Gardner, David Harrington, Scott Thunes, Ruth Underwood, Ray White and others.”
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We remember the bluesman Robert Johnson as the Jimi Hendrix of the 1930s, a guitarist of staggering skill who died before age thirty. Both found mainstream success, but Johnson’s came posthumously: in fact, his music and Hendrix’s first music hit it big in the same decade, the 1960s. King of the Delta Blues Singers, an album of Johnson’s songs released by Columbia Records in 1961, had a great influence on the likes of Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Robert Plant, and Eric Clapton, who calls Johnson “the most important blues singer that ever lived.” How did this poor young Mississippian come by his formidable abilities? Why, he sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, of course.
Or at least that’s what we all seem to have heard. And indeed, doesn’t the legend make the opening line of “Cross Road Blues,”King of the DeltaBlues’ opening number, that much more evocative? “I went down to the crossroads,” he sings. “Fell down on my knees. Asked the Lord above for mercy, ‘Take me, if you please.’ ” Well, it could’ve been the Lord, or it could have been the other one. But in fact we have precious little record of Johnson’s life, and no direct references at all to his bargain with Beelzebub (animations of which we previously featured here on Open Culture). Why has the legend stuck? Music Youtube series Polyphonic addresses that question in the video essay above.
An earlier episode covered deals with the devil throughout the history of music. This time, the subject is the crossroads itself, the setting of Johnsonian lore no one ever fails to mention. “Of all the marks that humans make on the earth, crossroads are among the simplest and most enduring,” says narrator Noah Lefevre. “As long as humans organize ourselves in towns and cities, crossroads will remain, and so will the legends of their dark powers and of the strange spirits who occupy them.” The mythology of the crossroads goes back at least to the Greek goddess Hecate, who rules over “liminal space, the transition from the known to the great unknown beyond.” In the Mississippi Delta, the mythology of the crossroads intersects, as it were, with the realm of Haitian voodoo.
“A religion that mixes Roman Catholic influences with West African spiritual traditions” — and the one that gave us zombies — voodoo has “one all-powerful god, but you can only speak to him through spirits known as loa.” And to talk to loa, you’ve got to go through Papa Legba, the loa of the crossroads. From the late 18th century, voodoo began making its way through the American South, the cradle of the blues. Out of this rich setting came Johnson’s predecessor Tommy Johnson (no relation), a singer and guitarist who based his persona on the claim of having sold his own soul to the devil. Even Robert Johnson’s mentor Ike Zimmerman was said to have practiced guitar in graveyards at midnight.
“Johnson is seen today as the grandfather of rock-and-roll,” says Lefevre. “That comes not just from his virtuoso playing, but also from his mythology.” (Consider this legacy in light of how often rock-and-roll was in decades past called “the devil’s music.”) Today, in songs like “Hellhound on My Trail,” we can hear both references to voodoo-inspired rituals and other forms of the occult as well as conditions of life in a South removed only a generation or two from slavery. This Polyphonic episode may convince you that “the myth of Johnson and the crossroads may have been birthed out of sheer accident,” but that’s no reason not to give King of the Delta Blues Singers a spin this Halloween — or any other day besides.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Sometimes describing a classic work of literature as “timeless” draws attention, when we revisit it, to how much it is bound up with the conventions of its time. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland emerged from a very specific time and place, the bank of the Thames in 1862 where Charles Lutwidge Dodgson first composed the tale for Alice Liddell and her sister. The future Lewis Carroll’s future bestseller became one of the most widely adapted and adopted works of literature in history. It never needs to be revived—Alice is always contemporary.
Those who have read the book to children know that Carroll’s nonsense story, though filled with archaic terms and outdated ideas about education, requires little additional explanation: indeed, it cannot be explained except by reference to the strange leaps of logic, rapid changes in scale and direction, and anthropomorphism familiar to everyone who has had a dream. Dodgson was a pretty weird character, and prim Victorian Alice is not exactly an everygirl, but every reader imagines themselves tumbling right down the rabbit hole after her.
As far as illustrators of Carroll’s timeless classic go, it’s hard to find one who is more universally beloved, and more Alice-like, than Tove Jansson, inventor of the Moomins, the Finnish series of children’s books and TV shows that is, in parts of the world, like a religion. How are her Alice illustrations not better known? It’s hard to say. Jansson’s Bohemian biography is as endearing as her characters, and she would make a wonderful subject for a children’s story herself. As James Williams tells it at Apollo Magazine:
The artist, Tove Jansson (1914–2001), was a great colourist who lived a richly plural life. Born into Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority to a Swedish mother and a Finnish father, both artists, she grew up on both sides of the Baltic. Jansson trained as a painter and illustrator in Stockholm and Paris, and made an early living through commissions and piecework. She was an acerbic and witty anti-fascist cartoonist during the Second World War, sending up Hitler and Stalin in covers for the Swedish-language periodical Garm. Descended on the one hand from a famous preacher, and on the other from a pioneer of the Girl Guide movement, she was raised on the Bible and on tales of adventure (Tarzan, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe). In her thirties she built a log cabin on an island and was a capable sailor. She lived visibly and courageously with her partner, the Finnish artist Tuulikki Pietilä, at a time when lesbian relationships did not enjoy public acceptance. She considered emigrating at various times to Tonga and Morocco but, despite travelling widely, remained rooted in Finland where she became (dread accolade) a ‘national treasure.’ She wrote a picture book for children about the imminent end of the world and spare, tender fiction for adults about love and family. She never stopped drawing and painting. She was Big in Japan.
