Cutting out a little early on 2010 to prep for 2011; today’s all about wrapping up loose ends, drawing up New Year’s resolutions, and game-planning for what’s sure to be another madcap 12-month stretch. Lots in the works, starting with my long-promised Jazz Age yarn. As always, check this space for details—or simply because you have a hankering to learn more about kabaddi, the Solomon Islands, or trends in oxen usage.
For the record, these were the most-read Microkhan posts of 2010:
May your New Year’s celebration be every bit as lavish as a top-notch Tsagaan Sar party, and hope you’ll continue to patronize Microkhan throughout our planet’s next revolution around the nearest yellow dwarf star.
I toyed with the idea of doing a couple of “Best of…” lists in these waning days of MMX, much as I didlastyear. But in the course of trying to pull together some worthy candidates from the realms of filmdom, books, and booze, I got to thinking about the criteria I was employing—at least for the works of art. (The judging of beer, wine, and whiskey is fairly straightforward.) Why, exactly, do I find some narratives more praiseworthy than others?
As I pondered that question on Boxing Day, I started in on a New Yorker piece that I’d missed: Burhard Bilger’s tale of underground foodies and their affection for Dumpster diving, rotten meat, and pungent fermentation. The story’s main character is a bloke named Sandor Katz, who’s created quite a career out of preaching the virutes of fermented victuals. Like most pundits, Katz has attracted his fair share of virulent critics, never more so than after he once advocated for the ethical production of meat. Bilger turns the response to this revelation into the article’s absurdist pinnacle:
Needless to say, this argument didn’t fly with much of [Katz’s] audience. Last year, the Canadian vegan punk band Propagandhi released a song called “Human(e) Meat (The Flensing of Sandor Katz).” Flensing is an archaic locution of the sort beloved by metal bands: it means to strip the blubber from a whale. “I swear I did my best to insure that his final moments were swift and free from fear,” the singer yelps. “But consideration should be made for the fact that Sandor Katz was my first kill.” He goes on to describe searing every hair on Katz’s body, boiling his head in a stockpot, and turning it into a spreadable headcheese. “It’s a horrible song,” Katz told me. “When it came out, I was not amused. I had a little fear that some lost vegan youth would try to find meaning by carrying out this fantasy. But it’s grown on me.”
Why do I love this passage so? Not necessarily for the use of the word “flensing,” though that’s certainly a bonus. Rather, it’s because it leaves me wanting to read a whole ‘nother piece, about the vegan punk rock scene in Manitoba and the “lost youths” who gravitate toward its rules, messages, and camaraderie. What I would give for Bilger or some other great reporter to spend the next few months in Winnipeg, checking out hardcore shows in an effort to understand the peculiar sort of angst that makes the musical culture so enticing.
And that, I’ve decided, is the measure of a great yarn: It has to leave me thirsty for a tale about the various minor players who cross the stage. Winter’s Bone achieved this, too—as soon as it ended, I lamented the fact that I’d never find out more about laconic meth lord Thump Milton. So, too, did Big Fan—I, for one, would love to see an HBO series about the life of star linebacker/coked-out asshole Quantrell Bishop.
Rather than go through a list of books and movies I dug this year, I’d like to hear from y’all about stories that left you hungering for spin-offs featuring minor characters. But, please, no Joanie Loves Chachi jokes.
On Christmas Night, the ingestion of too much fine red wine led the Grand Empress and I to spend a pleasant few minutes researching Thrinaxodon, one of the many Therapsids to be found in mankind’s evolutionary tree. We were intrigued to find great disagreement on what this critter looked like; due to a paucity of fossil evidence, artists have been free to imagine the mammal-like reptile as either a lovable otter-like creature or something akin to a slimmed-down wolverine. Will we ever be able to determine which artistic interpretation is closest to the way Thrinaxodon really looked?
Sealed inside by the snow on Boxing Day, I decided to do a little digging into the creative process for paleoartists. I didn’t have to dig very deep, fortunately, thanks to this great collection of interviews with contemporary masters of the form. Lots of great stuff here, including links to the works of such paleoart stars as Mark Hallett (see above) and Mike Skrepnick. But what I really zeroed in on was the Q&A with Mark Witton, who did an excellent job of explaining what makes a piece of paleoart worth your while:
The success of a palaeoart piece is determined through both its scientific and artistic merit, and the science is often the easier part to get right. With a complete skeleton, we can probably assume the rough body contours of an extinct animal to a reasonable degree of accuracy. Our record of soft-tissues is improving markedly, too, so even the detailed external anatomy of some long-dead animals can be restored in some detail. The science of palaeoart, then, simply relies on paying attention to the data available on given taxa: proportions, soft-tissues where known, footprint and trackway data and whathaveyou. We’re going to have some of this data superseded by other finds later, but we can definitely be ‘correct’ when we’re putting paint on the canvas.
Thing is, anyone who can use a ruler and a pencil can bring this information together and knock up a basic reconstruction of an extinct animal: in some respects, it almost has more in common with technical drawing than it does artistry. It has, indeed, led to the Dreaded Recurrence of Flat Views flowing through a fair amount of palaeoart: there’s a whole bunch of palaeoart images with dead-on lateral or anterior views of animal heads or bodies. Inspired, I suppose, by Paul-esque reconstructions of skeletons in multiple views, they look more like technical reconstructions dropped on top of painted landscapes than natural scenes. They’re great bits of art, mind: they look like 2D cutouts arranged on a stage, with even the backgrounds having a similar theatre-set feel to them, but they’re too stylised to persuade the viewers, even if only in a minor way, that the artist was actually there, witnessing these ancient scenes himself. This is where the artistic prowess of the best palaeoartists comes in: they take the schematic technical work of scientists and turn it into something dynamic and vital. Something composited into a realistic environment and interacting convincingly with other animals. Purely artistic skills – a sense of composition, use of shading, the position of the PoV, the colour palate – are what gives the picture presence and really grab the imagination of the viewer. Even the most striking, fantastic-looking critters will lose their effect in artwork if they’re poorly lit, positioned awkwardly within the frame or postured in an obscuring way. In this respect, palaeoart is identical to other forms of representative art: the artist needs to understand the form of their subject, how they would appear in a realistic environment, and then wrap it all up in a dramatic, stylish way. Think about John Gurche’s work, for instance: his knowledge of form, use of light and depth of field makes it look like he’s photographing enormous animals from 75 million years ago: it’s like he’s there, man. If you can trick your audience into that (and his work did, indeed, do this to a younger version of myself), you know you’ve done your job.
