Snob

 
A few months ago Tara did a post on 1A4STUDIO’s brilliant 60-second version of Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—in doing so she remarked that “One of the YouTube commenters is asking for a minute-long version of The Big Lebowski. That would be good, too.”

I’m happy to report that 1A4STUDIO has followed through on Tara’s request—and it’s far better than the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas one, in my opinion. The entry of Maude Lebowski is pretty fucking fantastic, as is the Valkyrie bowling dream sequence and the scene where the nihilists dump a ferret into The Dude’s bathtub.

So, so, so good.
 

 
Uschi Obermaier, like fellow model and rock star girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, is famous for the men in her life. But she is also remembered for her radical political associations, particularly the left-wing student movement in West Berlin in the late ‘60s, the milieu that produced the Baader-Meinhof gang/Red Army Faction, the shooting of young college student Benno Ohnesorg by police during a demonstration, and attempted assassination of leftist student leader Rudi Dutschke.

Uschi was briefly a member of Amon Düül (she played maracas on their albums Collapsing and Disaster) and lived with them in their Munich commune before moving to Kommune 1 in West Berlin with her new boyfriend, shaggy leftist political activist and communard Rainer Langhans in September 1968. Ironically she had no real interest in politics at the time, despite becoming the poster girl for the Left, being seen at numerous political rallies and demonstrations, and only moved to Kommune 1, West Germany’s first political commune, with hardcore Marxist values, drugs, and free love, just to be with Langhans. The couple met at the International Song Days music festival in Essen.

The Independent described daily life at Kommune 1:

Free sex, agit-prop political stunts, drugs and endless political discussion dominated life in Commune 1, where the inmates slept on mattresses on the floor. To rid the commune of bourgeois tendencies, all available cash was shared, the doors were torn off the lavatories and phone calls were piped through a loud speaker. Even inmates’ letters home to their parents were read out in full to the assembled communards.

Uschi was outspoken about sex and drugs, and cavalier about posing node, appearing on the covers of Stern and Playboy, and also posing at age 60, wearing only a pirate hat, in 2007. She recalled her youth in an interview with Bijan Tehrani in 2008:

I just wanted to be free. I didn’t think I wanted to be a rebel; I just wanted to be free and do the things I wanted to do, without anyone hindering me. I wanted to live the experiences in my own skin, it wasn’t enough for me to be told what it was, I had to experience it down to my own bones, to make a judgment for what I liked and didn’t like.

Among her lovers were Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards (who wrote about their relationship affectionately in his 2010 autobiography, Life and is still on friendly terms with her), and Mick Jagger. She met Dieter Bockhorn, a Hamburg club owner and former pimp, in 1973. She and Bockhorn were together for ten years, eventually marrying in India and travelling all over the world in a customized bus. After Bockhorn’s sudden death Uschi moved to the U.S. A film based on her autobiography, Eight Miles High, was released in 2007.

Uschi now lives quietly in Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles, where she works as a jewelry designer.

Uschi in the film Red Sun (Rote Sonne), 1969, below:

Image via Flickr

There’s a goofy neurological trick you can play on your brain that makes you feel like you have a super long nose. It’s called the Pinocchio Illusion and all you need to make it happen is a vibrator and a friend.

Here’s how it works. Person A closes her eyes and places the tip of her finger on her nose. Person B applies a buzzing vibrator to the tendon that connects the bicep to the inner side of the elbow of the arm that’s touching the nose. The vibration on the tendon stimulates the muscle fibers in such a way that tricks Person A’s brain into thinking that her arm is extending, but since Person A’s index finger tells her brain that it’s still connected to the tip of her nose, the brain does a quick and dirty calculation (in the absence of visual data) and concludes that her nose must be growing super long. It’s fucking crazy. Try it.

According to Princeton University neuroscientist Michael Graziano, this phenomenon is indicative of the key aspect of the human mind. Our brains create models of the world around us, including our bodies, in order to be attentive to the various signals we get from our senses. So in the Pinocchio Illusion, your brain creates a model of what your body looks like and the model falls apart due to the conflicting stimuli. Our brains might be exceptionally good at making models, but they’re never perfect replicas of what’s happening in the world, just fast and loose sketches to make sense of things.

