G.I.S.M.: Gay Individual Social Man

G.I.S.M.:

Gay Individual Social Man

live VHS tape (1995)

DNA Live in New York City

DNA

live in New York City

Book Review

Book Review

The Man In the Iron Mask

by Alexandre Dumas

     Honor and loyalty. That is what Alexandre Dumas’s The Man In the Iron Mask is all about. Forget the title and forget that it is the final chapter in the saga of the Three Musketeers because really there are four musketeers, not three. In actuality, the musketeers are a massive military platoon that goes to war in the name of the French king anyhow. This novel can be a lot more interesting if you do not allow those labels to mislead your attention. The overriding theme is more important and the secondary theme of aging and intergenerational conflict is significant too.

     First off it must be pointed out that d’Artagnan, the captain of the musketeers, is the main character of this book. As he gets on in years, he tries to maintain his status, earned through past achievements and military glories while serving under King Louis XIII. Problems arise as the newly crowned King Louis XIV challenges his loyalty to the other musketeers named Parthos, Athos, and Aramis. King Louis is young and naive; his decisions are unfair and shortsighted. One of the first big conflicts between the king and d’Artagnan occurs when the ambitious and dishonest Colbert frames the financial surattendant Fouquet. Colbert wants Fouquet’s position so king Louis sends the wily d’Artagnan to arrest him. But Fouquet is extremely loyal to the king and the captain of the musketeers manages to handle the situation so that Fouquet avoids peril for the time being. The honor and loyalty of all three men are put under a microscope.

     The titular Man In the Iron Mask refers to the most exciting section of the novel. Do not expect this to be a fictionalized account of the historic Man In the Iron Mask whose identity remains a secret to this day. Maybe Dumas wrote this as a way of speculating about that non-fictional prisoner’s identity; if he was, it sounds like a conspiracy theory. And Dumas’s story is about a conspiracy, one that is schemed up by Aramis who gets assistance from the herculean giant Porthos. In this fictional narrative, King Louis XIV has a twin brother who has an equal right to the throne and the royal inheritance. Rather than having a sibling rivalry over accession, the twin, named Philippe, was secretly imprisoned in the Bastille. Aramis’s plan is to break him out, kidnap King Louis XIV and place Philippe on the throne. No one would supposedly know the difference since the twins look identical. The plot does not work. Aramis and Porthos get exiled and Philippe gets sent away. King Louis XIV again proves himself to be unjust and cruel, a trait that lasts throughout the entire book, even when he tries to wise up and learn from his mistakes as he grows older. He never truly redeems himself, something that plays out interestingly enough if you know what happened to the real King Louis XIV during the French Revolution.

     The biggest conflict between d’Artagnan and King Louis XIV occurs when the captain is sent to either execute or capture Aramis and Porthos, his two closest and most loyal friends from the previous musketeer stories. This is the second most exciting part of the novel. Trapped off the coast of Brittany on Belle Isle, Aramis and Porthos use guile and guts to fight the troops of musketeers who arrive to take them back to Paris. Ultimately, this passage shows the king where the limitations of his power and intellect lie and he learns where d’Artagnan’s loyalty ultimately is.

     The third most significant story line involves the aging Arthos and his son Raoul whose heart has been broken. La Valliere is the woman he loved but she rejected him to marry King Louis XIV in order to advance her social position. This situation does not work out well for either of them. Arthos and Raoul are so close they almost seem like man and wife rather than father and son. Even so, Raoul decides to go off to Algeria to fight and die as a Christian martyr in a colonial war since he can not have the woman he wants. There is nothing complicated about this story but the detailed and long drawn out description of Arthos’s farewell to Raoul is so vivid and melancholy that it can stay with the reader for a long time.

     One major issue some readers might have with this novel is that it is the end of the story cycle involving the Three (Four) Musketeers. People who have not read the previous books may not appreciate the full meaning of everything that happens in The Man In the Iron Mask. Still, it can be read as a stand alone novel. Dumas gives enough information about the preceding story lines so that the reader does not get completely lost. The characters are well-drawn enough so that you can get a good understanding of who they are without knowing all the details of their past. Another thing that might put readers off is the inherently conservative nature of Dumas’s ideas. This is a story about the aristocratic rulers of France that were torn down during the French Revolution and their morals and ideology reflect a traditional and upper-class mindset. The courageous musketeers fear being called rebels more than anything else, even when it is obvious they dislike King Louis XIV. There is no social justice to be found in these pages but do not forget that Alexandre Dumas himself was of Afro-Caribbean descent.