As someone who was deeply influenced by the dinosaur art of Rudolph Zallinger as a young’un, it’s tough to realize that Microkhan Jr. will grow up with a very different mental picture of what ancient animals looked like. And that’s due not only to changes in paleontology, but also to the rapid evolution of paleoart. The big question, then, is how the artists influence the scientists—there’s just no way that a paleontologist can avoid being influenced by the painting and drawings that first got him or her interested in the field.
Can’t believe I’m about to do this, but actually gonna take a few days off starting right now. Big plans for the holiday weekend: ice skating, Staten Island, and Ayinger Celebrator (not necessarily in that order). I leave you with a comically inappropriate snippet from Yogi’s First Christmas, arguably the greatest ursine-themed holiday movie of all time. Given Boo-Boo’s tender age, Cindy is definitely flirting with some serious violations of state laws here. Also, her crush on Yogi is pretty inexplicable. The dude’s woefully out-of-shape (thanks to his twin obsessions with hibernation and picnic baskets) and pretty darn lazy—though, granted, he has excellent taste in hats.
Raucous holidays to all, and see you back here in a bit.
In the midst of researching an upcoming post on the cigarette economy in prisons, I came across this image of juvenile prisoners in Russia. I was struck by the extreme youth of these convicts, and thus motivated to look a bit more deeply into how Russia handles criminals who’ve yet to become adults. As I expected, the situation ain’t a happy one—juvenile offenders are often stashed in the “junior wings” of maximum-security prisons, where they come under the influence of hardened criminals.
This grim policy inspired painter Yana Payusova to do a series on Russia’s young convicts, whom she renders as Orthodox icons. The boys in her paintings are lifted from black-and-white photographs that she took while visiting several juvenile detention facilities. She talks about the experience of capturing those images here:
I was truly shocked when I saw the teenage convicts in person. When we arrived they were in their cells, mostly sleeping and passing time. They were brought out in front of us into the main hallway for lineup. I was expecting to see tough guys and intimidating criminal types, but instead I saw a group of scrawny, pale, shaven-headed young boys, many of whom were covered in warts and sores. I knew that all of them had to be ages 14 to 21, but the majority seemed like they could not be older than twelve (as I later learned, an indication of malnourishment in childhood). Many had tattooed limbs and torsos. A few of the tattoos were masterfully executed, but most were crude amateur drawings. Many of the tattoos were grossly infected. Ironically, the tattoo designs displayed harsh arrogance and aggression, which was markedly missing from most of the boys’ faces. Also, many of them spoke ‘blatnaya fenya’ (special cryptolanguage used among criminals) partially out of habit and partly to show off and flaunt their connections to the criminal culture.
Taking a day to wrap up pending projects, so that I can unplug for 96 hours starting on Christmas Eve. Stevie Wonder will see you through; a great remix of this tune leads the latest installment of Microkhan fave Fresh Produce.
The hooded lady above was not a bandit, but rather a New York City detective who worked the 21 Jump Street beat in the early 1970s. Kathleen Conlon earned her gold shield after surviving a scary incident in the Bronx: While working on an undercover narcotics unit, she was dragged into an alley, assaulted, and robbed. One attacker placed a gun to Conlon’s head and pulled the trigger twice, but the .25 misfired both times. After that, the NYPD reckoned that the young policewoman was ready to explore the drug scene in the New York City school system.
A year later, Conlon made a masked appearance in Congress, testifying before the House Select Committee on Crime. Obviously blessed with a flair for the dramatic, Conlon completed her outfit with a .38 on her hip—not to mention a saucy short-sleeved shirt, still a rarity among those who appear on Capitol Hill. (Even that blunted lifeguard who testified about the Jack Abramoff scandal opted for a classic shirt-and-tie look.) Bewitched by her showmanship, the committee didn’t seem to bother pressing Conlon about the absurd tales she shared:
She told of students buying, selling and using all forms of drugs in the schools and said many teachers actually “condoned” the use of narcotics in school. At some of the schools she was in, Miss Conlon asserted, 90 per cent of the students were on drugs of one form or another…
The detective said that late in 1969, when she was working at Springfield Gardens High School, one student would sell $500 worth of drugs before school in the morning, $500 worth at lunchtime, and still more when the second-session students arrived in the afternoon.
At this school, in a middle-income community, students would regularly “nod out” in class and be ignored by the teachers. One teacher, she said, told a troublemaker to “go out and take something to quiet you down.” She said three-quarters of the students there used narcotics and as many as 50 per cent of the students were on heroin.
That last statistic caught the attention of a skeptical New York Times reader, who responded the following week:
As a former faculty member at Springfield Gardens (who was there during the time she served as an undercover agent) I can assure you that this is patent nonsense. “Emphatically, yes!” to the question of whether there are narcotics users at S.G.H.S. and indeed, whether there is a large-scale narcotics problem among New York’s students, but half of the student body?
If this were true, one might expect the daily attendance to reflect this figure, the graduating classes to have shrunk to minuscule size and education to have come to a standstill. Such is not the case.
In some ways, Conlon’s showmanship makes me nostalgic for an era of more exciting Congressional testimony. There used to be more theatricality to the endeavor, particularly from the side of the testifiers’ table. Mark McGwire talking about his allergy to the past doesn’t quite compare to the whole Joseph Valachi affair. But the fact that Colon was permitted to hyperbolize at will hints at a problem that continues to this day: The willingness of politicians to accept half-truths if they’re packaged nicely, and if they appear to be in the service of some greater moral good.
I have no idea what happened to Conlon after her Congressional appearance, as he basically disappears from the public record thereafter. If anyone knows, please advise—I’d be interested to know where her career led her. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if she ended up as a cop-show consultant.