There’s a funny consequence to our brains’ proficiency in model-making, Professor Michael Graziano argues in his book Consciousness and the Social Brain, which came out this month. That consequence is what we call consciousness, the ineffable ungraspable “I,” the magic sauce of Being that defines our essential humanness. From Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum,” to Kant’s theory of a priori forms, to Taoist, nondualist Vedantic whatever, the origin of consciousness has been, you know, a real head-scratcher. And Professor Graziano’s theory proposes an exceptionally clear explanation of what’s going on in our domes’ pieces every day of our short little lives.  

So to the question: Are we ordained by our divine creator or are we just delusional lumps of carbon and guts? Professor Graziano concludes something closer to latter. But it’s not delusion that makes our brains aware. It’s a highly functional adaptive strategy. What we think of as sentience can be explained by what he calls the Attention Schema Theory, and I talked to him on the phone this week to understand what his theory of a neurological basis for our consciousness means today and what it could mean in the future.

VICE: Can you describe what exactly your investigation into consciousness is?
Professor Michael Graziano: Here’s a quick background. I can be conscious that I am me and I am human. Whatever that consciousness is, is an experience. What I am asking is what set of information is that consciousness. What does it mean to have an actual subjective experience of something?

What’s unique about your method of inquiry? This question sounds like something a lot of people have tried to figure out.
To start off, many scientists are asking the wrong question. They’re asking, “What does it mean to have the magical inner feeling?” You start with the assumption that there’s magic and then you start experimenting. The better question is how and for what adaptive advantage do brains attribute that property to themselves? And right away that puts it into the domain of information processing, something that can, in principle, be understood.

How is it that the cognitive machinery in our brains accesses internal data and arrives at a conclusion and can sometimes report, “I have experienced, I am aware of something.” Not just “that is blue,” but “I am aware that that is blue.”

OK, so how do brains do that?
Brains construct models, informational models of all kinds of things, in fact it’s one of the things brains do best, make models of the external world and models of things going on inside your body.

The theory at heart, the reason why brains attribute the property of awareness to itself, is because the brain is essentially constructing a model to monitor the fact that it is paying attention to that object. So attention is a physically real data-handling method and awareness is the brain’s cartoon sketch that’s used to keep track of what it’s doing. That it can use to keep track of what it’s doing.

Wait, so that’s it, your brain creates a model, and therefore you are an aware, sentient, nonrobot?
So let’s think about what the physical project of attention is: there’s an agent, a brain, a being that’s focusing its processing power on a particular set of signals that neuroscientists call attention; the signals might pertain to the sandwich you’re holding. There’s an agent and there’s a sandwich, and there’s a relationship between the two: that is, the agent is focusing its resources on the sandwich. That’s attention.

So when you build a model of that it will have a large amount of information about the agent—who you are, where you are, your memories, your information about yourselves—that model should contain information about the sandwich, and it should contain information about the relationship between the two. And, crucially, the model will have information about what it means for an agent to focus attention on a thing. What I’m saying is that there is information in the brain, a large dossier with lots of descriptive information that there’s a you, and there’s a sandwich and a specific relationship: you are aware of the sandwich.

And there’s some recursion involved. In some sense, awareness of self and awareness of some object are kind of the same thing. The underlying formula is very similar. 

One thing that I’m surprised by is how similar and useful language is in conceiving these models and structures. Specifically the sentence “I see blue.” Three aspects of this cognitive function are the three essential aspects of the sentence: subject, verb, object. Is that an accident or something hardwired into our brains?
I think there is a deep connection between language and all these other issues. One aspect of this theory is that there’s a constant evolutionary change and what may have started out as a simple model to help control attention then evolved into a way of of keeping track of other people’s state of attention and then evolved into a key part of our social machinery. An outgrowth of our social capability is language capability, and in fact, the main language area of the brain—it’s called the Wernicke's area—is basically an evolutionary outgrowth of the same regions involved in social thinking that we think might be involved in attributing awareness in ourselves and others. So the actual brain mech[anics] of language have a very deep connection to all these issues of consiouness and awareness.

OK, well can we make robots self-aware? Can we turn Pinocchio into a real boy?
A robot can do a bunch of things, but it does not have the information to report: “I have experience, I have an inner experience.” It does not have that algorithm. But I think that’s programmable, and it think it’s coming.