We’ll find dream logic woven into all of Jansson’s work, from her early Moomin-like creature paintings from the 1930s to her illustrations for The Hobbit and Alice decades later. Her Alice, in Swedish, was first published in 1966, then released in an American edition in 1977. Sadly, her illustrations “did not receive such a great reception,” notes Moomin.com. “Readers already had their own imaginations in their minds about these classics.”
Blame Disney, I suppose, but there is never a bad time to re-imagine Alice’s journey, and the artist has left us with an excellent way to do so, “crafting a sublime fantasy experience,” Maria Popova writes, “that fuses Carroll’s Wonderland with Jansson’s Moomin Valley.” See more of Jansson’s timelessly weird drawings at Brain Pickings.
The late Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962) definitely loved miniatures, and excelled at their creation, knitting socks on pins, hand rolling real tobacco into tiny cigarettes, and making sure the victims in her realistic murder scene dioramas exhibited the proper degree of rigor mortis and lividity.
Her preoccupation began with the Sherlock Holmes stories she read as a girl.
In the 1930s, the wealthy divorcee used part of a sizable inheritance to endow Harvard University with enough money for the creation of its Department of Legal Medicine.
Its first chairman was her friend, George Burgess Magrath, a medical examiner who had shared his distress that criminals were literally getting away with murder because coroners and police investigators lacked appropriate training for forensic analysis.
The library to which Lee donated a thousand books on the topic was named in his honor.
The homemade dioramas offered a more vivid experience than could be found in any book.
Each Nutshell Study required almost half a year’s work, and cost about the same as a house would have at the time. ($6000 in the 1940s.)
“Luckily, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” Lee remarked. “It gives me the time and money to follow my hobby of scientific crime detection.”
Although Lee had been brought up in a luxurious 13 bedroom home (8 were for servants’ use), the domestic settings of the Nutshell Studies are more modest, reflective of the victims’ circumstances.
She drew inspiration from actual crimes, but had no interest in replicating their actual scenes. The crimes she authored for her little rooms were composites of the ones she had studied, with invented victims and in rooms decorated according to her imagination.
Her intent was to provide investigators with virgin crime scenes to meticulously examine, culling indirect evidence from the painstakingly detailed props she was a stickler for getting right.
Students were provided with a flashlight, a magnifying glass, and witness statements. Her attention to detail ensured that they would use the full ninety minutes they had been allotted analyzing the scene. Their goal was not to crack the case but to carefully document observations on which a case could be built.
The flawlessness of her 1:12 scale renderings also speaks to her determination to be taken seriously in what was then an exclusively male world. (Women now dominate the field of forensic science.)
Nothing was overlooked.
As she wrote to Dr. Alan Moritz, the Department of Legal Medicine’s second chair, in a letter reviewing proposed changes to some early scenes:
I found myself constantly tempted to add more clues and details and am afraid I may get them “gadgety” in the process. I hope you will watch over this and stop me when I go too far. Since you and I have perpetrated these crimes ourselves we are in the unique position of being able to give complete descriptions of them even if there were no witnesses—very much in the manner of the novelist who is able to tell the inmost thoughts of his characters.
It’s no accident that many of the Nutshell Studies’ little corpses are female.
Lee did not want officers to treat victims dismissively because of gender-related assumptions, whether the scenario involved a prostitute whose throat has been cut, or a housewife dead on the floor of her kitchen, the burners of her stove all switched to the on position.
Would you like to test your powers of observation?
Above are the remains of Maggie Wilson, discovered in the Dark Bathroom’s tub by a fellow boarder, Lizzie Miller, who gave the following statement:
I roomed in the same house as Maggie Wilson, but knew her only from we met in the hall. I think she had ‘fits’ [seizures]. A couple of male friends came to see her fairly regularly. On Sunday night, the men were there and there was a lot of drinking going on. Some time after the men left, I heard the water running in the bathroom. I opened the door and found her as you see her.
Grim, eh?
Not nearly as grim as what you’ll find in the Parsonage or the Three-Room Dwelling belonging to shoe factory foreman Robert Judson, his wife, Kate, and their baby, Linda Mae.
The period-accurate mini furnishings and fashions may create a false impression that the Mother of Forensic Science’s Nutshell Studies should be relegated to a museum.
In truth, their abundance of detail remains so effective that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore continues to use 18 of them in training seminars to help homicide investigators “convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”
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