I sometimes forget that the characters in my “stories” have had previous acting jobs. Which means that this adorable Brit:
Went on to become this Georgian corpse-killer:
While we can all agree that Andrew Lincoln is totally dreamy (even if he’s grown a bit skeletal himself since he started his Walking Dead stint) I think after tonight’s episode I’m firmly on Shane’s side – if you’re not busting zombie heads, you clearly have no interest in survival anymore.
You may know Chris Evans as the Human Torch: the superhero with gayest catchphrase of all, ‘Flame on!’. His Aryan looks and healthy teeth have also gotten him roles like the ‘Harvard Hottie’ in The Nanny Diaries and the jock in Not Another Teen Movie. Most recently he starred in Captain America: The First Avenger. I’ve heard the movie is pretty good until the special effects consume all the actors and plotlines like a CGI black hole. Still, I’ll see it for the pecs and the 1940s drag everyone will be wearing.
Right, but why is Chris posing with a Care Bear?
Because he’s looooves them. According to The Hollywood Reporter:
“’To be completely honest, I was watching like Care Bears and like My Little Pony,’ Evans said… But, he had his reasons for playing with the typically girl-centric toys. ‘I had older sisters, I had to, I had no choice.’”
Excuses, excuses, Chris. Those were my favorite toys, but at least I had a plastic dinosaur or two around to butch things up.
You can watch Chris’ video interview here.
And just to be gratuitous, here’s my favorite scene from Not Another Teen Movie. It happens to be a musical, which I know will be a shock to you all. I swear there’s an uncensored version of this out there somewhere which includes not just breasts but a scatalogical joke delivered on a high note, but maybe it’s just too much fun for YouTube to handle.
Somedays it seems like you come across a previously unknown something (a word, a concept, a ghostly being) and the next thing you know this unknown something is everywhere you look. I spent too much time last night on a blog called Pork Rhine. It’s a paranormal blog, run by a guy who generally debunks the kind of hoaxes believers go wild for.
I started reading about the shadow man. He usually shows up at night, standing by your bed or at the door, simply watching you. A lot of people who claim to see him also feel they’re unable to move for the duration of his appearance – this is probably just sleep paralysis, which is pretty common. It happens when you first wake up out of a deep sleep, and it feels as though something heavy is lying on your chest, a sensation best embodied in this fantastic Fuseli painting:
Note the gargoyle perched on the lady’s chest, stopping her from moving, while a white mare (you got it, a night-mare) peeks from behind.
Anyway, the shadow man seems to be everywhere, including the Dior ads in this month’s issue of Details. And in The Twilight Zone, surprise surprise. Click ahead to about 5:42 for the good stuff, though it never hurts to get a little backstory.
I don’t believe in this guy at all, but was intrigued Dior’s use of the same hallmarks in their ad. Sure, a flat-brimmed hat and a trench aren’t exactly rare in the fashion world, but there does seem to be a lot of shadow…
Yeah, bet you never thought you’d see PBR on the tennis court. Well this ad hails from a more congenial time, when Pabst took their blue ribbon seriously. It’s a pretty posh ad, and I’m especially referring to that white tennis sweater (which I wish to God I owned, who can sell me one of those, I can’t find them anywhere). Now I was a little thrown by how they kept putting “Pancho” in quotes, because no one does that anymore, and it almost seemed racist(?)
But because we have the internet, I read Wikipedia. Turns out his name is Ricardo Gonzalez, and he was a truly badass tennis player – he won the US Championships twice and Sports Illustrated said of him “”If earth was on the line in a tennis match, the man you want serving to save humankind would be Ricardo Alonso Gonzalez.”
[It should probably be "If earth WERE on the line" and "the man you WOULD want" and really, if earth were on the line, you'd be saving more than just humankind. Geez, SI, so anthropocentric (most syllables ever used on this blog, I'll bet)]
Also, “Pancho” was a looker.
Way better-looking than he appears in that PBR ad. In fact, in addition to that tennis sweater, I’m going to add his sneakers to my shopping list. “Pancho” Gonzales: fashion icon?