     In the end, however, this is a good book. The stories are suspenseful, some characters are sympathetic, and their personalities are so clearly described that they are unforgettable by the end of the book. Finally, if you think about the moral dilemmas of d’Artagnan, you might even begin to ask subtle questions about who you are loyal to in life, if anybody, and why.

Dumas, Alexandre. The Man In the Iron Mask. Signet Classics, New York: 1992. 

The Nervous System

The Nervous System

excerpt from a Soviet documentary film about psychological conditioning

(1928)

Puerto Rico, Protest, Prison: Johanna Fernández and Jose Saldaña Talk About The Young Lords

Johanna Fernández, child of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and professor at New York’s Baruch College, has just published The Young Lords: A Radical History, a book about the 1960s Puerto Rican activist group. The Young Lords began as a Chicago street gang; then, inspired by the Black Panther Party, morphed into a militant rights organization that caught fire in New York City, where Jose Saldaña, child of Puerto Rican immigrants, was born. Raised in impoverished East Harlem, Jose spent 38 years in NY prisons. On his release in 2018, he became the Director of Release Aging People in Prison Campaign (RAPP) and a compelling critic of our criminal justice system. Johanna, for her part, has devoted years to the prison abolition movement, championing the release of imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Read the interview on Counterpunch here

Genetic Self-Destruct – Some Worms Programmed to Die Early for Sake of Colony

Some worms are genetically predisposed to die before reaching old age, which appears to benefit the colony by reducing food demand, finds a new University College London-led study.

Read the full article on SciTech Daily here

L'Inferno

L'Inferno

silent film directed by

Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, & Giuseppe Di Liguoro

(1911)

Book Review

Book Review

City by Clifford D. Simak

     In the 21^st century, the human population begins to decline. Fear of nuclear war has driven people away from the cities. Advanced economics and new developments in atomic power allow people to live in countryside mansions for almost no money. Agricultural innovations have made the food supply abundant and better tasting. But Clifford D. Simak’s novel City is not utopian. This book is full of great ideas but like the future world as Simak imagines it, this novel lacks something fundamental.

     As City begins, talking dogs are debating the meaning and merits of some written stories that give accounts about the shrinking and disappearance of the human race. These Doggish academics can not be certain if the humans ever existed and some of them are convinced that people are a legendary and mythological species that grew from the imagination of primitive dogs. Each chapter is introduced by these intellectual canines and their individual interpretations of each story is explained. This framing device is clever for a number of reasons. One is that the readers, presumably people and not some other type of being, know the truth about what the dogs discuss. We see the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments. We can also see ourselves in them. The anthropomorphized dogs sound a lot like contemporary historians and theologians discussing the origins and meaning of the Christian Bible. By implication, our understanding of that and other ancient texts are incomplete and mostly the result of guesswork and speculation. We also learn through this framing that dogs survived when humans went extinct. Of course we are supposed to wonder how that happened and of course stories about dogs are always cute. Simak was reaching for the lowest hanging fruit when he wrote this.

     City is made up of eight chapters which were all originally short stories published in pulp sci-fi magazines. But “short stories” ought to be written in quotes because they are not really stories but more like situations, incomplete descriptions of the state of human affairs at different stages along the way to the end of the human race. Each story introduces some conflict such as whether people should be allowed to run their own farms or whether a man should remain at home or go to other places. At one point people discover that the planet Jupiter is a paradise compared to Earth so the human population thins out as massive amounts of people forsake their humanity and earthly home for a better life. (Is this another allusion to the Bible? Exodus or the conflict between Christ and Pontius Pilate?) Later on, people lose interest in reproduction altogether and succumb to a state of mind-numbing boredom.

     This novel does not have strong character development. There are actually very few real characters that do much after their initial introduction to the stories. One recurring character is Joe, a member of a mutant race that speciated out of humanity. They have telepathic powers, superior intelligence, and are condescending to ordinary humans. Joe does not actually do a whole lot except help some people solve technological problems when they reach an impasse. He also steals the book outlining the Juwain philosophy and then gives it back at a key monet for his own personal gain. He puts in a couple appearances but the effects of his actions play a bigger role in the drama than he actually does as a character.

