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"Here's what happens when Lady Edith, Mrs. Patmore, and Mrs. Hughes play a raunchy American card game." (more…)

Thirty-four years ago, at the launch of Ted Turner's Cable News Network, the founder made a grandiose and specific promise about his newly created round-the-clock operation. "Barring satellite problems, we won't be signing off until the world ends," Turner declared. And in anticipation, he prepared a final video segment for the apocalypse:

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Deadspin is pleased to announce our 2014 Bear of the Year. After a great deal of consideration and deliberation, we arrived at a clear choice: Genius Bear Who Was Too Smart And Strong For Bullshit-Ass Electric-Deer Gag.

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Profcyclist told students that they could bring a 3"x5" card to an exam; a clever student wrote overlapping notes in blue and red ink and brought in gels to read them.

Rachel sends us "a series of posts about all the cool ways to use dollar store finds in tabletop RPGs. There is an amazing variety of useful things there, from things that could easily work as miniatures, to white boards for sketching maps or tracking initiative, to the cheapest source I've yet found for glass beads." Read the rest

Scientists exploring the deepest place on Earth — the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean — have captured footage of a never-before-seen fish at a record depth of 26,722 feet (8,145 meters).

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Look at the pretty design I made using Nathan Friend's elegant Inspirograph site.

Adult Swim's Unedited Footage of a Bear trumps Too Many Cooks for intensity, virtuosity and genuine terror. Read the rest

So, in the midst of all the horrible news last week, the usual outlets were yukking it up about some speech by Joe “I’ll kill your son” Biden. And that was a true quote!

But there was more to the speech, and NYMag has a full transcript:

… Look, let me just say it straight: violence against women is a stain on the moral character of a society, in any society in which it occurs. It’s an obligation of all societies, particularly the men in society, to stand up and do all in their power eradicate that stain. And it is a stain on the conscience of a country. This is an issue, that has been made repeatedly tonight, of basic human rights.

My dad said it differently. He said, ‘Everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity.’ That was my dad’s favorite word, the one we heard most often. We should be attacking this virus, this stain, with a profound sense of urgency. Urgency. For as I speak, there are thousands of women around the world being brutalized. Mutilated. Killed at the hands of those who allegedly love them and care about them…

This notion that women are chattels is a central part of our culture, inherited from our Anglo-Saxon ancestry, but also in many other cultures, and our law. I asked my staff, when I started to write the law, two men and four brilliant women, one of whom is here today, and went on to be a distinguished professor of law for ten or twelve years, I asked her to come back and be my council. And I asked them to go out and do a survey of the laws on the books in the states to determine where and whether or not, this implicit bias that somehow it’s the woman’s fault, somehow it’s a man’s right, are written in the laws.

They wrote a paper, and I’m happy to send it to any of you who are interested, because you may be. It’s over 23 years old. We listed in almost every state in the nation, the application of law was different. In the State of Delaware, my home state, if you consented to go out with me, if you were a voluntary partner, no matter what I did to you, no matter how brutally I raped you, I could not be convicted of first-degree rape. If I jumped out of an alley and brutally raped you, I could be convicted of first-degree rape.

Think of the premise: you must have done something. You must have somehow, inexplicably consented somehow, to something. I could not be convicted of first-degree rape…

And indeed, when I began to draft the Violence Against Women legislation, the reason why it didn’t work out at first, I physically drafted it myself, because no one wanted to be part of it. There are a lot of you out there who are working like the devil to do something, but getting nowhere. Because of the incredibly talented staff I had, we put together the Violence Against Women Act. And when we did, our opponents said that what Biden was doing – I could give you all the quotes – was ‘undermining the solidarity of the family.’ Seriously. That it would impact on the cohesion, bring about the disintegration of the American family. When we championed, and [they] now exist, women’s shelters, and housing, and transitional housing, they were characterized ‘as indoctrination centers for runaway wives.’ This is 1989. 1990. 1991. 1992.

Senator Birch Bayh, you may remember from Indiana, back in the early ‘80s introduced in the Judiciary Committee, and got a law passed saying that a man, a husband, could be convicted for raping his wife. In the markup of that bill, the deceased Senator from Alabama said on the record in frustration, ‘My young friend just doesn’t understand, sometimes a man has to use force with his wife.’ On the record.

Even some in this audience did not support the Violence Against Women Act in the beginning, to tell the truth. No women’s organization stepped forward and supported it, until Ellie Smeal spoke about it. It was characterized as ‘this is just a fad on Biden’s part.’ That was the phrase used. Others said that it was important, but did not deserve the national response….