I’ve previously written about the odious racism of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, where various peoples from around the world were displayed like zoo animals. For the most part, these folks were asked to inhabit ersatz villages, so that their clothes and customs could be gawked at by paying customers. But some of the Fair’s international participants were instead cast as actors in a massive recreation of the Anglo-Boer War, which had concluded just two years prior. It was an enormous production, as a contemporary paper noted:
The Anglo-Boer war exhibition at the World’s Fair, St. Louis, in which General Croje is the leading figure, is the largest and most realistic outdoor entertainment ever seen. It is as though 20 acres of South frica had been carried across the Atlantic and dumped down at St. Louis…
A representation of the capture of Colonel Long’s guns at Colenso is shown. Men and horses drop until hardly one is left standing, deeds of heroism are performed, stray horses gallop wildly about. At last, with a loud cheer, the Boers, led by General Ben Viljoen, rush from rocks and kopjes, and the day is won…
The entertainment is a military tournament on a large scale, and one is brought face to face with war and all its horrors.
I was initially struck by the extreme oddness of this production, given how conflict’s freshness. It’s one thing for Civil War reenactors to take part in mock battles that are well over a century old, quite another to recreate a war that had ended two years earlier. Vietnam War reenactment might be a better comparison, but that pastime didn’t start until a good decade after the fall of Saigon. And it’s never been put on as a mass entertainment; instead, it is largely for the enjoyment of the participant themselves.
One might be tempted to say that folks of the early 20th century were more inclined to view warfare as spectator sport, but I’m not sure that’s what’s going on here. We have to keep in mind that in the pre-newsreel era, Americans who weren’t directly involved in warfare knew about the terrible practice solely through the written word (and, perhaps, the oral histories passed down by Civil War vets in their families). Think about that for a second—you’re fully aware that much of world history has been shaped by violent conflict, but you have never witnessed even a close approximation of the phenomenon. Curiosity is only natural.
There is obviously something a wee bit unsettling about the notion of turning recent conflict into theater—tough to envision folks lining up to see the 2008 campaigns in Afghanistan recreated in a major American city. We turn instead to film and television to get our warfare fix, but the focus there is now more on the interior lives of soldiers than the logistics of battle. That’s partly because contemporary warfare is chaotic, but also due to the fact that we’ve developed more empathy for the men and women who pay the price for officers’ orders—at least if those men and women are wearing friendly uniforms. We want to know how they cope with an experience that we understand to be shattering in so many ways; back in 1904, spectators were far more interested in the grandeur of General Cronje’s uniform.
Absolutely nothing left in the tank today—not even enough mental bandwidth to squeeze out a Bad Movie Friday. Spent the bulk of yesterday recording the audio version of my upcoming Jazz Age yarn, an experience that has given me new respect for voice actors. You try saying “Critics and compatriots rarely stinted on superlatives” without tripping over the alliteration—not an easy feat, as I found out the hard way.
Outro-ing for the much-needed weekend with a gem from the best guitarist ever to emerge from Western Sahara. See you next week for the joyful run-up to the holidays.
The fundamental premise of the American economic system is that competition is healthy. By extension, we generally assume that the greatest men and women are those in whom the competitive spirit burns brightest—individuals with “fire in the belly.” These are the people who take play as seriously as work, and thus descend into deep depressions upon losing games of Monopoly or racquetball. We hail this mindset—how many 60 Minutes interviews with captains of politics or captains of industries have revealed that the subject absolutely hates to lose at anything?
But what about those who shy away from contests of skill because they find competition off-putting? Are they doomed to lives of mediocrity? I started thinking about this issue while reading this vintage New Scientist piece about the psychology of chess. The article includes a quote from Albert Einstein, who apparently didn’t enjoy the sport’s competitive element:
I always dislike the fierce competitive spirit embodied in that highly intellectual game.
As you might expect, Einstein was actually a pretty decent chess player, achieving a rating of 1800. (Check out a summary of his 1933 match against J. Robert Oppenheimer here.) But he insisted that the game brought him little to no enjoyment, and was one of the last things he liked to do with his free time:
Chess grips its exponent, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom and independence of even the strongest character cannot remain unaffected.
As someone who enjoys solitary pursuits, I think that Einstein was on to something here. One can still achieve without engaging in constant competition. In fact, I’d wager that certain types of minds benefit by stepping away from competition for long stretches. Just because you don’t spend every waking moment trying to embarrass your fellow humans at games doesn’t mean you can’t contribute anything to the grand American experiment—right?
Mere hours away from this killer Wired deadline that’s been vexing me since last week, so please endure one last day of meh-ish posting. There’s only so much mental bandwidth to spare, alas, and most of what I’ve got is currently dedicated to figuring out a way to end this piece. (I’m playing with several variation of that oh-so-classic kicker: “Only time will tell.”) I thus give you a true sonic rarity: Africa’s cover of “Louie Louie,” which I believe actually surpasses the original. It’s off of this little-known album, which also includes excellent takes on “Light My Fire” and “Paint It Black.”
Back soon with real content. In the meantime, enjoy the music and maybe, just maybe, take a sneak peek at one of the long-rumored “major projects” that I sometimes mention in this space. Really excited about that one—should go live in early 2011. Rest assured, I’ll be keeping y’all posted—as well as be offering bonus material in advance of the debut.
Comments Off on Closing in on DawnTags:Africa·music
Still cranking on this Wired deadline, so I can only offer you a pittance this morning. But what a pittance—a tribute to the Morris Day, a few hours too late to celebrate his 53rd birthday. Aside from absolutely owning Purple Rain, Day is responsible for one of the greatest on-stage gimmicks ever: Checking his reflection in a gilded mirror, to ensure that he is maintaining ultimate prettiness. Wielding that mirror seems to be the primary reason that Jerome Benton is part of the band; he doesn’t actually play any instruments, though he is a rather excellent dancer. Given his role in The Time, Benton reminds me of another sideman whose contributions are more theatrical than musical: Bez, the maracas-shaking Happy Mondays oddity who is a master of exhibiting uninhibited joie de vivre. Benton is an infinitely better dresser, though.
Somewhat lighter-than-usual posting these next three days, as I hack through yet another killer Wired deadline—the last major work task of an exhausting 2010. I was tempted to just toss up a few YouTubes between now and Thursday morning, but that wouldn’t be very sporting. So I will instead offer some quick hits about topics near-and-dear to Microkhan’s heart, starting with a twofer about the satellite business and the Kingdom of Tonga.