     The robot Jenkins is the most complete character and appears in almost every chapter. His career as a servant to people spans 10,000 years. As he works for them, and robots start to become less dependent on humans, he takes on some of their characteristics like emotions, humor, and morality. He also tells some big lies for what he perceives to be ethical reasons.

     Otherwise the Webster family might be considered a character. The chapters move from one generation of the family to another, each generation representing a different era of human evolution. The Websters are masters of the technology and managers of the government even though the need for government grows increasingly obsolete throughout the book. Each member of the Webster family has the same problem, though; they all make important decisions that have a huge impact on the course of human destiny but each decision also causes a major problem. They are people characterized as taking giant strides but making terrible mistakes simultaneously. They all live in Webster manor (Solomon’s temple and the Ark of the Covenant? Look for the parallels).

     Then there are the dogs. After one of the Websters teaches a dog to talk, the pets begin to learn at an accelerated pace. Eventually they become the dominant species of the planet and teach all the other wild animals not to kill so that world peace is achieved (the lion lays down with the lamb). So the dogs and robots live on while humanity dwindles and then everything is threatened by the rise of ants who threaten to exterminate everything else on the planet due to an experiment once conducted by Joe the mutant.

     City introduces some amazing concepts. However, the characters are two-dimensional, shallow, and without any description of their physical appearance. In fact, most of the book is lacking in physical description. If you love reading because it transports you into an imaginary world, this book is not for you. It is difficult to travel to such an imaginary place when there is so little attention to what it actually looks like. As a novel, it also leaves out plot development, interesting dialogue, exciting action, and narrative tension. A lot of what happens takes place as either conversations or private thoughts in people’s heads. It is not a book with an action driven plot but more like a series of situations. A lot of conflicts are introduced but often only partially resolved if they get resolved at all. Reading City is like looking at a children’s coloring book that has not been colored in.

     Simak introduces some big ideas. They aren’t just big, they are intriguing and even grandiose. City could have been an epic science-fiction or fantasy classic along the lines of Dune or The Lord Of the Rings. Unfortunately, the end result is mediocre, bland, underwhelming, and rudimentary. It reads more like an outline than a complete novel. It seems as if Simak deliberately dumbed the whole thing down to make it more accessible to a wider and less intellectual audience. Because of its profound ideas it may be worth reading once but otherwise City proves that a great book can not be built out of great ideas alone. 

Simak, Clifford D. City. Ace Books Inc., New York: 1952. 

Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion

Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion

directed by Mark Carducci (1992)

Climate change and the collapse of Angkor Wat

Built using a thousand elephants and 300,000 laborers, the opulent temple city of Angkor has been near-deserted for centuries, yet its grandeur and mystery now attract a million visitors each year. The question is, why was it deserted at all? An answer is finally emerging.

Read the full article on Phys.Org here

On Noam Chomsky’s Theory of Human Nature

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the most famous (or infamous) academic who is also a prominent public intellectual. Chomsky is known first and foremost for his decades of activism on the political left: opposing American imperialism, advocating for egalitarian and democratic social policies and engaging in feuds with prominent right-wing intellectuals. Now in his 90s, Chomsky continues to pursue a dizzyingly busy schedule focusing on political activism, including an interview with yours truly, which will be livestreamed on 16 April. Love him or hate him, Chomsky’s energy is impressive.

Read the full article on Areo

The 19th Century French Hashish Club Called Club des Hashischins

The nineteenth century French Hashish Club called Club des Hashischins (also spelled Club des Hashishins or Club des Hachichins) was a club of hashish users dedicated to exploring drug-induced experiences, primarily with a resin that comes from the female cannabis plant called hashish (or nicknamed hash). The club was founded in about 1844 and included members from the literary and intellectually elite of Paris. Monthly séances (the French word for meetings) were held at the gothic Hôtel Pimodan (afterwards known as the Hôtel de Lauzun) in the rooms of Fernand Boissard, a nineteenth century painter and musician who was considered the figurehead of the club. At the time, also living at Pimodan in a rented upstairs apartment was the poet and translator of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, Charles Baudelaire. Théophile Gautier, a poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic also rented apartments there.

Read the full article on Geri Walton here

Like a Biblical Plague, Locusts Swarm East Africa, Laying Waste to Crops and Livelihoods

BEER, Somalia — In the distance, it looked like a cloud of confetti.

Faisa Abdi Alleh had never seen anything like it. Neither had anybody else here in the tiny town of Beer in northern Somalia.

With the cloud hovering over her farm about a mile away, Alleh and several of her children ran to investigate.