I’ve now traveled a million miles as Vice President, and so many more as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. And those of you who are involved know there’s not a country I go in I do not raise this issue. Not a single country I go in. But I’m told: it’s a family affair, or you don’t understand our culture, you don’t understand our religious practices, you don’t understand we’re different. You have no right to trespass on our culture. Let me make something absolutely clear to everyone here: there is NEVER, never, a religious, a cultural, a societal, justification for inhumanity. Period. Never. Never. And don’t be intimidated when you are told that you don’t understand our culture. You’re right, I don’t understand it. They’re wrong. They’re simply wrong…

Full text at the link. Bless you, Uncle Joe, may your outrageous voice be with us for many years yet…

I can attest to the absolute outrage among the Very Serious People when Biden’s Violence Against Women Act was first introduced, as I’m sure many of you can. (I was writing at a feminist apa/fanzine collective, since we had yet to discover weblogs.) Seems to have been just an eye-blink… and yet, it’s a whole generation.

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Two recent Storify pages provide some fascinating insight on how this group came to conceive of "gamer" as a fictional "ethnicity" with a persecution complex (from Katherine Cross), as well as on how the cultural norms of Chan-style boards drive this perplexing clash with the realms of people's real working and social lives (from A_Man_in_Black). Read the rest

Something clicked in my head over a year ago: the board game Candyland could be used as an analog to the movie Chinatown.

No, bear with me here.

In Candyland, you have no agency. Candyland is a skill-teaching game, mainly for patience in turn-taking, pattern matching, and simple processes. There are no choices precisely because that would be against the role of the game in child development.

In Chinatown, Jake doesn’t really have much in the way of significant agency. He’s a film noir protagonist: someone who becomes embroiled in a deadly situation over his head, and is fortunate to survive at the end but doesn’t really achieve much in the way of change. To me, that’s the point of Chinatown and it’s a powerful point indeed.

For some reason, it clicks in my head that you could use Candyland as a base for a Chinatown story game. The reskin is simple but non-trivial:

• There’s some overall “plot” regarding a bunch of characters investigating a murder.
• Each of the “PCs” should have some little backstory on a card or something representing their role in the world.
• Each of the eight colors are themed and also double-coded with a shape. Things like a black gun (for “Murder”), purple cocktail glass (for “Bar”), red high-heel shoe (for “Dames”), etc.
• Each card would have a line of flavor to go with it. That’s the narrative input from a random engine, which would get coupled with some player reaction that shows character circumstance but not necessarily character agency.
• Each character has 3 hit points (for lack of another term), which are checked off each time a gun card is drawn. When the third gun card is drawn, that character dies and that player is out of the game. Because it’s Sweettown, and murder can happen to those who stick their candy corn in places.
• No matter what, the player has no choice in the game (beyond little bits of narration). There’s no player agency in Sweettown.

That means more in the way of art production and making up a bunch of little one-liners for a random film noir movie. And admittedly, it would be something that’s probably funny (but not fun) to play once on a lark, but making it a good game would take, well, a lot of work and scrapping the underpinning idea of having no agency. So it’s a thought exercise, a little bit of an amusement, and possibly the kernel of a future idea.

– Ryan

“So we’ve … now finally done something for the first time for our generation,” the Lockheed Martin manager for NASA’s Orion spacelaunch said.   And that’s true.  It’s the furthest NASA have sent a capsule since 1972.  It came back at a screaming 8G, more than any Apollo vessel pulled on re-entry, and nearly three times the G of a Shuttle reentry.  But it did come back.  It’ll be seven years before it gets crew-rated, I believe.  But that comment stayed with me.  Just as the Virgin Galactic flights are intended to recreate the suborbital lob that Alan Shepard rode in 1961, the Orion mission was essentially looking to recreate Apollo-level space travel ability.  And I kept thinking about Kon-Tiki.

In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl built a raft from only the materials and methods available to pre-Columbian South America, in order to re-enact the antiquitous voyages from Peru to Polynesia.  It was called Kon-Tiki.  Heyerdahl and his team were also the first in their generation to do that thing.

It’s a curious thing, to view a spacelaunch from the perspective of experimental archaeology.

 

 

Vi Hart and Nicky Case created a brilliant "playable post" that challenges you to arrange two groups of polygons to make them "happy" by ensuring that no more than 2/3 of their neighbors are different. Read the rest

The Aztec death whistle produces a sound so horrifying, it will chill you to the bone. Described as the "scream of a thousand corpses," the death whistle sounds like the cry of the un-dead, or the torment of a human being burned alive.

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During the first scene of the original 1990 Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger's head explodes. It's just a dream sequence, and the camera cuts away before his face actually pops open. But the fact remains: One of the biggest summer blockbusters of its era opens by forcing you to contemplate the most bankable movie star of his era as his face transforms into a grotesque, plastic mask of pain. It's revolting, and it's awesome, and there were once entire wings of major Hollywood studios dedicated to selling things like this.