Anyway, now PBR is mostly for hipsters, but we can look back in envy at the days when it was a country club beverage enjoyed by handsome Mexican-American tennis pros.
Found this little clip from a 1935 edition of Popular Science, thanks to Modern Mechanix. It made me think of Albert II, a brave little space monkey who successfully entered space, only to die when his parachute failed to work! RIP Albert.
“What the fuck you guys I was told there would be bananas!”
Virgin Media has this to say about Albert II.
Date: June 14th, 1949
What went wrong: Albert II wasn’t the name of a spaceship but a monkey. He was the very first monkey in space, traveling on-board a US V2 rocket. Having made it safely to space, Albert II was sadly killed when the rocket returned to earth and the parachute failed to open.
Bummer. But check out the cover of that issue of Popular Science:
I’m not quite sure what that invention with the whirring blades is supposed to do. A reverse lawnmower? Hedge-trimmer? Death device? Mostly it reminds me of that scene in Caligula where the emperor buries a bunch of traitors in the sand up to their head, then propels a giant lawnmower over them. Not a clip for the faint of heart:
Yeah, so that pretty much covers all the bases for today. Dogs in parachutes, martyr monkeys, killing machines. We’re good.
After years of people telling me I ought to, I finally watched (most of) The Shawshank Redemption. I liked it for the most part, but at this point I have heard Morgan Freeman’s narration parodied SO OFTEN that I can’t take him too seriously (plus the script has a saccharine folksy tone that irks me). Stephen King wrote the novella the movie’s based on, “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” so maybe I should give up and read that.
There is an opera scene that is completely unrealistic and still enjoyable.
I like how the camera pans across all the dudes in the prison yard staring up at the sky like it’s an alien invasion.
Then the script reads like this:
RED (Morgan Freeman) (V.O.)
I have no idea to this day what
them two Italian ladies were
singin’ about. Truth is, I don’t
want to know. Some things are best
left unsaid. I like to think they
were singin’ about something so
beautiful it can’t be expressed in
words, and makes your heart ache
because of it.
CAMERA brings us to Red.
RED (V.O.)
I tell you, those voices soared.
Higher and farther than anybody in
a gray place dares to dream. It was
like some beautiful bird flapped
into our drab little cage and made
these walls dissolve away…and for
the briefest of moments — every
last man at Shawshank felt free.
Actually, though, that aria (“Sull’aria… che soave zeffiretto” from The Marriage of Figaro) is about two women conspiring to expose a philandering husband, so, good thing Morgan Freeman doesn’t know Italian. Here’s a version w/ Renee Fleming as the Countess with the cheating husband, and Cecilia Bartoli as the serving wench who’ll snare him:
Makes you wonder what would happen if we piped opera through our penitentiaries. Kind of like Mozart for Babies, but it’s Mozart for Convicts. Just don’t teach them Italian, or they might subliminally start inventing letter schemes and kooky disguises to heighten drama in the final act.
We’re pretty used to the QWERTY keyboard because it works well for English. And, you know, pretty much all Latinate language. But what do you do if you happen to be, oh, I don’t know, Japanese?
You do this:
I found this beauty on eBay (if you want it, get in there, cuz they’re bidding up a storm over there). I have no idea how it works, but the seller says that it’s got over 1,4000 characters, all jam-packed in this tiny machine.
And like most things Japanese, it is also infuriatingly elegant.
This Soviet typewriter, on the other hand, is all efficiency:
And my personal favorite is this uber-rare 1950 Keaton MUSIC TYPEWRITER! I bet you thought this didn’t exist. Well, check it:
Granted, if a normal typewriter seems anachronistic and inconvenient, this device seems nearly impossible to use effectively. Seems like it’d be far easier to write a score by hand, but I’ve never written a score, so who am I to say?