As they got closer, they could make out the whirring wings and the ridged torsos no longer than a finger.

“We saw them before they landed,” Alleh recalled.

Read the full article on Pulitzer Center here

Book Review

Book Review

Notre Dame of Paris

by Victor Hugo

     Paris...a city of glamour, art, sophistication, fine food, and passion for life. This is not how Victor Hugo imagined his hometown in his first novel Notre Dame of Paris. The picture he paints of 15^th century Parisian life is, instead, one of a grim city full of ignorant hicks, a worthless king, and an anemic Catholic church.

     A central figure in this classic French Romantic novel is La Esmeralda, the Gypsy dancer who entrances audiences with her companion goat Djali. The goat has gilded horns and performs tricks for the people’s entertainment. Esmeralda is possessed of a free spirit and powerful beauty. She is virginal and pure and has the virtues of a saint which she freely shares with others in times of distress. Almost every man she meets falls into a hypnotic state of infatuation for her. But despite her charisma, she also inspires the sins of envy, lust, and hatred in the fickle hearts of the Parisian citizens.

     This is what happens with Dom Claude Frollo, the archdeacon of Notre Dame Cathedral. Frollo was once a serious student of theology, medicine, and science but grew bored and delved into the black art of alchemy. Incidentally, Hugo’s novel is full of references to alchemical synbolism with references to the key that opens the red door and a few lions here and there but pursuing these signs may lead you down a blind alley. But in any case, the alchemy may have been what brought out the bad side of Dom Claude or maybe he had been exposed to too many mercury fumes while leading a solitary life in his secret laboratory. Or even more probable, his lifetime of celibacy probably drove him out of his mind. When he first sees La Esmeralda he becomes insane with lust for her and turns into a stalker, a potential rapist, and one of the creepiest characters in the history of Western novels. Like a teenage boy who is obsessed with a girl that hates him, Dom Claude Frollo can not stop his pursuit of her and when he can’t get what he wants, things turn out the worse for Esmeralda. At least the teenage years can be blamed for the social awkwardness of the aforementioned boy; Frollo, on the other hand, is an old man and one who works in the service of the church, no less, which makes him little more than evil.

     Claude Frollo’s sidekick is Quasimodo, the hunchbacked, deformed, deaf, and partially blind simpleton who is most closely associated in the public mind with Notre Dame of Paris. After being abandoned as a baby at the cathedral, Dom Claude takes him in as an act of charity and teaches him how to ring the bells in the campaniles. At first Quasimodo appears sinister but after La Esmeralda gets unfairly sentenced to death for a murder she did not commit, he snatches her from the mob who are about to take her away to the gallows. Quasimodo loves her and cares for her while embodying the idea that an ugly appearance does not signify a morally depraved soul as so many in the novel believed.

     Gringoire and Phoebus are other important characters that drive the plot, even though they play secondary roles to Esmeralda, Frollo, and Quasimodo. Basically they all love Esmeralda except the cad Phoebus who only wants to get in her pants. But Phoebus is the only one she loves and her naive pursuit of him is what sets the whole city on fire. Hugo’s depiction of repulsion, desire, and impossible love anticipates Jean-Paul Sartre’s depiction of Hell in his play No Exit. In 15^th century France, churches were considered sanctuaries and what went on inside them was untouchable by the police and the monarchy. So when Quasimodo rescues Esmeralda, he takes her to a secret room in Notre Dame. The judiciary decides to overrule the sanctuary law so a lower-class mob forms at night and storms the cathedral to rescue her.

     This uprising of the rabble and riffraff bears resemblance to the storming of the Bastille. In fact, the story switches over to a scene of the miserable King Louis XI holding a meeting in the Bastille tower to emphasize this reference. Notre Dame of Paris is set in the 15^th century but the influence of the French Revolution on the book is easy to see. The spectacle of public executions is present throughout the book. The arbitrary and unjust sentences of the courts, along with the feeble leadership of the monarchy, could fairly represent the pre-revolutionary situation. So can the church. Notre Dame sits at the center of Paris. The cathedral can be said to be the soul of the city while its inhabitants, Claude Frollo and Quasimodo, could be said to be the shriveling, weak, and impotent soul of the Catholic church.