Here’s another thing I suspect that will happen in 100 years: imagine a device that can scan your brain in enough molecular detail to simulate or recreate that data in artificial hardware. There is a you—your mind and memories that are now copied almost like a file on a computer system. Now you can live in a simulated world of your choose. The reason why I think this is likely [to] will happen is that people are obsessed with living as long as possible. this is essentially the invention of [an] electronic afterlife. Another reason I think this will happen is because if there’s one thing people spend the most money on, it's entertainment, and this is like putting yourself in a virtual playground. I think this is an inevitable consequence of understanding awareness. So forget about robots that are aware; imagine putting yourself into a simulated world and have it feel real. 

More Brain Stuff:

War in Our Heads: A Chat with Jonathan Moreno

The Science Behind Tripping Balls

Reading Brain Waves

W. Kamau Bell Is Trying To Become A Thing
A few years ago, sick of performing for San Francisco audiences who didn't want to hear about race or politics, he was ready to quit comedy completely. Now he's the host of TV's most diverse, boundary-pushing nightly talk show, which just happens to be the flagship of a new network. No pressure or anything.

Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell on fxx.com and Video on Demand
Previously on MetaFilter: Sarah Silverman talks about the roasting she got at the James Franco roast

La semana cultural del barrio organiza una visita arqueológica a la fortaleza

 

Una de tantas movilizaciones populares en demanda de carga de trabajo

Muchas veces lo hemos recordado. Ferrol nace como ciudad por y para el Estado y su economía ha de sustentarse desde entonces en la construcción de barcos. Funcionará el binomio Bazán-Marina que marcará el perfil de los ferrolanos. Torrente Ballester escribió que las familias ferrolanas soñaban con que sus hijos alcanzaran el puesto de director de la Constructora o  de almirante Capitán General. La realidad es que esos ferrolanos habrán de acostumbrarse a vivir en la alternancia del esplendor y la depresión económica, en relación directa con la carga de trabajo que le encomiende la Armada. Y esto sucede desde que a mediados del siglo XVIII se construyeran los astilleros de Esteiro, debutando con ¡la fabricación de 12 navíos!, operación que recibió el nombre de Apostolado. Más adelante, en 1795, nos encontramos con que se produce la primera y más larga crisis, debida al mal estado de la Hacienda española. Pasaría medio siglo para que en 1847, con el marqués de Molins de ministro de Marina, se reactivase la construcción naval. De nuevo, con el desastre colonial de 1898 vuelve el colapso hasta que en los inicios del siglo XX, concretamente en 1909 se decreta la Ley de creación de la Escuadra, bajo el Gobierno de Maura, período productivo que se mantiene hasta la primera Guerra Mundial (1914) en que vuelve a vaciarse la cartera de pedidos. En la dictadura de Primo de Rivera (1923) los astilleros desarrollan importante actividad, vinculada a los programas navales, mientras que en la República se produce otra paralización. Tras la Guerra Civil se crea la Empresa Nacional Bazán, en 1947, y en 1941 se funda Astano y ambas factorías constituyen el soporte económico de Ferrolterra hasta los años setenta en que se registran los primeros avisos de la crisis que acaban con el decreto de la Reconversión en los años ochenta y la caída en picado del empleo, que, salvo treguas esporádicas, no ha parado hasta nuestros días. Los dichosos dientes de sierra, que alcanzan altura cuando se registran encargos en los astilleros y retornan al valle cuando fallan los pedidos. Históricamente, coincidiendo con los períodos de vacas flacas, operó la presión social. Ahí estamos actualmente. Los trabajadores de Navantia, tras el descanso estival, vuelven a las movilizaciones. Vetados para la construcción de buques de la marina civil en la antigua Astano y sin encargos en materia de construcciones militares en la antigua Bazán, hoy ambas factorías bajo el paraguas de Navantia. Panorama desolador. Más que nunca. 

The super special September issue of VICE was exclusively culled from the archives of Bob Guccione Sr.—the legendary magazine publisher who built a media empire that started with Penthouse. This portion of the issue features some accounts of a very naughty Chuck Berry.

 

 

For even more unpublished archival material, please visit The Guccione Collection website, which is devoted to illuminating all the varied corners of Bob's legacy and creating new content in the spirit of the Guccione empire.