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Shortly after Indians pitcher Corey Kluber won the AL Cy Young Award last week, New York Times writer Tyler Kepner made Twitter do a double take by pointing out that the seeds of Kluber’s Cleveland victory were sown when the 28-year-old starter was still in nursery school:

Eddie Taubensee’s 1991 Indians finished seventh (and last) in the AL East, which tells us he played for the franchise so long ago that there were only two divisions per league (and 26 teams in total). Since then, the Indians have gone from terrible to great to bad to good to bad and lately, aided by Kluber, back to pretty good again. Through all the ups and downs, the legacy of the 22-year-old Taubensee’s 26-game, rookie-season stint survived. Reading Kepner’s tweet is like turning on Ancient Aliens and discovering that today’s technological society, which we’d assumed had evolved organically, actually had a helping hand from E.T. Except that the tweet is based in fact.

That taste of a trade tree left Grantland contributor Rany Jazayerli wanting more:

In the Kauffman Stadium press box minutes after Salvador Perez popped out to end the World Series, I looked into Rany’s eyes and saw the unspeakable suffering²⁷ there. To distract him from still-painful flashbacks to Mike Jirschele’s stop sign, if only for a few moments, I’ve attempted to answer his question by finding the roster spot with the longest lineage on each team.

There are two ways in which a player can be considered a direct roster descendant of a previous player from the same team: He can be a product of the same linked sequence of trades, like Kluber and Taubensee, or he can come from a combination of trades and compensation/supplemental draft picks awarded to his team after one of his athletic ancestors signed elsewhere as a free agent.²⁸ To find transaction chains of both types, I’ve traced the background of every player who’s currently on a major league team’s 40-man roster, relying on the depth charts at RosterResource and the transaction records at Baseball-Reference.com for research.

As it turns out, Kluber’s tree actually goes back much further than Taubensee, but it still isn’t baseball’s longest. I’ve listed each team’s oldest roster spot below in reverse chronological order, with the earliest origins listed last. That means you can skip to the end to see which roster spot extends furthest into the past, but I’d recommend going in order instead of snatching the single cookie. I’ve included some sequences that rely on compensation/supplemental picks, but for the purists who prefer trade-only chains, I’ve also noted lengthy examples of those wherever applicable. The text contains the bare bones of each sequence,²⁹ beginning with the date on which the team acquired the player who started the chain, but to see all of the players involved, you can click on the expandable images, courtesy of David Kaleida, who developed this method of displaying “trade trees” in graphical form at his site 6-4-3 Putout.

30. Reds: 8/23/02

(Ryan Hanigan → David Holmberg)

No other club’s longest transaction line terminates so quickly, but these are going to get better soon. Like Alien: Isolation, we’re starting slow and boring to build suspense.

29. Giants: 6/4/02

(Matt Cain)

It would’ve been fun to find out that Brian Sabean had unknowingly laid the groundwork for the Giants’ three-titles-in-five-years quasi-dynasty with an obscure move that snowballed into a “one red paperclip”–style sequence featuring William VanLandingham, Tsuyoshi Shinjo, and Emmanuel Burriss and miraculously leading to Madison Bumgarner. Instead, I found out that drafting Cain and keeping him is as crazy and convoluted as Giants roster-spot origin stories come. Well, works for them.

28. Mariners: 11/30/00

(Ichiro Suzuki → Danny Farquhar)

Farquhar is a useful setup arm, but however far into the future this sequence extends, it probably peaked early.

27. Cubs: 7/2/00

(Robinson Chirinos → Matt Garza → Justin Grimm/Mike Olt/Neil Ramirez)

 

Rangers GM Jon Daniels is already on record as fearing that he’ll regret the Garza deal, but here’s a hook for you: There’s a Rangers trade mentioned later in this list that Daniels has admitted to liking even less.

26. Braves: 6/5/00

(Adam LaRoche → Mike Gonzalez → Todd Cunningham)

Cunningham is a Triple-A center fielder who’s on the 40-man roster and got a cup of coffee with Atlanta in 2013. Martin Prado (drafted in 2001) to Justin Upton/Chris Johnson is the longest Braves chain that ends in players whose backstories I don’t have to explain. The Braves’ recent drafts have been fruitful, so they haven’t had to look outside the organization as often as most teams.

T-25. Royals: 6/2/99

(Mike MacDougal → Dan Cortes → Yuniesky Betancourt → Lorenzo Cain/Alcides Escobar)

You might point out that Betancourt wasn’t the only player the Royals traded in the deal that brought back Cain and Escobar, and that there was also a little-known throw-in named Zack Greinke whom the Royals included to sweeten the offer because the Brewers got cold feet about trading their whole farm system for Yuni. To which I’d respond: If you want to make Greinke the star of this story, you can’t start this sequence until 2002.