     It is tempting to say that this novel is a commentary on the French Revolution but there really is a lot more to it than that. It is also a commentary on the art of architecture as well as an examination of the sickness of the human soul, a malady that has no apparent cure. Hugo’s condemnation of human stupidity and ignorance is harsh and brutal. The city of Paris is depicted as dark and gloomy, claustrophobic with lots of enclosed cells, dungeons, and chambers. The open spaces, the city squares, are places mostly used for torture and executions as if the only escape from the urban grit is to follow the river Seine out of town. The innocent figure of Esmeralda is first revered then degraded by the filthy and ignoble crowds who acre more interested in spectacle than human decency. Even in her purity, her naivite is a fatal flaw. Quasimodo, the hero of the book is a deformed monster and even his attempts at doing good end up doing unintentional harm. On top of all these themes, Hugo’s novel can be read as a protest against the death penalty, a cause he was passionate about throughout his life.

     The build-up of the plot, the atmosphere, and character development are nearly perfect. However, three sections of this book nearly ruin what could have been one of the greatest horror stories ever written. One of the longest, and most useless chapters, is a description of Medieval Paris. Another is a mid-novel essay on how literature has overtaken architecture as the most important art form. The third is the passage with King Louis XI meeting with his officials in the Bastille while the uprising at Notre Dame begins. All of these sections interrupt the flow of the narrative without adding much of any value to the story. It is like listening to a song where the singer stops the music and starts giving some dull academic lectures that have only a tenuous connection to the music that the audience wants to hear. Victor Hugo could have benefited with some better editing and any reader could easily skip the first two aforementioned passages without having missed anything of importance.

     Despite those flaws, Notre Dame of Paris is still a great book. It evokes an eerie atmosphere and leaves the reader feeling painfully sad. A book that can really make you feel something like that is worth reading. It can also make you wonder why the impoverished and goofy philosopher Gringoire lost interest in Esmeralda and ran off with her goat Djali. Maybe some questions are better left unanswered. 

Hugo, Victor. Notre Dame of Paris. Penguin Books, New York: 1978. 

AL GOLDSTEIN: THE RISE AND FALL OF A NEW YORK JEW

Al Goldstein co-founded Screw in 1968, calling his magazine “the Consumer Reports of sex” and then spent half a century battling the forces of American puritanism. Despite the raunchiness of his publication, Goldstein was unafraid to take on everyone from J. Edgar Hoover to Donald Trump. His appetites were legendary—for sex, food and controversy. Larry “Ratso” Sloman chronicles the rise and fall of the man he calls his mentor and friend.

Read the full article on Please Kill Me here

Linda Tripp, Clinton Sex Scandal Whistleblower, Dies At 70

Linda Tripp, the government employee who secretly recorded conversations with Monica Lewinsky in the late 1990s about Lewinsky's affair with President Clinton, has died at age 70.

Read the full article on NPR here

Propaganda

Propaganda

satirical documentary film by Slavko Martinov (2012)

Viruses don't have a metabolism; but some have the building blocks for one

In satellite photos of the Earth, clouds of bright green bloom across the surface of lakes and oceans as algae populations explode in nutrient-rich water. From the air, the algae appear to be the primary players in the ecological drama unfolding below.

But those single-celled organisms we credit for influencing the aquatic environment at the base of the food chain may be under the influence of something else: viruses whose genes can reconfigure their hosts' metabolism.

Read the full article on Phys.Org here

Tod Browning's Freaks and the Distorted Perceptions Of the Public

     Circus and carnival sideshows are an unsettling part of our cultural past. The display of physically deformed people for the public’s entertainment persisted for many years before laws were written making them illegal. The so-called “freaks” were physical inversions of everything that people considered to be beautiful or attractive. The physical revulsion people felt in their presence also hypnotized and fascinated them, arousing a range of emotions from pity and awe to disgust and fear. “What if I were born like that?” was the discomforting question many patrons silently asked themselves while viewing those unfortunate individuals. In less enlightened times, physiological deformity was also perceived as a symptom of moral depravity. So the subjective and human side of the carnival freaks became lost and made invisible while the world projected their own anxieties onto their outer appearances. In the 1930’s, Tod Browning directed the movie Freaks with the intention of correcting this false impression that people had.