Ha empezado la Quinta Temporada de Reflexiones de Repronto
y ya tienen disponible la primera entrega:

Capítulo 49: “Tecnócratas”

 
While I agree mostly with this list, I have to politely interject and say the Stars Wars’ “Imperial March” is a totally sexy time song (apparently!)

Just watch the hypnotic video, below.

 
Via Nerdcore

In south London, teenagers Adam Welland and Cameron Ford treated themselves to a fancy night out at Mickey D’s.

They ordered the typical fast food fare on this Sunday evening, although a third friend of theirs, William Peachey, tagged along to document the romantic getaway. But what’s so Romeo about dining in at one of the universe’s most vile fast food establishments? Obviously, it’s all about the atmo.

Welland, Ford and Peachey brought along with them tablecloth, plates, cutlery, wine glasses, candles and created a makeshift centerpiece out of straws to enhance their McDonald’s experience. (I especially like the strawberry shake in the white wine glass.) See their Twitter pics below.

“Who would have thought classing up McDonald’s would have gone so well?” tweeted Ford.

According to Welland and Ford’s Twitter feeds, the restaurant threatened to ban the dining duo if they didn’t leave immediately. Ford and Welland were confounded as to why their behavior would prompt a booting. “It was just the standard knives and forks,” Welland sardonically pleaded on Twitter. “Clearly we were planning to take over the whole of McDonald’s, so they had to stop that.”

Restaurant management eventually gave in after other customers and employees decided the pair were not a bother. Multiple posts from their Twitter feeds (links below) have been retweeted thousands of times.

h/t Mirror/photos: @AdamWelland and @CameronDFord

Follow @BrianAbrams

On Wednesday, in response to recent criticisms about its unclear stance on partisan political posts, BuzzFeed published community guidelines in regards to what user-submitted content is allowed on their site. And they’re really, really dumb.

Their hand was essentially forced. In the past few months, political interest groups have been publishing articles in the Community pages of the site (which allows any users to post their own articles). Sometimes, the articles went viral and, in turn, created tons of negative attention for the BuzzFeed brand.

Full disclosure — I had my own run-in with the company when I ran a satirical post mocking their trivial and insensitive articles via their Community section, titled “The Top 10 Dumbest BuzzFeed Lists You’re Embarrassed To Say You Clicked.” My post was quickly banned for being “mean spirited,” so I reposted it on my own blog. It went viral, and then it was reinstated on BuzzFeed due to the overwhelmingly negative press. They also changed their guidelines to allow “haters” to make fun of BuzzFeed. I was all like,

So why exactly are their new user guidelines dumb? Just read them (all sic):

“Meh and snark were a big part of the early days of digital media, but they’re the default poses of lazy people who want to feel superior yet don’t have anything to offer. It’s not a shareable posture because most people don’t want to share boredom or contempt; it was never really fun in the first place; and it’s the lowest, least creative way of making a point that anyone ever came up with. Hate is the laziest, easiest pose for anyone to assume.

No Haters doesn’t mean ‘no critics’ – there’s nothing wrong with being usefully critical of something. We need to be critical when it’s the right thing to do, when it’s interesting, when it adds to the story, and when we have something worthwhile to say. But we can do that with grace and understanding, and we can certainly do it without snark and vitriol.”

It seems like they really hate haters! How lazy and easy.

They claim that “hate” is lazy and boring, but so is something that’s “shareable.” Something that’s shareable is usually, by design, inoffensive and generalist and painfully banal. Nuanced, possibly polarizing content isn’t shareable, apparently, which is a great MO for a burgeoning media company.

It also seems like their “no haters” policy is a clever, PR-ish way to surreptitiously justify the stifling of any content that might pollute the hermetically sealed environment they’ve designed for generous corporate advertisers, and harm their CPM rate.

But their guidelines get worse:

“Remember: Corgis aren’t haters.

Think about those majestic little dogs for a second: Is there anything they don’t love? Those cute little bastards with their tiny legs; they just smile and run and are generally awesome. Corgis are our spirit animal. They’ll protect us from the haters. Remember them.”

And at the very end:

“If in doubt, ask yourself what a Corgi would do. A Corgi would probably be all, ‘Hey, let’s make something fun and creative and interesting and informative and not be a jerk about it.’”