T-25. Orioles: 6/2/99

(Erik Bedard → Adam Jones/Chris Tillman)

In retrospect, this is one of the most lopsided trades in recent years, and every season tips the scale more toward the Orioles’ end. The Mariners got four mostly meaningless wins above replacement out of Bedard, while the four major leaguers the Orioles received in return, led by Jones and Tillman, have totaled almost 35 wins and helped Baltimore to a pair of playoff appearances.

23. Angels: 9/24/98

(Francisco Rodriguez → Garrett Richards/Randal Grichuk → David Freese/Fernando Salas)

The Angels are the kings of extracting talent from compensation/supplemental picks. Not only did they get Grichuk and Richards from Rodriguez, but they got Mike Trout from the Yankees’ comp pick for Mark Teixeira in the same draft, plus Cam Bedrosian from losing John Lackey the following year. Hat tip to Casey Kotchman (drafted in 2001), whose presence made the Teixeira trade possible.

22. Yankees: 6/2/98

(Alfonso Soriano → Alex Rodriguez)

The Yankees constantly sign free agents and surrender draft picks, so there’s no sequence for anyone on their 40-man that goes back more than two moves. Fortunately, even after all the retirement tours, there’s at least one beloved, long-tenured Yankees legend left.

21. Tigers: 11/1/97

(Fernando Rodney → Chance Ruffin → Doug Fister → Robbie Ray/Ian Krol)

Mike Rabelo → Miguel Cabrera mounted a challenge but fell a few years short, so this one goes to a series of moves that ends with everyone’s favorite Dave Dombrowski deal. The Curtis Granderson → Austin Jackson → David Price chain can’t compete yet, but it’s off to a promising start.

T-20. Phillies: 6/4/96

(Jimmy Rollins)

Just … Jimmy Rollins. That’s it. The Phillies are the only team other than the Giants whose longest line begins and ends with a player who’s still on their roster. And the Phillies’ second-longest line begins and ends with Chase Utley, whom they drafted in 2000. For years, the Phillies have been unwilling to envision a future without their veterans; now, they’ve also managed to erase from their roster any record that a Rollins-free era ever existed.

T-20. Rangers: 6/4/96

(Warren Morris → Esteban Loaiza → Michael Young → Lisalverto Bonilla/Josh Lindblom → Michael Choice)

Surprisingly, the winner isn’t the 2001 Teixeira trade that yielded Elvis Andrus, Pedro Feliz, and Matt Harrison, among others. It just wouldn’t be a real Rangers trade chain without Young, who asked to be traded multiple times and eventually got his wish.

T-20. Pirates: 6/4/96

(Rob Mackowiak → Damaso Marte → Jose Tabata)

If you’re a Pirates fan who’s embarrassed to tell people at parties about Tabata, you can class up your past by tracing Josh Harrison back to John Grabow’s 1997 selection instead.

17. Rays: 3/4/96

(Victor Zambrano → Scott Kazmir → Alex Torres → Logan Forsythe/Brad Boxberger)

Did you remember to mark the 10th anniversary of the Zambrano-Kazmir trade? Jim Duquette didn’t.

16. Diamondbacks: 11/8/95

(Greg Aquino → Dana Eveland → Dan Haren → Tyler Skaggs → Mark Trumbo)

The Diamondbacks didn’t play their inaugural game until March 31, 1998, but there they were, signing 16-year-olds almost two and a half years before first pitch. No wonder those go-getters became the fastest expansion team to win a division and a World Series. Signing Aquino must have been one of the franchise’s first official transactions; in the 1995 transaction logs, it’s the only one attributed to “ARI (NL).” Credit Aquino for entrusting his career to a team that existed only on paper, with no ballpark, no manager, and no minor league teams.

15. White Sox: 2/8/94

(Carlos Lee → Luis Vizcaino → Javier Vazquez → Tyler Flowers)

Flowers’s career minor league on-base percentage was .391. With the White Sox, his OBP is .287. The majors are a harsh mistress.

14. Athletics: 7/17/93

(Miguel Tejada → Huston Street → Matt Holliday → Shane Peterson)

Peterson, a first baseman who spent the season in Triple-A, got a brief major league look in 2013 and is still on the 40-man roster. The A’s had the least homegrown roster in the majors this year, though, so there were plenty of other sequences that came close: Trying to trace the crisscrossing paths of Billy Beane’s many trades is impossible without leaving your walls looking like they were decorated by John Nash, Rust Cohle, and Carrie Mathison. Mark Mulder leads to four members of the 40-man; three have ties to Nick Swisher; one owes his saves to Barry Zito; and two (Josh Reddick and Raul Alcantara) go all the way back to Ben Grieve.