     Tod Browning was born in Lexington, Kentucky to an affluent family. The year was 1880. From an early age, he developed a fascination for carnivals and circuses. By the age of sixteen, wanderlust had possessed him and he ran away from home to live the nomadic life of a carny. Intrigued by the tightly knit society of carnival freaks, he quickly made friends with them and was impressed at how their status as marginalized outsiders drew them closer together. While some people said they were being exploited, they countered that argument by saying if they were not employed as entertainers they would be locked in miserable institutions; at least as circus sideshow performers they got to earn some money and live as accepted as members in their own community. Browning soon got his first job as a barker for the Wild Man of Borneo. He also “performed” as The Living Corpse, an act where he would be buried in a coffin and two days later, dug up so that he could emerge as alive he ever was.

     Tod Browning eventually hooked up with the Barnum and Bailey Circus which brought him to New York City where he found employment as a minor vaudeville performer. He met up with the silent film maker W.D. Griffiths and went on to direct his own features. Browning made several horror movies, some of which starred the Man of a Thousand Faces, the great Lon Chaney Sr.

Browning’s life got darker. His father died and his wife left him. He began drinking heavily and sunk into the pit of alcoholism. Then one night he went for a drive with two friends. He did not see the delivery truck ahead of him because its taillights were burnt out. He crashed into it and his two friends died. Browning suffered severe injuries but survived to spend a long time recovering in the hospital. He was left with a limp due to a permanently injured leg. Some say that his genitals got severely mutilated or even severed completely. But this has never been confirmed.

     By 1931, he got his life back together enough to begin directing sound films. His most famous work was Dracula, starring the eccentric Hungarian immigrant Bela Lugosi. Browning’s star was rising so his lifelong friend, Harry Earles, approached him to pitch an idea for a film about circus sideshow performers based on the misanthropic short story “Spurs” by Tod Robbins. Browning liked the idea and so did the producers at MGM studios. Harry Earles was a midget circus performer that Browning knew from the old days; he went on to star as Hans in the film that was to become known as Freaks.

     Production began in Hollywood during the fall of 1931. The Russian actress, Olga Baclanova, was cast to star as the trapeze artist Cleopatra who the midget Hans falls in love with. The cast was mostly composed of authentic circus freaks so Tod Browning arranged to have her spend social time with them for the sake of getting used to who and what they were. Baclanova later said that at first their appearance shocked and saddened her but after getting to know them she regarded them as friends and ordinary human being. Some of them became her lifelong friends.

     The film crew members were not so sympathetic. After they initially encountered the cast, they refused to eat meals with them, complaining that the freaks’ appearance and behavior made them nauseous. The crew threatened to quit. Arrangements were made for them to have a separate meal time.

     Freaks begins with a carnival barker telling an audience he has the most shocking attraction ever then directs them to look down into a pit. They gasp with horror then the scene changes to show a meeting between Hans and Cleopatra. Hans is immediately infatuated with her and his midget fiancee Frieda looks on in despair.

     The movie cuts to a scene showing the sideshow freaks going about their daily business. A hermaphrodite makes eyes at a man while his friend tells him the female side loves him but the male side is jealous. A man with no arms or legs uses his mouth to strike a match and light a cigarette. Three people with microencephaly, otherwise known as pinheads, roam around the caravan grounds. A Siamese twin quarrels with her boyfriend while her sister, attached to her side, tries to ignore them. All the while other normal circus performers converse with them as if they do not even notice their physical abnormalities. The famous Johnny Eck, a man with no legs, transports himself up a set of stairs using only his arms. Hans continues to court Cleopatra while her strongman boyfriend, Hercules, laughs at him. The undertone of the whole scene is one of sexuality; it shows that the freaks have the same romantic notions as other people. In case anybody wonders about their ability to perform, a bearded lady gives birth to a baby girl in her trailer.

     While this scene in Freaks portrays an idyllic lifestyle, things off camera may not have been so good. Rumors were circulating that misbehaving pinheads were being chained to trees or locked in closets. Food rations for the performers were meager and of low quality; complaints were made that their paychecks were smaller than the agreed on rate and some of their wages were reported to be stolen. Illness and injuries were sometimes a problem due to binge drinking midgets and clowns.

As the film goes on, Cleopatra learns that Hans is rich. She and Hercules hatch a plan to murder him with poison for the sake of inheriting his money. Then there is the most famous scene in the movie. The circus freaks hold a wedding dinner where they gather with Cleopatra and Hans around a table. A dwarf dances on the table then picks up a giant goblet and passes it around to each person. While everyone takes a drink, one at a time, they chant in unison, “Gooble gobble gooble goble, one of us, one of us.” They announce that Cleopatra has been accepted into the fold of freaks. She becomes hysterical and, in a drunken rage she shouts at them, throws wine in their faces, and scares them all away. Hercules carries her off and Hans passes out from the poison she put in his drink.