I’m pretty sure a corgi would actually be all like, “Woof,” and then it might vomit on its MacBook, and then probably eat its own vomit, because it’s just a dog. Maybe that’s the kind of community content they’re looking for. This is what a media company run by adults decided was a good way to delineate their already dubious ethical/moral standards in the face of very warranted criticism.

So what would a corgi do? I guess it’d post articles that trivialize human suffering, like Obama’s Syria speech explained by “The Hills” gifs, or their classic article explaining the Egypt crisis with “Jurassic Park” gifs. Because that’s fun!

On the upside, they’ve figured out how to get people to create for them enough free daily content to generate top level SEO, while simultaneously making a few quick pennies from the users who share the content they’ve created with all their friends, in what’s basically a Huff Po-style, borderline Ponzi scheme. Not to be a jerk about it or anything.

Follow @joeveix

The Vatican's new secretary of state has said that priestly celibacy is not church dogma and therefore open to discussion, marking a significant change in approach towards one of the thorniest issues facing the Roman Catholic Church.

By John Cheese  Published: September 12th, 2013  Everyone knows there's a clear double standard between the rich and the poor in pretty much every facet of life. From opportunity to incarceration, it's not even debatable. It's so bad that we don't even try to hide it anymore -- we just kind of acce

El Arzobispado autorizó la venta por cerca de 1,2 millones de euros

• De regalar vino del Ribeiro a ser un restaurante de fama internacional

 
Brought to you by artist Christopher Keelty.

 
I have no clue who this acapella gospel group is or where this video footage comes from, but I’d like more. This snip of a song simply isn’t enough to digest Larry’s (that’s what I’m callin’ him, because he just looks like a Larry to me) low C-note capabilities.

It’s like he’s singing in slow motion!

 
Via Christian Nightmares

by Elise Czajkowski

Sarah Silverman was W. Kamau Bell's guest on Totally Biased last night, and the conversation quickly turned to jokes made about her at the recent James Franco roast. Many of the jokes, and Totally Biased's response to the roast, focused on her age (she's an insanely young-looking 42), and she confided that she spent two days in bed "trying to remember [her] self-esteem" after the event:

Me being old, first of all, at the roast? — completely took me by surprise … Because it's personal, that is just so woman-based. I wasn't even the oldest one on that dais. I'm the same age as fresh-faced new star W. Kamau Bell! I feel like it's a part of, as soon as a woman gets to an age where she has opinions and she's vital and she's strong, she's systematically shamed into hiding under a rock. And this is by progressive pop-culture people! You know what I mean? It's really odd! I feel bad that it cut me. Because I should be like this about it (brushing her hand off her shoulder). I feel like your joke is that I'm still alive. My crime is not dying.

And I feel like, I just did this special and it made me think of something I said, which was — to so many women, especially when I watch Real Housewives — (muffled, through gritted teeth) which I watch, I wish I didn't, but I do — I just want to say, "Your heartbreaking attempts to look younger is the reason your daughter doesn't dream about her future!"

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Fans of the late Richard Scarry may be happy to know that a new book featuring Scarry's favorite character Lowly Worm is due on the shelves this autumn. From the Guardian article: "The book will feature one of Scarry's best-loved and most ubiquitous [and mysterious] characters, the alpine-hatted, singly-shod Lowly Worm, who drives an applecar and was probably the first worm in space."

Lowly on Tumblr, Pinterest, and yeah, he's on Twitter.

The Bluffer's guide to Irish folk: 20 songs from the last 50-odd years of Irish traditional music.

Animales fantásticos y dónde encontrarlos (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), así se llamará la primera de una nueva serie de películas de Warner Bros dentro del universo de Harry Potter. Lo ha confirmado su propia autora, la escritora J.K. Rowling, quien ha anunciado a través de su página de Facebook que está trabajando en el guión de este spinoff inspirado por uno de los libros de texto de Hogwarts y su autor ficticio, Newt Scamander.

Todo comenzó cuando Warner Bros. me sugirió la posibilidad de convertir ‘Animales fantásticos y dónde encontrarlos’ en una película. Pensé que sería divertido, pero la idea de ver a Newt Scamander, el supuesto de autor de ‘Animales fantásticos’ realizado por otro escritor era dificil. Tras haber vivido durante tanto tiempo en mi universo ficticio me ha hecho ser muy protectora con él y ya sabía un montón sobre Newt. Como sabrán los fans más hard-core de Harry Potter, me gusta tanto que incluso casé a su nieto, Rolf, con uno de mis personajes preferidos de la saga, Luna Lovegood.