T-13. Cardinals: 6/3/93

(Eli Marrero → Adam Wainwright)

I was rooting for the Adam Kennedy → Jim Edmonds → David Freese → Peter Bourjos sequence, but that one started in ’97, and arbitrary rules are arbitrary rules. Also of note: Michael Wacha came from a comp pick that the Cardinals got from the Angels for Albert Pujols, one of many millions of reasons why St. Louis isn’t too broken up about being outbid for Pujols by Arte Moreno.

T-13. Brewers: 6/3/93

(Mark Loretta → Keith Ginter → Nelson Cruz → Francisco Cordero → Jake Odorizzi → Zack Greinke → Jean Segura/Johnny Hellweg)

Finally, Greinke gets the spotlight.

T-13. Rockies: 6/3/93

(Jamey Wright → Jeff Cirillo → Brian Fuentes → Rex Brothers)

The Rockies are the only expansion team on the list whose longest line doesn’t extend past the franchise’s first game, but that probably doesn’t explain why they’ve been the least successful of the four.

10. Blue Jays: 7/9/92

(Kelvim Escobar → Adam Lind → Marco Estrada)

The Roy Halladay line that leads to Kyle Drabek, Josh Thole, and R.A. Dickey is the sentimental favorite, but Escobar beat Halladay to the Blue Jays by three years.

9. Marlins: 6/1/92

(Charles Johnson → Mike Piazza → Ed Yarnall → Mike Lowell → Hanley Ramirez → Nathan Eovaldi)

This is one of the most star-studded trade trees on the list. If you’re a big Rob Brantly fan with some time to kill, you can connect him to the ’92 draft, too.

8. Nationals/Expos: 11/13/89

(Alex Pacheco → Chris Widger → Terrmel Sledge → Alfonso Soriano → Jordan Zimmermann)

The Expos live on not only in Grantland colleague Jonah Keri’s heart, but also in the origin story of Zimmermann’s roster spot.

7. Twins: 6/5/89

(Chuck Knoblauch → Brian Buchanan → Jason Bartlett → Delmon Young → Lester Oliveros and Knoblauch → Cristian Guzman → Brian Duensing)

You might have expected A.J. Pierzynski → Francisco Liriano → Eduardo Escobar, but Knoblauch beats both that and the two-step Eddie Guardado → Glen Perkins tag team.

6. Dodgers: 6/1/88

(Mike Piazza → Gary Sheffield → Andrew Brown → Milton Bradley → Andre Ethier)

Another star-studded trade sequence, and the second lengthy one of which Piazza is a part.

5. Astros: 6/2/87

(Darryl Kile → Brad Lidge → Michael Bourn → Brett Oberholtzer)

The Astros offloaded all of their veterans in recent years, some of whom brought back young players who’ve earned spots on the 40-man. As a result, there are many young Stros with ties to Houston luminaries: Robbie Grossman comes from Wandy Rodriguez (drafted 1999); Chris Carter from Lance Berkman (1997); and Jonathan Villar and Hank Conger from Roy Oswalt (1996). Only Oberholtzer’s spot dates back to the ’80s, though. There’s also a weird one: The Astros drafted Michael Foltynewicz in 2010 with a compensation pick from the Tigers for free agent Jose Valverde, whom the Diamondbacks had traded to Houston for (among others) Chad Qualls. Foltynewicz and Qualls are now teammates, which is like Marty being Lorraine’s date to the dance.

4. Red Sox: 6/16/86

(Ken Ryan → Heathcliff Slocumb → Derek Lowe → Craig Hansen → Jason Bay → Brandon Workman/Anthony Ranaudo)

If you’d prefer a Pedro-flavored sequence, you can trace Clay Buchholz (2005 supplemental pick after Pedro’s departure) back to 1989 draftee Randy Brown. The longest trades-only line is of more recent vintage: Brock Holt and Allen Webster have their roots in the 2000 Hanley Ramirez signing.

3. Padres: 6/3/85

(Greg Harris → Andy Ashby → Adam Eaton → Adrian Gonzalez → Anthony Rizzo → Andrew Cashner)

Getting Gonzalez, Chris Young, and Terrmel Sledge from the Rangers for Eaton, Akinori Otsuka, and Billy Killian was one of Kevin Towers’s smartest moves (and, by his own admission, one of Jon Daniels’s worst). Thanks to Cashner, that swap is still paying dividends four years after San Diego dealt Gonzalez to Boston — and almost three decades after the Padres drafted Harris, setting the scene for this five-trade sequence.