For those who don’t follow politics in the South Pacific, Tonga has recently been teetering toward something resembling a democracy—albeit one still dominated by the nation’s aristocracy. One of the figures who seems likely to retain a good deal of power is Princess Pilolevu Tuita, the king’s sister and the chairperson of Tongasat, Tonga’s dormant satellite company. Yes, the tiny nation has a stake in the space race, though mostly due to the machinations of a Swedish-born telecommunications executive who dreamed of using Tonga’s political privileges to make a fortune. The whole sad story is here, including this snippet about how the princess was coaxed into heading up Tongasat:
Tuita has always claimed her involvement in Tongasat was party of God’s plan for Tonga to lead the way in Christianising China. It was why Tonga switched its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing and it moved Tongasat to Hong Kong.
“I believe that God invented us to do this work otherwise we could have become just another foreigner knocking on doors in Beijing for years without having a chance to meet the leaders of China.”
Track Tonga’s lone satellite here. No idea what purpose it’s currently serving, though it does appear to be making a nice figure-8 pattern above Sri Lanka these days.
I distinctly remember the first time I was surprised by a geographical truth that ordinary maps conceal. I was about ten years old, and thought of myself as pretty sharp when it comes to map-related matters. Seeking to impress my pops with my knowledge, I mentioned at the dinner table one night that Maine was the northernmost state in the Lower 48. He quickly corrected me, and ran to fetch an encyclopedia volume to prove his point. Sure enough, the flat map by our classroom blackboard had lied to me: the northern tip of Maine is on the same latitude as Seattle’s southern suburbs. Rainy Washington, rather than icy Maine, wins the prize.
I might not have embarrassed myself like that if Richard Edes Harrison had been allowed to have a greater impact on our educational system. A nearly forgotten legend of cartography, Harrison made his name creating beautifully detailed maps for Fortune throughout the magazine’s 1930s and ’40s heyday. (The graphic-design geniuses at my employer Wired are much in his debt.) Harrison’s masterstroke was to recognize how aerial intelligence had changed the art of mapmaking, revealing the contours of a planet that defies our species’ natural prejudices regarding direction. This 1944 LIFE profile describes his special knack for defying expectations:
In a perspective map a part of the world is seen from a vantage point high above the earth so that the distances draw together in perspective, as they might to an incredibly farsighted man poised at an altitude of many thousand miles. Perspectives are not new to map technique but they have rarely been done so accurately and artfully as Harrison does them. One of their special advantages lies n the way they break the cartographic convention of showing the world with the top of the map inevitably north, the bottom inevitably south. Although this convention is useful, Harrison feels is is grossly overdone. The perspective maps are based on the obvious truth that the shapes of countries and continents change their look when the point of view changes…
Anybody can improve his geographical sense, Harrison says, simply by taking a map and turning it upside down or sideways. Harrison is always up in arms against the academic cartographers who stubbornly refuse to break away from conventions. He is also thoroughly annoyed at careless American who refuse to see fact that maps show them. He has found, for example, that most people are utterly surprised when told that all of South America lies east of Jacksonville, Fla. He has also discovered that almost everybody will give him two-to-one odds that Venice is south of Vladivostok (it is actually 150 miles farther north).
I do wonder about the particular mental gift that allowed Harrison to be such a groundbreaker in his chosen profession. I think it can probably best be characterized as spatial intelligence—an innate sense of how objects relate to one another in three dimensions. In the sporting realm, he might have made a very fine stock-car racer.
Another great Harrison map, of 1930s Ethiopia, is available here.
Update: A kind correspondent alerts us to the fact that there is a Lower 48 locale even farther north than Washington’s roof: Northwest Angle, Minnesota.
Not to tease too much, but I’m getting really excited ’bout this secret project I’m wrapping up. Details to come shortly, I promise—all should be public right after the New Year, if not a little sooner. In the meantime, though, I can only hint at the nature of the yarn: It involves a son of Appalachia who started off life as a child coal miner, and ended up a much-revered musical legend.
Given how my protagonist spent his formative years, I’ve spent a lot of time researching the hardships faced by coal miners in the early twentieth century. That line of inquiry alerted me to the existence of Misère au Borinage, a silent 1933 documentary often touted as the best coal-mining film of all time. Not sure I agree with that assessment, but it is fascinating to see how Wallonian miners operated during the Great Depression. Suffice to say that ever since seeing clips of this movie, I have felt super-guilty about the relative luxury of my own working life. I’m sure these miners would have killed for paying gigs that entailed sitting in padded chairs and lifting nothing heavier than a 13-inch MacBook Pro.
A comprehensive list of coal-mining films can be found here. Not many comedies on that list.
Putting the finishing touches on a long-gestating major project this a.m., so just a quickie before I get back to ironing out some word-choice matters. The graph above comes from the much buzzed-about paper estimating that per-capita GDP in late Medieval England was around $1,000 in 1990 dollars—an estimate that, if accurate, would mean that the Joe Sixpacks of 1600s England were better off than contemporary residents of Burundi and Niger. I’m skeptical of this claim, primarily because the paper itself (PDF) makes no such grandiose claims—it was the public-relations department at Warwick University that added that extrapolation in its press release.
Still, the research makes for fascinating reading, and the authors were kind enough to include a bevy of helpful graphs and charts. My favorite is the horses-versus-oxen illustration I’ve selected for your viewing pleasure. Why did the English kiss off their oxen so rapidly after 1700 or thereabouts? Some clues are to be found in this 1989 article about the rise of the horse:
Horses often represented a much smaller capital investment than oxen, a matter of key importance for peasant cultivators in particular. This was because oxen always retained their value as meat, no matter how old they were, while elderly horses, due to the well-known and widely observed taboo on eating horseflesh, had little more value than their hides. Consequently, compared to oxen, the price range for horses was exceedingly wide – from over £100 for a prized war-horse all the way down to as little as 2s. for an old nag that may have been blind or lame but was still capable of some useful work. The horse trade in fact has often been compared to that for used cars today. As Joan Thirsk put it over a decade ago, ‘…there is a car within the price of everyone; you can pay £20 or you can pay £10,000’. The same applied for horses in the medieval period, where the wide variation in prices for the animals allowed peasants to acquire cheap horses much as the ‘banger’ trade in cars allows teenagers to do the same today.