Found this ad(vertorial?) in a Boys’ Life from 1950. I guess the idea is to give Scouts a brainy role-model while still plugging General Electric. Nuclear piles are not especially nasty hemorrhoids – it’s actually just the term they used before they got around to saying “nuclear reactors.” The Hanford Site is really interesting to read about (much like the other two sites involved the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, NM and Oak Ridge, TN). You get to learn about how the government pulled the eminent domain card in 1942 and kicked about 1,500 people off the property, including a few Native American tribes. You get to learn how plutonium manufactured there went into the bomb that hit Nagasaki, and how until that bomb landed, only about 1% of the people working at the Hanford site were even aware they were working on a nuclear weapons project.
Of course, what you don’t know can still hurt you, and particularly during the early years a lot of nuclear waste was released into the air and adjacent Columbia River. The US is still working on cleaning that up. Estimated completion date: 2040.
Some Atomic Age propaganda…
And an incredibly creepy photo from the Hanford ‘Atomic Frontier’ parade. Look at those settlers confronting a miserable, anti-radiation suit clad envoy from the future. Grim.
Last two photos courtesy of the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System. I don’t know how to go through this database, but I’m guessing it would be fun to snoop around.
The more I read Thomas Mann, the more I am convinced he’s my literary mentor. First, he wrote “Death in Venice.” Second, he wrote this thing called “Mario and the Magician,” where an Italian waiter (Mario) is hypnotized and made to look like a fool by a visiting magician, so Mario pulls out a pistol and kills him (you have to read it, but after my own existential crisis as a server, I like to consider it a waiter’s version of going postal).
And THEN he wrote this, from The Magic Mountain. Yes it’s a little long. No don’t sue me for copyright infringement:
“I don’t understand it,” Hans Castorp said. “I never can understand how anybody can not smoke – it deprives a man of the best part of life, so to speak – or at least of a first-class pleasure. When I wake in the morning, I feel glad at the thought of being able to smoke all day, and when I eat, I look forward to smoking afterwards; I might almost say I only eat for the sake of being able to smoke – though of course that is more or less of an exaggeration. But a day without tobacco would be flat, stale, and unprofitable, as far as I am concerned. If I had to say to myself tomorrow: ‘No smoke today’ – I believe I shouldn’t find the courage to get up – on my honor, I’d stop in bed. But when a man has a good cigar in his mouth – of course it mustn’t have a side draught or not draw well, that is extremely irritating – but with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him – literally. It’s just like lying on the beach: when you lie on the beach, why, you lie on the beach, don’t you? – you don’t require anything else, in the line of work or amusement either. People smoke all over the world, thank goodness; there is nowhere one could get to, so far as I know, where the habit hasn’t penetrated. Even polar expeditions fit themselves out with supplies of tobacco to help them carry on. I’ve always felt a thrill of sympathy when I read that. You can be very miserable: I might be feeling perfectly wretched, for instance; but I could always stand it if I had my smoke.”
Thomas! I feel that.
Loves his smoke.
If this wasn’t already clear, that picture comes from LIFE.
So if you saw tonight’s episode of Mad Men, you know that after cutting her own hair (so transgressive!) Sally Draper is also accused of ‘playing with herself’ during a girl’s sleepover party. This may or may not be true. All the camera really showed was her touching her knees and getting all dreamy-eyed, which is about as delicate a visual interpretation of female masturbation as ‘playing with oneself’ is a silly euphemism for it. As she’s getting off, she’s watching an old ’60s spy show, featuring this pixie-cut sporting stud.
His name is David McCallum. He used to look like this (but now he’s over 70, so cool your jets (I’m looking at you, Sally)).
He’s a Scottish actor, but he plays a Russian-born secret agent in the The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a hot spy show in the ’60′s. Personally I’m not feeling him, but I’ve never been a big fan of those straw-haired Aryan types. I guess I’d prefer his swarthy partner.
But to each his own. Here’s the beginning of one episode of ‘The Man From UNCLE’, in case you’re curious about just how schmaltzy it gets.
If I were Sally, I’d go for a late-night episode of The Twilight Zone. That guy is foxy.
Woof.