     At this point the message is clear. The beautiful people are morally sick in their inner lives while the physically deformed are happy, honest, ethical, and possessed of inner beauty.

     By the time Hans wakes up, he is wise to Cleopatra’s plan. She gives him medicine, actually poison, to help him get better but he spits it out when she is not looking. Soon the circus caravan heads out on the road during a thunderstorm. Cleopatra decides to escape from her trailer when Johnny Eck and a dwarf show up in support of Hans; they begin polishing guns and knives as she gets scared and flees. In what may be one of the creepiest scenes in any of the old-time horror films, all the freaks come out and crawl through the rain and mud after Cleopatra and Hercules who try to escape. Then lightning strikes a tree.

     The next scene returns to the beginning where the barker commands his audience to look into the pit. There they see Cleopatra transformed into a duck, her legs missing, her hands mutilated to look like webbed feet, her head shrunken, a beak on her mouth, and a tiny tuft of hair, like the style worn by the pinheads, on top of her head.

     During the test screening of the movie, some audience members threw up. Many of them ran out of the theater. The small number of people who stayed complained that Freaks was a disgusting movie. The producers demanded that Tod Browning cut all the disturbing scenes from the film. The ninety minute feature got pared down to less than an hour as a result. Scenes that were cut included parts of the wedding scene; originally it showed each freak drooling into the wine goblet before they passed it on to the person sitting beside them. The dwarf on the table was thought to be doing a lewd and obscene dance so part of that was cut. The chase scene ended with the tree falling on Cleopatra’s legs before the freaks tortured here and mutilated her body. A segment where they catch Hercules and castrate the strongman also got deleted. These scenes were lost and most likely destroyed. The remaining final cut lasts a mere 62 minutes with a segment tacked on to the end where Hans apologizes to his first fiancee Fried and they agree to get marries; no doubt this was meant to stretch the movie out to feature length and leave the audience with a more uplifting conclusion.

     Freaks bombed at the box office and Tod Browning’s career as a film director was officially over. The movie got banned in the United Kingdom because censors claimed its depiction of disabled people was inhumane. But censors rarely understand the content they censor and missed the point that the film was intended to advocate for the idea that these circus sideshow performers were real people who deserved to be treated with the same amount of dignity as everyone else. In America, due to lack of interest, Freaks also disappeared for thirty years.

     In 1962, it was rediscovered and shown at a film festival in Italy. Critics immediately responded with praise and a cult following began to coalesce around it. In 1963, Freaks was finally released in the U.K. but it was given an X-rating. Its reputation grew throughout the 1960s as the word freak became synonymous with cool. By the 1970’s it was a regular feature in the midnight movies along with such films as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pink Flamingos, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, all of which were in their own way counter-cultural celebrations of the outsider status. The popularity of Freaks continued into the punk era. Joey Ramone, the tall and awkward singer for the Ramones, was born with a rare congenital disease that caused his bones to grow disproportionately and disfiguring the shape of his face. He also suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. He claimed that Freaks was a major artistic inspiration for his lyrics and he went on to become one of the most influential punk icons in history.

     Critics have found a lot to say about Freaks. One interpretation is that it allegorically portrays the relationship between the rich and poor during the Great Depression. Cleopatra and Hercules represented the morally bankrupt rich who viewed the morally pure lower classes, represented by the freaks, with contempt. Another interpretation is that while fascism was on the rise in Europe and eugenics and social Darwinism were popular in America, some segments of the population supported euthanasia for disabled people as a means of strengthening the human race; it appears that Tod Browning intended to make Freaks as a protest against these poisonous ideas. One scene cut from the original version showed a lynch mob organizing to attack and kill the sideshow performers. A less sympathetic interpretation has been that Hans symbolically represents the movie studio executives who worship the beauty of glamorous female stars, represented by the gigantism of the blonde bombshell Cleopatra; however, their lust for physical beauty was causing them to be blinded to quality as they continued to churn out junk entertainment and fluff with no intellectual substance for the sake of making higher profits.

     But despite any way you might choose to interpret Freaks, its importance can not be denied. In 1994 the film was selected for preservation in the United States Film Registry as an artistic work of strong cultural significance.