Gadget development also played a role: The invention of the padded horse collar doesn’t get nearly enough adulation in geek circles.
Whenever my work involves looking at rolls of decades-old microfilm, I inevitably stumble across a handful of tremendous yarns that have been lost to time. Such was the case this past Saturday, as I whiled away the hours scrolling through old copies of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Lazily panning across the pages in search of a few relevant scraps of info, I fortuitously encountered the strange story of Lonnie Cross. In 1935, Cross got in a violent argument with his girlfriend, and a Good Samaritan named Edward Bozier tried to break up the altercation. The incident ended with Bozier dead from a stab wound to the skull, and Cross on the run—for the next 37 years. That stretch on the lam ended, however, when Cross suddenly decided to turn himself in:
Cross limped into the Duval County Sheriff’s Offfice Wednesday night and said he wanted to “get right with the Lord” by confessing to killing a man 37 years ago.
In a jail interview yesterday, Cross said he had lived in New Orleans under the name Richard Mosley since 1937…Cross said he fled to Savannah [after the murder], but met too many people who knew him and went to New Orleans. A longshoreman in Jacksonville and Savannah, he followed the same trade on the banks of the Mississippi River until an auto accident on Canal Street…
“I think God blessed me that I didn’t get killed,” he said. “I didn’t get religion right then, but one day, just like laying down my coat, my conscience came up on me. The thoughts of the Lord came on me.”
Only recently, he said, the spirit of the Lord moved him to clear up his old trouble. “It said, ‘You’ll feel better to clear this up,’ and I feel better.” Cross said. “I’m bound by four walls in this jail, but it is up to the Lord whether I will go free again.”
Despite Cross’s confession, he was freed from jail after a few weeks and suffered no further punishment. A big reason for that was the fact that the police couldn’t find any corroborating evidence; everyone from Cross’s Casketville days was either dead or gone, and the police hadn’t bothered to retain any physical evidence.
Cross’s tale brings up a lot of issues regarding the philosophy of state-mandated punishment. It seems like he was let off the hook because of his religious conversion. But many incarcerated criminals have claimed similar spiritual transformations—why do they tend to be treated more disdainfully by the system? And is a guilty conscience really as grave a punishment as the loss of physical freedom? Edgar Allen Poe might have thought so, but I reckon that most everyone else will disagree.
Microkhan has a bunch of A-plus material lined up for the coming weeks, including looks at gossip in Borneo, Korean marathoners, chess hustling, and Orissan labor songs. But today’s a wash due to a Wired deadline, so please ease into your Monday with a humble musical offering: New Birth‘s “You Don’t Have to Be Alone.” Killer lead vocals on this one, plus I can never resist a musician in a polyester cape. This is a band that deserves to be part of the soul canon, though not for its cover art.
There was a time not long ago when slapstick comedies like Hamburger…The Motion Picture seemingly occupied half the multiplexes in America. The cinematic formula, arguably pioneered by the much-maligned Police Academy heptalogy, was devilishly simple: Throw a bunch of wacky, hormonally charged characters into close quarters and let physical mayhem ensue. I was squarely in the target demographic when these films had their heyday, and forked over many a dollar to watch fat people fall of helicopters and buxom blondes reveal their bras.
In hindsight, of course, one must admit that most of these movies were really, really terrible—and thus ideal fodder for our semi-regular Bad Movie Friday feature. Hamburger…The Motion Picture is truly the bottom of the barrel, and not only because of those stupid ellipses in the middle of the title. This is the perfect example of a film that was almost certainly dreamed up by a high-as-a-kite studio executive who drove by the All American Burger on Sunset Boulevard and thought to himself, “You know kids like? Hamburgers!” Even the great Dick Butkus couldn’t save this horrific mish-mash, which inspired a Variety review that could never be written in the post-9/11 world:
To judge Hamburger…The Motion Picture fairly requires certain relative standards of the filmgoing experience. If, for example, the theater were captured by terrorists and a member of the audience killed every 20 minutes for eight days, that would be a bad filmgoing experience. Without the terrorists, Hamburger is merely a poor filmgoing experience.
Fortunately, appearing in this turkey didn’t stymie the career of handsome leading man Leigh McCloskey, now primarily known as an artist who recently collaborated with Flying Lotus on Cosmogramma. No one from the rival Hot Dog…The Movie appears to have attained such lofty creative heights.
Perhaps I am bucking for a karmic penalty here, but let me take a brief moment to speak slightly ill of the dead. Neutron-bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen, who passed away four days ago, was always a controversial figure, and not just because of his role in the atomic-weapons industry. As previously highlighted on Microkhan, Cohen was prone to making wildly exaggerated statements about his own genius and importance, and he obviously operated with a massive chip on his shoulder. But even Cohen opponents could not deny his technical brilliance—the Cold War-era RAND Corporation didn’t tap dummies for its inner circle.
Cohen may have longed to be regarded as an equal of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, but he did his legacy no favors in his waning years by constantly spouting off about a substance of dubious provenance: red mercury:
In recent years, Mr. Cohen prominently warned of a black market substance called red mercury, supposedly capable of compressing fusion materials to detonate a nuclear device as small as a baseball — ideal for terrorists. Most scientists call the substance mythical, and stories about it, many circulating on the Internet, are widely regarded as spurious.
Indeed, red mercury last made news two summers ago, when rumors swirled around Saudi Arabia that the substance was embedded in Singer sewing machines. Before that, it figured prominent in several smuggling hoaxes centered in the former Soviet Union. Cohen’s insistence on the veracity of the red mercury threat is akin to Freeman Dyson suddenly warning the world about the illicit admantium trade.