Just finished work on a piece for Exit Zero about rum-running in Cape May, NJ. Fun Fact: the Jersey coast was probably the busiest spot for illegal liquor smuggling outside of Florida during Prohibition (mostly because New Jersey is just a strip of land connecting the bigger urban centers of Philadelphia and New York). I’ve been using the hell out of my NY Times archive subscription before it runs out at the end of August, but I also got a chance to rifle through old issues of the Cape May Star and Wave to get more local perspective. I especially like this Times article, because it makes Cape May sound super-exciting (something that has happened less often since liquor was re-legalized).
HBO is coming out with a miniseries this September called Boardwalk Empire that deals with the same subject matter in a much glitzier town: Atlantic City. It’s directed by Scorsese and stars Steve Buscemi and Michael Pitt (who, despite his weird lips, I really liked in The Dreamers). It starts at the very outset of Prohibition in 1920, and the preview trailers look incredibly rich and sexy. Look:
Even more exciting – turns out the Prohibition Act was passed on my birthday (October 28th), which means in two months I will be throwing a very serious speakeasy party in my own honor. Also, have you noticed the Jazz Age fixation with compound words? Rumrunner? Speakeasy? Bootlegger?
Bomb.
Check out Bannerman Island on the Hudson River, home to Bannerman’s Castle, a building which – all nouveau riche McMansions notwithstanding – is one of the few places I can actually call a “castle” without feeling hyperbolic. Maybe that’s because Bannerman’s Castle is already in a serious state of disrepair. The turrets are crumbling, the crenellation along the top is missing in many spots, and after years of explosions and exposure to the elements the whole place is wrapped in a decaying mystique that is downright Medieval.
Only it’s about half-an-hour by train from New York, so places like Esquire get to use it as a location for photoshoots.
Esquire published this shoot on my birthday! Fate.
The historical down-low on Bannerman Island is that it was purchased by Scottish arms dealer Francis Bannerman VI in 1900. Shortly thereafter he sketched up plans for the Castle, meant to house the huge stockpile of weapons and ammunition he acquired in the wake of the Spanish-American War, as well as a smaller house called Crag Inch. Bannerman died in 1919 and the very next year Bannerman’s Castle exploded – not so surprising since it was filled with gunpowder – tossing one tower clear off the castle and into the Hudson, jettisoning debris onto the railroad, and shattering windows both on and off the island. The NY Times story that ran about it attributed the explosion to the mischief of river pirates (Hudson River pirates!) who had been known to carouse on the site. You can read the article here.
For a while the arsenal became a museum boasting “every description of gun, sword, powder flask, armor, ammunition, regimental banner, uniform and decoration” but was continually plagued by fire, wrack, ruin and vandalism. I’ve known a few people who have waded out to the island on inner tubes, but in this case I’d recommend that rather than being all gung-ho and DIY, you take a tour with The Bannerman Castle Trust. That way you’ll have someone informed leading you around and the proceeds will go to the preservation of the Castle, which is a cool place to donate money.
Compare this to the first picture. The wall's falling down!
Plus, wouldn’t you want to take you date here? I’m going to as soon as I have a date.
I’ve got a project coming up in my Urban Studies class about mental institutions around Manhattan, and researching this topic has yielded a lot of bizarre and interesting anecdotes. For instance, this story about Evelyn McHale – “The Most Beautiful Suicide.” On May Day in 1947, she flung herself off the observation deck of the Empire State building and landed looking like Sleeping Beauty on top of a U.N. limo. That’s when photographer Robert Wiles rushed over to snap a photo (just casually, you know). It was LIFE’s photo of the week (you can read the snippet (and the magazine) here) and eventually Andy Warhol made a print out of it.
Who publishes this shit in magazines? LIFE does.
Guess who made this.
That is a weird photo. Weirder after multiplication. Is it glamorizing suicide? Is it teaching girls to jump off buildings in white gloves? What are THE IMPLICATIONS?!? Aw my brain hurts. It is creepy/cool though.