2. Indians: 6/7/77

(Jerry Dybzinski → Pat Tabler → Bud Black → Alex Sanchez → Willie Blair → Kenny Lofton → David Justice → Jake Westbrook → Corey Kluber)

As seen on Twitter — but even longer. Cleveland’s trade tree actually goes back to 1977, when the Indians drafted Jerry Dybzinski — then made four trades from that starting point before they got to the Lofton deal.

1. Mets: 6/6/67

(Jon Matlack → Tom Grieve→ Pete Falcone→ Stan Jefferson→ Kevin McReynolds→ Bret Saberhagen→ Arnold Gooch→ Roger Cedeno → Mike Hampton → David Wright)

Transaction trees for each team are easily accessible via the widget below, which also includes links to the full-size images:

Your browser does not support iframes

Interactive table by Nick Wheatley-Schaller of Baseball Prospectus

An earlier version of this file listed the Indians tree as beginning with Taubensee, and the Mets tree as beginning with Leach. We learned after publication, however, that the Kluber tree actually begins with Dybzinski, and the Mets tree begins with Matlack (as is now noted above). Updates have been made to this article to reflect the corrections. 

WORTH SEEING: Grandma’s smoking weed for the first time. They are so cute. 

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Everyone should know how to do this.

Cruising Electric (1980) is both 2014's best gay-themed comedy, and a pitch-perfect homage to 1980s movie toy merchandising. I was honored to have this hilarious short by Brumby Boylston play before my new film in New York last summer. Read the rest

Giants ace Madison Bumgarner "chugged" four beers at once when his team won the wild card play-in game. When he "chugged" five beers after winning the NLDS, everyone wondered if he'd be able to work his way up to six beers in the event of an NLCS win. So, did he go for the full sixer last night? You're goddamn right he did.

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When a "seasonal" drink has no "seasonal" ingredients, including pumpkin, what can it be, but simulacrum? Read the rest

What happens when six second graders from Brooklyn sit down to dinner — a $220 seven course tasting menu dinner, to be exact — at one of New York City's fanciest French restaurants?

If you haven't watched this video yet you're in for a treat!

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Get excited. Get excited right now.

               10th and maybe last in a series on D&Dable art history.

Hans Bellmer, hand-tinted-photo 1934

Theo Van Doesburg, Dungeon Map With Three Pit Traps Where Red Is Monster Lairs & Gold Is The Treasure and Blue Rooms Are Secret c1931

Kees Van Dongen, Ever Since Dolly Died This Painting Has Cause Viewers To Save Or Refuse To Be More Than 15' From It Forever, 1911

From an official list of over sixteen motherfucking thousand works of art declared "degenerate" by the Reich. Pretty much everyone who made it into the art history books from this era is on the list, although only a fraction appeared in the official Degenerate Art show. Bad things happened to the artists who stayed in Germany. Their works were variously sold, confiscated and destroyed, depending on what the Reich was up to at the time.

“Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937,” at the Neue Galerie, opens with a quietly devastating compare-and-contrast. The walls of the narrow hallway leading onto the first gallery are covered with facing photomurals.
The image in one dates from 1938. It shows the exterior of the of the Schulausstellungsgebaude in Hamburg where the traveling antimodernist exhibition called “Entartete Kunst” — “Degenerate Art” — has opened. The line of visitors waiting to get in stretches down the street.  

Egon Schiele, My Sister Is Frozen In This Position Due To The Leucochloridium paradoxum Which, As You Can See, Is Beginning To Invade Her Abdomen, 1909

"The photo on the opposite wall is from 1944. It shows Carpatho-Ukrainian Jews newly arrived at the railroad station at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They are densely crowded together along the length of a platform that runs far into the distance and out of sight. The message is clear: The event in the first picture led or contributed to that in the second. The show itself is one of the few in an American museum in the past two decades to address, on a large scale, the Nazis’ selective demonizing of art, how that helped foment an atmosphere of permissible hatred and forged a link between aesthetics and human disaster."              

Klimt, A Painting I Did On The Theme of 'Philosophy' that the University of Vienna Rejected And Censored Basically On The Grounds That It Was A Way Too Prescient Picture of Where Austrian Philosophy Was Headed, 1899.

But mentioning all that genocide is gilding the lily. We can totally follow nerd etiquette and discredit Max Nordau while avoiding Godwinning altogether--like Tipper Gore, a mere list of Nordau's more prominent targets is enough to indict him as having been completely wrong: Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy, all the pre-Raphaelites--Hunt, Millais (father of all modern mainstream high-fantasy illustration), Verlaine and all the Symbolists, all the Impressionists--Monet, Manet, Seurat, everybody else your mom has hanging on the wall--Baudelaire, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert.