The question, then, is why a man of Cohen’s obvious intellectual prowess could be so easily duped by hokum. And I have to wonder whether his gullibility was simply a product of the aging process, which has been known to diminish critical thinking skills far more than ambition. Cohen wanted to stay relevant, and that meant finding a crusade that would set him in opposition to the establishment that had never embraced his life’s work. Unfortunately, Cohen settled on a cause of little worth, perhaps because the years had worn away his mental acuity. (He doesn’t appear to have embraced the red-mercury issue until his late 70s.)
This isn’t the first time that an accomplished, outspoken figure has tarnished their legacy by touting false theories in their golden years. Cohen’s tale reminds me of the final years of Pierre Salinger, the former White House official whose name is now synonymous with conspiratorial nuttiness. Sad stuff, but I do understand the impulse. No one wants to admit that their heyday is over, and so they grasp for ways to stay in the conversation. And that can lead to really poor decisions by otherwise brilliant folks.
Putting the finishing touches on a soon-to-be-revealed major project this morning, so just a quick slice of sonic grandeur to get your day started. Laugh if you must at this band’s name, but rest assured that many of the finest minds in hip-hop history can see beyond the cheesy psychedelic moniker. The Electric Prunes’ “General Confessional,” produced by the real David Axelrod, has been memorably sampled by the Beatnuts, Black Moon, Madlib, and Rampage, among many others. It’s easy to see the appeal: The song oozes a natural, silky menace, as if it was recorded in an abandoned Transylvanian church after everyone in the band downed some high-quality asinthe.
Fun fact about The Electric Prunes: Kenny “Danger Zone” Loggins was once a member, during his alleged rock-‘n-roll phase. I wonder how many times Loggins’ work has been sampled. I’m guessing zero.
Try as I might to keep apprised of the political situation in the Solomon Islands, I regrettably lose track of the thread from time to time. Thanks, then, to the commenter who recently showed up to offer his two cents regarding Jimmy “Rasta” Lusibaea, the former ethnic militia leader who had become the Solomon Islands’ fisheries minister. Our Microkhan visitor from the South Pacific is evidently not a fan:
[Lusibaea] is not capable and dumb, he is just a wild boar let loose with alot of weight to throw around….he wont make a good politician….how do you think he became wealthy,,,by the barrel of a gun of course..he stole, he is a thief, and unworthy of a position in the Big House…he sucks man!
I wondered why this heartfelt comment appeared a few months after the post went live. A quick news search revealed all: Lusibaea was recently convicted for kneecaping an unconscious man a decade ago. He was sentenced today to roughly 33 months in prison, a pronouncement that caused his youthful supporters to run roughshod through the streets of Honiara. The political fallout may be worse, however:
The sentencing bars Lusibaea from acting as an MP and puts the government, led by Danny Philip, under pressure. Mr Philip now has 24 members, while the opposition, led by Steve Abana, has 23. Three by-elections are likely to take place next month after two other MPs died shortly after elections in August.
The stakes here are unusually high, given the Western world’s interest in tapping the Solomon Islands’ gold resources. But it’s tough to see how foreign business interests can have much impact on tiny by-elections. As is so often the case with embryonic democracies, the entire experiment may ride on the ability of local political bosses to deliver votes—a service that will come with a heavy price tag, no doubt.
The human rays of sunshine above are academics devoted to the study of juche, the nonsensical North Korean ideology that stresses self-reliance above all else. You would think that men and women in possession of advanced degrees would recognize the flaws in an economic theory that denies the basic sociability of our species—or, at the very least, would have the critical thinking skills required to realize that North Korea staggers by thanks to foreign aid and smuggling, two major juche no-nos. But that doesn’t appear to be the case for the select group of Ivory Tower dwellers who belong to the International Institute of the Juche Idea, which is sort of the Modern Language Association for Maoist fantasy.
Background on the Institute’s history can be found in this debriefing of a North Korean defector. Kim Il-sung evidently thought that he could strengthen North Korea’s international standing by legitimizing juche as a scholarly topic. Not a wholly illogical plan, perhaps, as universities have always been a source of revolutionary agitation. But as you might expect, few professors were willing to devote their careers to studying an idea that is only slightly more coherent than Jonah Hex.
There have been a few takers, though, most notably in Nigeria, where the national juche committee recently got 530 college students to turn out for a lecture series. (I’m guessing there were free snacks.) And the IIJI’s journal, Study of the Juche Idea, continues to publish semi-regularly; the latest issue actually features an article by an American, Anthony DiFilippo, a sociologist at Lincoln University.
I am most aggrieved to learn that the Institute has now established a beachhead in our beloved Mongolia, too—and at the venerable Chinggis Khan University, no less. How sad to think that a single Mongolian mind will be wasted pondering a philosophy that is essentially meaningless—a truism that even nifty clip art can’t counteract.
I’ve long refused to travel during the holidays, a stance that makes even more sense in this era of rampant junk touching. I might change my mind, however, if modern air travel bore any faint resemblance to what’s on offer in the Khrushchev-era Aeroflot commercial above. Dancing flight attendants in futuristic pink mini-skirts and white go-go boots? Free hand cream and wine? Yes and yes.
Okay, granted, the reality probably didn’t live up to the Madison AvenueTretyakovsky Proyezd ideal. The flight attendants were probably surly, the pilots drunk. Still sounds better than having to fly Delta out of LaGuardia on the day before Thanksgiving.
Have a tremendous holiday, and see you back here in a few days.
While I enjoy a good sci-fi concept album as much as the next khan, few bands are adept at creating mythologies that measure up to their music. Ziggy Stardust’s backstory has always struck me as prosaic, for example, while the “Red Star of the Solar Federation” from Rush’s 2112 is only a tad less schlocky than The Wild, Wild Planet.
The same cannot be said, however, for Detroit techno legends Drexciya, who built an entire career around a single unifying fantasy: the notion that there exists an underwater kingdom populated by the descendants of West Africans who were tossed overboard during the Middle Passage, yet somehow survived and learned to breath like fish. Primarily a one-man show steered by the late James Stinson, who refused to show his face publicly, Drexciya created lyric-less songs that fleshed out the imaginary history of this Atlantis-like world, occasionally expanding the narrative to show how the Drexciyan race evolved over the centuries (for example, by establishing diplomatic relations with a distant star called Clone). It’s daft stuff, but it works because of the sonic textures of Stinson’s work—so much so, in fact, that his music inspired painter Ellen Gallagher to do an entire series devoted to the mythology of Drexicya.