Mientras consideraba la propuesta de Warner, una idea tomó forma de un modo definitivo en mi cabeza, así que terminé proponiéndoles mi propia idea para una película a Warner Bros.

Aunque se situará dentro de la comunidad mundial de magos y brujas en la que he sido tan feliz durante diecisiete años, ‘Animales fantásticos y dónde encontrarlos’ no es ni una precuela ni una secuela de la serie de Harry Potter, sino una extensión de su mundo mágico. Las leyes y costumbres de la sociedad mágica oculta resultarán familiares a cualquiera que haya leído los libros de Harry Potter o visto sus películas, pero la historia de Newt comenzará en Nueva York setenta años antes de que Harry se ponga en marcha.

En particular quiero dar las gracias a Kevin Tsujihara de Warner Bros por su apoyo en este proyecto, el cual no habría sido posible sin él. Siempre he dicho que sólo volvería a visitar el mundo mágico si tuviera una idea con la que estuviese verdaderamente emocionada y es esta.

El libro de Animales fantásticos y dónde encontrarlos fue publicado en España en 2001 por la editorial Salamandra junto a Quidditch a través de los tiempos, el otro libro realizado por Rowling como complemento a la historia original del joven mago de la cicatriz con forma de rayo. A estos dos volúmenes le seguiría en 2008 Los cuentos de Beedle el bardo, un obra dentro de la obra que la autora inglesa aceptó publicar con la intención de recaudar fondos para la ONG que dirige.

Animales fantásticos incluye un prólogo escrito por Albus Dumbledore y contiene toda clase de anotaciones de Harry, Ron y Hermione a lo largo de sus páginas con comentarios sobre su contenido, bromas e incluso alguna supuesta partida entre clases al tres en raya. En cuanto a la película, o mejor dicho, películas, en plural, que cuente con la firma de Rowling es en realidad todo lo que necesito saber. Eso, y la fecha del estreno. No importa dónde, no importa cuánto cueste la entrada. Allí estaré.

Jonathan Franzen: what's wrong with the modern world. [The Guardian]

Confused about who wrote the Bible we have, and why? Jim MacDonald has the answers. How was the Canon of the Christian Bible selected? There really isn't a better, or funnier, short account than this. After all, if fandom is a religion, then religions must work like fandom, right? And the epistolatory disputes of late antiquity were just Usenet to the Greeks. So if you want to know how the Doctrine of the Trinity became important, this will explain it:

"Athanasius was best known for his blog, Athanasius Contra Mundum. (The top of every page was marked with a flashing icon labeled "Breaking!" while the bottom of each page said, "Must credit Athanasius)."

Also, why do Muslims believe in the Virgin Birth? Because of The Gospel of James. So, there's the most influential fanfic ever written, and it's based on another fanfic which isn't even canon. There really are no limits to the creativity of the religious imagination.

Unlike Razor & Tie’s 1997 double-disc collection She Thinks I Still Care: The George Jones Collection (The United Artists Years), Omnivore’s 2013 set The Complete United Artists Solo Singles focuses directly on the 45s George Jones released for United Artists between the years 1962 and 1966 (he was only with the label until 1964 but they churned out singles for another two years after his departure). This is a bigger difference than it may initially seem. The 40-track She Thinks I Still Care sampled generously from Jones’ duets with Melba Montgomery, his tributes to Bob Wills and Hank Williams, his bluegrass and gospel LPs, which meant there were several singles absent from its track listing. Conversely, The Complete United Artists Solo Singles misses several of these…