Basically Nordau attacked nearly everyone in his era who we now, in 2014, might look back on and accuse of having made some positive and radical contribution to the culture of the 20th century. Nordau even, in 1895, managed to find a feminist to attack--in the form of Henrik Ibsen. In short; if it was good, Max was agin' it.

Odilon Redon--a symbolist. Max was agin' it.

Odilon Redon, 1882

So this is the worst critic ever. Pretty close to objectively. When your criticism's main impact is that it not only leads to the wholesale destruction of the kinds of works of art that formed the entire wellspring of the next hundred years of cultural production and the exile, imprisonment and sometimes even murder of the artists who made it but, in addition to all that, actually and measurably subverted all the broader societal goals you yourself claimed to seek in every country where your ideas were implemented for decades to come simply by taking your literal meaning, you know you did criticism completely wrong.

Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau which translates as "Attempt to Reproduce, In My Home, The Malevolent and Inhuman Geometries Vistas I Witnessed That Spring Evening", 1933. He fled Nazi Germany 4 years later

So How Did He Do It So Wrong? 
What Hitler recognized in Nordau was not a similarity of world-view--Nordau would not have signed himself and his family up for state-assisted suicide in ovens. What linked them was a style of thought--or, rather, of nonthought. It's essentially a contempt for thought, even when engaging areas of human experience where there's nothing to do but think. Stalin was to adopt precisely the same attitude toward modernism in 1934.

Egon Schiele, My Sister's Eyes Were Removed Before They Could Be Infected And Then Implanted In The Newborn's Head, 1910

During the 583 pages of his magnum opus Degeneration, Nordau outlines the following critical principles:

A. Stuff I don't like is probably made by people who have something wrong with them.
B. Stuff I don't like probably mostly appeals to people who have something wrong with them.
C. There are no possible good reasons to like or make what I don't like.
D. The stakes are incredibly high.
E. I refuse to check any of this.

As Cam Banks here demonstrates: these principles still operate today.

Tamara Lempicka, It's Still Prohibition And I'm Already Less Uptight About Nipples Than RPGnet, 1930

The method is even simpler than the philosophy:

A. Identify a societal ill
B. Claim a work is contributing to it
C. Dare the audience not to see the connection, scaring them into thinking they lose the intellectual high ground if they don't see it and the moral high ground if they don't believe it
D. Ignore the counterargument and call anyone making it names

Alberto Giacometti, 3d Sketch For Dungeon With Pterodactyl, 1932

This style of thought is, like all conservatism, an appeal to risk-aversion. It appeals to the part of the brain that goes: I'm not 100%--but can we afford not to believe him? The part that will trade certain pleasure for possible safety. The part that would never dream of trading a bird in the hand for nine in the bush.

Such a conservative approach is somewhat understandable when dealing with, say, explosives disarmament and disposal. It's considerably less understandable when dealing with something that just sits on a wall in a white room in front of drunk curators and bored schoolchildren, so it's imperative that anyone promulgating it constantly claim the risk art poses is tremendous and forms part of the central struggle of the age. So much so that it outweighs any benefit of looking at the work or even listening to the argument in favor of it.

Maybe this sounds crazy, Nordau suggests, but can you ever forgive yourself if I'm right?

Let's take a closer look at Degeneration and its maneuvers. Knowing now, with hindsight, that all of these arguments were completely--near genocidally--wrong:

Joaquin Torres Garcia, I Have Worked Clues To The Details Of My Murder At The Hands Of The Buenos Aires Dagon Cult Into This Image, 1944

1. It's Not Like Economics Or Class Or Technology Or History Are  Engines Of Society Or Anything, It's All On Whatever Poem I'm Worried About Today

"Books and works of art exercise a powerful suggestion on the masses. It is from these productions that an age derives its ideals of morality and beauty. If they are absurd and anti-social, they exert a disturbing and corrupting influence on the views of a whole generation. Hence the latter, especially the impressionable youth, easily excited to enthusiasm for all that is strange and seemingly new, must be warned and enlightened as to the real nature of the creations so blindly admired…"

Harry Clarke, Vornheim Countess Amusing Herself With Diminutized Courtiers, some time in the '20s

2. I Am A Fucking Brave As Fuck Hero To Attack Artists Because Artists' Ability To Punish Me Is Far Greater Than, Y'know, Powerful and Entrenched Institutions That Have Actually And Overtly Controlled Peoples' Lives for Millennia 

Performers in Oskar Schlemmer's "Triadic Ballet" ('20s) whose exotic costumes and ritualized motions allowed performers to communicate with the Eilraphact Emperors of Psyaellicharr IV

Yves Tanguy, Dynaiadic Fortress On The Elemental Plane of Plasma, Elevation, Exterior View, To-Be-Keyed, '30s

Yves Tanguy, Archons of the Beta-Realm Perform Aetheric Surgery In Preparation for the Coming of the Nythovorg, 30s

The offending Kate Greenaway.