In researching Stinson’s universe, I came across this intriguing tidbit from his obituary:
Although a jazz and hip-hop listener, Stinson also deliberately isolated himself from other electronic music, especially when recording, for the simple reason that he didn’t want to be unduly influenced by other peoples’ ideas.
I’ve often wondered about the wisdom of doing this—of isolating one’s self from new ideas and modes of expression while in the thick of the creative process, so that you don’t end up wearing your influences on your sleeve. A big part of being an artist is opening yourself up to as many ideas as possible, but there’s also something to be said for trusting the visions that are rattling around your head, however odd they may seem. It probably helps to know thyself a bit before deciding whether or not to work in isolation, though; giving the brain too much alone time probably isn’t the best idea for certain neural types.
Many more Drexciya tunes here; I’m partial to “Sea Snake.”
I spent much of the weekend zipping through The Reluctant Communist, former Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins‘ memoir of the 39 years he spent living in North Korea after walking across the demilitarized zone in 1965. It’s a harrowing read, primarily because it reveals the North Korean establishment to be even more deluded than I’d previously realized. There is actually a nice parallel in the story between Jenkins’ mindset before defecting and that of Kim Jong-il’s regime. As Jenkins explains it, he was afraid of being deployed to Vietnam, and reckoned that he would surely be court-martialed if he went AWOL in South Korea. So he figured that he’d hand himself over to the North Koreans, who would then hand him over to the Soviets, who in turn would send Jenkins back to America as part of a Cold War prisoner swap. An absolutely bonkers plan, especially since there was no love lost between Pyongyang and Moscow. But it made sense in Jenkins’ beer-addled mind, just as North Korea’s seemingly daft scheming must feel logical to Kim and his frightened underlings.
There is one passage from the book that really gets to the heart of this logical dysfunction. It is Jenkins’ account of North Korea’s 1978 abduction of his Japanese wife, Hitomi Soga, from Sado Island. After being assaulted and stuffed in a sack, Soga was loaded onto a ship and put out to sea. That’s when things got really strange:
They sailed the whole rest of the day and landed in Chongjin, North Korea, on the evening of the thirteenth. The next morning, they gave her breakfast and took her to the beach to look for clams. That is typical of how strange the North Korean cadres are, how out of touch they are with the emotions normal people have. Here they have just kidnapped you and your mother and separated you, they have ripped you from your home street in your own country without any explanation or any idea of what is going to become of you, and they are so out of touch with what they have just put you through and how you might hate them and fear them at that moment that they see nothing weird in saying, “Now that we have a few moments, maybe it would be fun for you to go to the beach to look for some clams?” They are that crazy.
This anecdote makes me wonder if a nation’s entire elite can suffer from emotional tone deafness, simply because they were raised and educated in isolation from the world beyond their borders. Or perhaps it wasn’t the isolation that deprived these cadres of their ability to pick up on social cues, but rather the fact that North Korean education is exclusively about indoctrination rather than socialization.
The bottom line is that human beings are far more malleable than we typically realize. The little things we take for granted—the capacity to recognize another person’s pain, the logical prowess to link cause to effect—are not instinctual, but the product of early reinforcement. If a warped system gets its hooks into a child, it’s equivalent to a virus embedding itself in a piece of software: The complete product may still look the same to the untrained eye, but it malfunctions in a precise and dreadful way.
All the recent chatter over the dangers of professional football compelled me to look up one of my favorite snippets of Greek mythology: the tale of Achilles’ choice, from Book Nine of the Iliad. For those who have only foggy memories of high-school English, the story goes like this: the gods of Olympus gave Achilles the option of leaving Troy alive, in which case he would live to a ripe old age and die in anonymity. If he stayed in Troy, by contrast, he would be killed in battle, but his name would be renowned for all eternity. The fact that you’re reading these words makes clear which fate Achilles selected; the parallel with debilitated former football players is tough to miss.
Leo Tolstoy explored similar philosophical terrain in The Two Brothers, a brief parable about siblings who choose very different paths through life. One is a stand-in for Achilles, a risk taker who prefers the peaks-and-valleys model of existence; the other is content to live in peace. The former brother gets the last word in the story, which suggests that Tolstoy’s sympathies, like those of Homer, lay with the bold.
And that makes sense for men of letters, who typically need strong characters in order to create drama. (Okay, maybe not Arthur Miller, but you get the point.) But should populations at large similarly favor risk takers? While bold individuals certainly play a key role in advancing any species’ fortunes, no population can afford to have too many members bent on glory at all costs. There has to be a balance between those with a predisposition to sally forth, and those who hang back in the rear and provide stability. What, then, is the optimal ratio between the two types?
There are some clues to be found in one of my favorite papers of recent vintage: “Effects of group size and personality on social foraging: the distribution of sheep across patches” from Behavioral Ecology. The paper describes an experiment in which researchers split their ovine subjects into two groups: one consisting of sheep notable for their boldness, the other of meeker compatriots. (The personality determinations were made based on how the sheep responded to various inanimate objects.) They then observed the animals’ grazing habits over time, in order to discern how temperament might affects the sheep’s’ willingness to wander toward new patches of grass.
It came as no surprise that the bold sheep were more willing to break away from their groups in order to exploit fresh turf. But as the researchers noted, this doesn’t mean that risk-taking individuals are necessarily more valuable to a population’s survival than their meeker counterparts; it is the interplay between these two personality types that creates a population with the best long-term odds of success:
Our results demonstrate that individual variability can also promote behavioral plasticity at the level of groups within populations. It is possible that much of the variation in the spatial organization of groups may depend on fairly small phenotypic differences between a few individuals. Different personality types may also act as complementary forces at the scale of the flock or herd, with bold individuals contributing to the spread of the group and their ability to explore new resource sites and shy animals contributing to the maintenance of group cohesion.
The question then becomes, What is the ideal ratio between shy and bold individuals? Perhaps someday we’ll be able to get a better sense of the answer by evaluating the distribution of so-called risk-taking genes—though, to be honest, I remain deeply skeptical of such methods, which strike me as too dismissive of nurture’s role. Or maybe there is wisdom to be gleaned from the realm of military science, which has long been fascinated with the concept of the tooth-to-tail ratio—that is, the correct proportion of combat to support troops.