320 kbps | 187 MB | UL | CL | MC ** FLAC

…stylistic detours (naturally, the title is a give-away that there are no duets to be found here), but it has its share of surprises — i.e, the rocking holiday single “My Mom and Santa Claus (Twistin’ Santa Claus)” — and, better still, its 32 songs give a greater sense of how George Jones was heard at his ’60s peak: as a series of singles saturating the airwaves or cranking away on a jukebox. George had some of his biggest hits during these five years — “The Race Is On,” “She Thinks I Still Care,” “You Comb Her Hair” — but his star didn’t shine as brightly as it did in the ’70s, when he was a fixture in the upper reaches of the charts. He was a popular country singer, regarded as one of the best and selling at a rate deserving of his reputation, and the singles reflect this status, as they’re largely exceptional pieces of straight-ahead country designed to please broad audiences. His hardcore Texas honky tonk wound up getting slightly sweetened by the pros in Nashville, a transition that resulted in the first flowering of his gorgeous ballad style, a bit of MOR Nashville sound (“Where Does a Little Tear Come From”) but also gave a bit of a lively snap to the novelties (“Geronimo,” “The Best Guitar Picker”) and poppier tunes like “What’s Money” or “Your Heart Turned Left (And I Was on the Right).” This gives the United Artists singles some color, but the foundation lies in the purer country, whether it’s the haunted murder ballad “Open Pit Mine” or such barroom weepers as “A Girl I Used to Know” and “Brown to Blue.” Taken together, each of these singles — including the B-sides, which are often quite strong — create a portrait not only of George Jones in the ’60s, but that decade’s mainstream straight-ahead country, a blend of Nashville and Texas that remains enormously appealing. Needless to say, this is the best way to hear George Jones’ United Artists recordings; it’s tighter, better than either the Razor & Tie comp or the enjoyable but very large Bear Family box.

1. She Thinks I Still Care 2:36
2. Sometimes You Just Can’t Win 2:44
3. Beacon In The Night 1:50
4. He Made Me Free 2:38
5. Open Pit Mine 3:09
6. Geronimo 2:01
7. He’s So Good To Me 1:58
8. Magic Valley 2:17
9. A Girl I Used To Know 2:41
10. Big Fool Of The Year 2:28
11. Not What I Had In Mind 2:27
12. I Saw Me 2:45
13. Lonely Christmas Call 2:26
14. My Mom And Santa Claus (Twistin’ Santa Claus) 2:32
15. You Comb Her Hair 2:40
16. Ain’t It Funny What A Fool Will Do 2:24
17. Your Heart Turned Left (And I Was On The Right) 2:15
18. My Tears Are Overdue 2:28
19. Something I Dreamed 2:40
20. Where Does A Little Tear Come From 2:34
21. The Race Is On 2:08
22. She’s Lonesome Again 2:10
23. Least Of All 2:35
24. Brown To Blue 2:42
25. Wrong Number 2:34
26. The Old, Old House 2:29
27. What’s Money 2:37
28. I Get Lonely In A Hurry 2:28
29. World’s Worst Lover 2:39
30. I Can’t Change Overnight 2:32
31. Best Guitar Picker 2:40
32. A Good Old Fashioned Cry 2:30

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was an American poet and author. Showing a talent for poetry at a young age (she had a poem published when she was 8), Plath earned a scholarship to Smith College, where she wrote hundreds of poems and had her work published in national magazines. Although she seemed to have the world at her feet, Plath had suffered from severe depression since she was a child and received electroshock therapy after a failed suicide attempt in her early 20s. After her recovery and eventual graduation from Smith, Plath won a Fullbright scholarship to attend Cambridge University. There she met and fell in love with another poet, Ted Hughes, whom she later married. Theirs would be one of the most famous and controversial relationships of the literary world, with the two of them eventually separating after seven years when Plath learned of Hughes’ infidelity. Fragile and left to raise their two children alone, Plath retreated into her work, with the period after her divorce being her most productive. During this time she wrote what are considered her best poems and her only novel, The Bell Jar. Sadly, Plath’s depression worsened during this period and she committed suicide in 1963, at the age of 30. In 1982, Plath was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer prize for The Collected Poems.

Plath’s style of poetry was known as ‘confessional’, with her poems being deeply autobiographical and honest. They also contained what were taboo subjects at the time, such as mental illness and suicide. For instance, here you can listen to Plath reading her poem Daddy. The haunting poem touches on her conflicted feelings for her German-born father who died when she was a child, her first suicide attempt and failed marriage to Hughes.

Plath is a beloved hero to many, and I can’t begin to do her justice. For a more in-depth story of her life, I recommend this article.

The quote used in the comic is a famous passage from Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, which is a semi-autobiographical account of Plath’s period of depression in her early 20s, her subsequent suicide attempt and stay in a psychiatric hospital. Set in the 1950s, the main character Esther (based on Plath) uses the fig tree analogy to convey her frustration with the restrictions society have placed on women. She wants to be free to do all the exciting things men do, but thinks she must conform to what other people expect of her. Esther feels paralysed by her inability to act and spirals further into depression.