A feverish chair of the infernal  François-Rupert Carabin, probably made by freezing real cats alive to a plinth like in that one Vincent Price movie. I mean, I can't prove it but….probably.

Gustav Klimt's Judith II which was frequently mislabelled "Salome". Why? Because although both the tale of Judith decapitating Holofernes and the story of Salome decapitating John theBapist are eminently D&Dable, Judith is a heroine and Salome is a villain. In typical sexist pigfucker fashion, critics had a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that somebody whose nipple you could see could be on the good guy team.

Has Bellmer, Languish Wraith Attempting To Reconstruct Itself From Available Materials In An Attic, Mid-Stage. Photo, 1934

Man Ray, Golem Familiars, 1947

Franz Von Bayros

More Von Bayros

Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902. Klimt being remembered as "the guy who painted The Kiss" is like Guns N Roses being remembered as "that band that did November Rain".

Hans Bellmer, That Was So Dumb I'm Paralyzed Between Facepalming And Making the 'Loser' Sign. Photo. 1934

Paul Klee, Giant So Giant A Peryton Lives In Its Head, 1905

Harry Clarke, from the Faust Illustrations I believe

Claude Cahun, Self-Portraits Trapped In the Phylactery of the Cephaloraptor, 20s or 30s

Aubrey Beardsley

Xanti Schawinsky, What Is This I Don't Even,1924

Paul Klee, These Rolls On The Mutation Tables Have Left Me Embittered But I Have The Wand of Excision Strapped To My Arm,  1905

More Oskar Schlemmer dancers

Egon Schiele, Self Portrait While Scribbling Formula Allowing Adele's Mirror-Twin To Attain Self-Awareness, 1910

Tina Modotti, Hands of a Puppeteer. Photo.1929

Joseph Cornell, Any Player Worth Their Salt Will Look At This Box, Realize the Bottles Are Too Small To Be Taking Up A Box That Tall And Realize There's A False Bottom, 1940

Joseph Cornell, Each Blue Bead Is Filled With Liquid Time, But One Of The Three Glasses Is Now In The Possession Of Nyarlathotep, 1939 I think

Joseph Cornell, The Effect Of The Various Potions Is Coded By Color But Don't Tell The Players That, 1943

Alphonse Mucha, La Trappistine 1897

John Singer Sargent, Print Out This Image Of The Suspects And Ask The Players Which One They Talk To First, If Anyone Notices The Swastika on The Carpet, Have Them Roll A San Check, 1882

Oskar Schlemmer's duplicates, wielding rapiers and a clonesphere

Dorothea Tanning The Touch of the Gargantuan Growth Caused Targets To De-Age But Audsley Retained Her Pact Magic, 1943

Egon Schiele, Running 5th Edition For The First Time c.1918

Rodchenko, Hanging Construction, 1920

John Hearfield antifascist photomontage "Blood And Fire", 1934. He'd jumped out his window to escape the SS the year before.

Sidney Sime. Krampus.

Another Oskar Schlemmer guy.

You know that part at the end of the last episode of the lovely nature documentary where they dutifully but depresssingly tell you that all the animals you've seen that evening--from the lovely panther to the cheetah that ate it, to the llama whose corpse it got fucked on--will all be gone one day because of massive environmental degradation that only you can prevent? Well we're at that part of the show.

Man Ray, Spiral Staircase Down To The Pool of Molten Moon On Level 9, 192something

The frequent cry that "we can do better" sounds so upbeat--but it can only do so by substituting, in that "better", the speaker's moral view for the artist's. "We can do better" doesn't mean "we can do better at the job of making fascinating things" it means "We can be more like me". When applied to the casting of a network TV sitcom, it's absolutely correct--We can do better, because a national TV network is a greed-motivated conglomerate that has no moral view. When applied to the creative output of an individual artist, it's simply saying their moral view is invalid. In that case "We can do better" means "You should be less you"--you should be more didactic, more eager to pitch your art to only the most credulous kind of audience, more eager to narrow its function to only education or escapism (never, say, thought experim...

According to science, the Cardinals are the most hateable team in in the MLB playoffs.

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pineplapple:

when your cool friend takes you with them to a party

From the magesterial Screenshots of Despair tumblr (featuring dialog boxes to make you quail with terror and despair of your sanity), comes a slide-deck of the best of the worst to include in your own presentations. Read the rest