Above all, I’m curious about the role that narratives play in shaping the bold-to-shy balance. The Iliad’s commendation of Achilles’ choice or Sports Illustrated’s frequent paeans to gridiron heroes reinforce the notion that it’s always more noble to opt for glory over comfort. Does this suggest that humans are too predisposed toward meekness, so that we require cultural encouragement to develop a sufficient number of risk takers to sustain the species? If so, one might argue that storytelling has been more integral to our collective success than opposable thumbs.
There’s a scene in My Best Fiend in which Werner Herzog reveals what made him believe that Klaus Kinski possessed rare talent. It was a brief moment in a film whose title now escapes me, about a German soldier who is executed for deserting the army to be with his girlfriend. (A Time to Love and a Time to Die, perhaps?) Kinski plays a lieutenant who is taking a nap with his head atop a wooden table, and is woken up by a subordinate. He stirs, snorts, and checks his watch, a series of actions that takes no longer than two seconds. But Herzog claims that the way Kinski awakens in the scene is dramatic genius, and something that still haunts his imagination to this day. My Best Fiend shows the clip again and again, until you can’t help but see the great German director’s point—there is something so unusual about Kinski’s motion and body language that it’s difficult to shake the cinematic moment.
Herzog’s championing of that scene came to mind recently when I stumbled upon this gallery of images by the great Turkish photojournalist Coskun Aral. Many years ago, I purchased an edition of The World’s Most Dangerous Places that featured a brief article by Aral about his time in war-torn Lebanon. It was only a small sliver of a book that stretched over 1,000 pages, and the few accompanying photos were barely wallet-sized, black-and-white, and printed on newspaper-quality paper. Yet there was one image that immediately burned itself into my brain: the one above, of a Lebanese militiaman passing his leisure hours by playing Russian roulette. (According to Aral, the soldier died a week later when he gambled on the wrong chamber.)
I can’t quite explain why this photo has stuck with me for over a decade now. There are certainly tons of Russian roulette images in popular culture, so it’s not the sheer craziness of the situation that got to me. No, it was something much more subtle—the curl of grim resignation on the man’s lips, the way in which the shadows already seemed to be claiming him for the grave. As a result, I’ve always made sure my tattered, coffee-stained copy of The World’s Most Dangerous Places is within easy reach, so I can return to the photo whenever the memory of its initial impact flutters across my mind.
Aral took plenty more ultra-disturbing photos while on assignment in Lebanon, of course—there’s one of Druze militiamen in Halloween masks that I’ve been dying to find online. But the Russian roulette image is his accidental masterpiece, a fleeting glimpse of raw desperation that deserves a place in the photjournalism canon.
Read more about Aral here, or watch an interview with the man here. And apologies if the Russian roulette photo gets its hooks into you—it’s definitely not something you want hanging around your hippocampus when you want to be in a happy place.
Even by the most conservative estimates, Tonga is the most intensely Mormon nation on Earth. The official estimate is that roughly 15 percent of Tonga’s population belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but Mormons adherent place the figure much higher—typically around 32 percent, and sometimes even higher. This is par for the course in Polynesia, of course—of the ten nations with the highest concentrations of Mormons, six are in the South Pacific.
Part of the LDS Church’s success in Tonga is obviously due to tenacity of its missionaries, who first visited the kingdom in 1891. But there is another factor to consider, one that brings into question that nature of the conversion statistics: the fact that many Tongans adopt Mormonism for reasons that probably have less to do with spirituality than with bettering their family’s fortunes:
Assembly line Mormon churches (with their inevitable basketball courts) are popping up in villages all over Tonga, as the children of Israel convert in droves to be eligible for the free buildings, schools, sporting facilities, and children’s lunches. Many Tongans become “school Mormons,” joining as their children approach high school age and dropping out as they complete college in Hawaii. Unlike Cook Islanders and American Samoans, Tongans don’t have the free right of entry to a larger country, so church help in gaining a toehold in Honolulu or Salt Lake City is highly valued.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Mormons’ conversion strategy isn’t clever. Even if a sizable percentage of Tongan adherents only gravitate toward the Church for the benefits, there is a good chance that many of their children, having passed through Mormon schools, will become more genuinely devout than their parents. This is similar to what happened in Nagaland, where American Baptist missionaries opened primary schools beginning in the late 19th century, and now the North-East Indian province is among the most earnestly Christian corners of the world—though, granted, the Nagas do embrace a form of Christianity that is more than a little tinged with tribal traditions.
But bribery and religion do make for strange bedfellows, don’t they? It’s clear that the LDS Church takes great pride in its conversion numbers from Tonga, using them as proof that its message resonates the world over—even with those who might not have been particularly welcome in the Church prior to 1978. But winning souls through material inducements strikes me as undermining one of a religion’s key attributes: Its claim to offer an undeniable truth.
Is there something untoward about using bribery to attract converts, many of whose hearts are not truly changed by the proselytizers’ message?
Too sick to offer anything halfway intelligible this morning—to cop a line from Killing Zoe, I feel as if the rest of the world is in a bubble of glass and that I’m rubbing up against it like a bad windshield wiper. As I recuperate, please enjoy the classic Jamaican rocksteady cut above, later made famous by Sugar Minott.
Whenever my work involves looking at rolls of decades-old microfilm, I inevitably stumble across a handful of tremendous yarns that have been lost to time. Such was the case this past Saturday, as I whiled away the hours scrolling through old copies of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Lazily panning across the pages in search of a few relevant scraps of info, I fortuitously encountered the strange story of Lonnie Cross. In 1935, Cross got in a violent argument with his girlfriend, and a Good Samaritan named Edward Bozier tried to break up the altercation. The incident ended with Bozier dead from a stab wound to the skull, and Cross on the run—for the next 37 years. That stretch on the lam ended, however, when Cross suddenly decided to 
Perhaps I am bucking for a karmic penalty here, but let me take a brief moment to speak slightly ill of the dead. Neutron-bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen, who 
The human rays of sunshine above are academics devoted to the study of 