- RELATED COMIC: Frank Herbert’s Litany Against Fear.
- I haven’t seen it, but Plath’s life was made into a Hollywood movie with Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath and Daniel Craig as her husband, Ted Hughes.
- Thanks to Rosanna and Sahil for submitting the quote.
- Feel free to share your favourite Plath poem in the comments.

 
Until videotapes replaced 16mm film projectors in the classroom in the mid-1980s, there was a very good chance that if you were British or American, that at least once, if not twice or more, you were going to see the animated 1954 version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm during your education. I can vividly recall being absolutely incredulous during a post-film discussion in high school, that the teacher we had seemed to have no idea, as in none at all, that Animal Farm was quite specifically a satire of the Russian revolution and the rise of Joseph Stalin. After I raised my hand to object and explained, no doubt with the cocky annoyance of a teenaged autodidact, that “Old Major” was a Karl Marx/Lenin figure, that “Napoleon” was Stalin, “Snowball” was Trotsky and so forth, she blithely dismissed what I said (she clearly had no idea of what I was talking about and so therefore had nothing to add) and remarked that “it could be one theory.”

No my dear, that would be the only fuckin’ theory. If you think American public schools are bad now, I put it to you that they’ve always been pretty shitty…

Animal Farm was directed by the husband and wife animation team of John Halas and Joy Batchelor. It is considered one of the greatest British films, something akin to a “serious” work from Disney. The film does not follow the events of the book very closely, especially the “hopeful” ending that Halas felt necessary to tack on. Orwell’s book ends with the animals numbly resigned to their exploitation by the porcine politburo in cahoots with the humans. This was considered too bleak and Halas wanted an upbeat ending. “You cannot send home millions in the audience being puzzled,” he said about the film in 1980.

But there is an interesting back story of how Animal Farm came to be made that most people are probably unaware of: The most famous British animated film ever made was in fact financed by the American CIA in an effort to encourage a negative view of the Soviet Union.

In 1951, using American taxpayer dollars, the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination carried out obtaining the rights to the book from Sonia Orwell, the author’s widow, in an operation run by future Watergate criminal E. Howard Hunt. Two members of the Psychological Warfare Workshop staff who were working in undercover in Hollywood made the arrangements. To thank Mrs. Orwell, the CIA arranged for her to meet actor Clark Gable.

Hunt chose as the film’s producer, Louis De Rochemont, the creator of the famed “March of Time” newsreel journalism films and De Rochemont had final say over all creative matters (Hunt worked for De Rochemont when he was younger). Over 80 animators worked on the film, including three Disney animators who were not credited, probably because they didn’t want to piss off Uncle Walt. Two of them went on to work on Yellow Submarine and Watership Down.

Vivien Halas, the daughter of the film’s directors, believes that her parents were innocent of knowing that the CIA was involved with the project:

“I don’t believe that my parents were aware of any CIA involvement at the time. Frances reminded me that, in the early 1950s, the CIA was not regarded with the same scorn as today. My father dismissed the idea, but my mother felt annoyed.” John Halas and Joy Batchelor would go on to do the Jackson 5ive and The Osmonds cartoons. Louis De Rochemont became paranoid about the CIA bugging him late in his life.

The film was completed in 1954 and distributed worldwide the following year, the first British animated feature ever to be so widely seen. Prints were made for schools and libraries the world over by the United States Information Agency (USIA). If you are over the age of 35 and saw the film in school, there is a very high likelihood that US taxpayer’s dollars paid for the print you saw. The animated Animal Farm, due to the whole “pigs are unclean” thing, was also thought to be effective anti-Soviet propaganda in the Middle East.

On the flip-side, the Soviet spin on Orwell’s 1984 is that the book’s nightmarish depiction of constant state surveillance was about everyday life in America.

This is all so Orwellian, it’s making my head spin…

Read the full story in Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm

The cartoon that came in from the cold (The Guardian)

How Big Brothers used Orwell to fight the cold war (The Guardian)

 

Disney has announced plans to rerelease The Little Mermaid to theaters on September 20. However, the rereleased film has been synced with an iPad app that gives users the ability to play games, sing-a-long to the movie and interact with the characters. While in the movie theatre.