     Since the time Freaks was made, laws against using physically and mentally disabled people for entertainment purposes have been passed. People with microencephaly are well taken care of. Obese women, hermaphrodites, midgets, and dwarfs have all found increasing levels of social acceptance. Surgeons have successfully developed methods of separating most conjoined twins. Bearded ladies were proven to be men wearing dresses. Carnival and circus sideshows are no more. Tod Browning died impoverished and alone in 1962, just as Freaks was beginning to emerge from obscurity. Maybe his vision of a world more tolerant to outsiders has become partially true.

Reference

Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. Faber and Faber Inc., New York: 2001.

Book Review

Book Review

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

     What is the next step in human evolution? The science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon had some ideas. In his novel More Than Human he introduces homo gestalt, the species that will eventually replace homo sapiens. This time around, the environmental adaptation will not be physical but instead will be psychical or psychological.

     More Than Human is actually three separate short stories that were published in pulp sci-fi magazines during the Silver Age. They were strung together to create his novel and this was done effectively enough to make it organically sound, something that writers of lesser talent can not do even when writing a straight linear narrative. The first section of the novel introduces the initial main characters. The idiot-savant Lone is temporarily adopted by the Prodd family, some farmers whose first child was miscarried whereas their second child, Baby, is born mentally disabled. Baby has powerful mental computing abilities so Lone kidnaps him. The backwoods Kew family also gets introduced. Lone, the Prodds, and the Kews could easily have been taken from the pages of a a William Faulkner novel and that is one of the unique aspects of this book; it starts off like a Southern Gothic story with fully developed characters instead of the usual cartoon-type people in run-of-the-mill science fiction writing. We also learn about Janie and her African-American friends Beannie and Bonnie who can teleport themselves wherever they want. Lone, Baby. Beannie, Bonnie, and Janie are not separate people though. Actually they are different parts of one person and as one person they represent the next stage of human evolution, the homo gestalt.

     The second section is framed as a psychotherapy session with a character named Gerry. This is not just a framing device though as it also functions as a theoretical basis for the story. The concept of gestalt is examined further and the therapist’s office is a suitable setting for doing so. Gestalt actually originated as a school of psychoanalysis. It involved an inquiry into the separate elements of a person’s character as well as the past events of their lives. By putting the pieces of a patient’s mind back together a breakthrough would occur that led to an awakening of self-actualization. The individual was then able to live to their fullest potential by maximizing the insights gained during the course of their therapy. So Gerry’s psychotherapy session follows this routine as a narrative framework to advance the plot of the novel. He does not tell his story in a linear sequence of events. Instead he starts in the middle, explains the most important factors first, then fills in the details later so that all the pieces of the story’s puzzle fall into place at the end of his session. His story is about how Lone found him in the woods and took him in, how Lone met Mrs. Kew whose backstory is included in the first section of the book, and how Gerry takes homo gestalt to live with Mrs. Kew after Lone dies. At the end of Gerry’s therapy, we learn who he really is and how he lacks only one aspect of life, the one thing that makes a human complete. That missing piece of his personality gets taken up at the end of the book.

     The third and final section tells the story of Hip Barrows, a genius engineer who gets rescued by Janie, the homo gestalt member who can move objects by thinking. He is in jail with amnesia and does not know how he got there so Janie helps him get back on his feet and able to realize his place in relation to homo gestalt. Hip’s engineering experiments take him to the Prodd farm where he locates a device that was created by homo gestalt in the first section of More Than Human. Eventually Hip confronts Gerry who lives in a hidden location deep in the woods. The ending will not be given away here but an interesting observation might be that the final encounter bears a strong resemblance to a ceremonial initiation rite.

     Overall, More Than Human is effectively written. The characters are three-dimensional and the non-linear narrative has depth and complexity. The novel explores issues of morality, the human condition, and what it means to be an outsider in a world full of insiders. The language is clear and flows without getting sidetracked or bogged down in muddled thinking; there are no confusing plot holes. If you wanted to make the case that science fiction is, in the true sense, not genre literature but a branch of ordinary fiction, More Than Human could be one of the first books to use in support of that argument. 

Sturgeon, Theodore. More Than Human. Farrar Strauss and Young with Ballantine Books, New York: 1953.

Anthrax - From Russia with Love

This article recounts the chilling, yet fascinating story of the deadliest outbreak of anthrax in recorded history. Anthrax is a bacterium (germ) that can cause a serious, sometimes fatal infection. Anthrax can be used as a weapon. In 2001, anthrax was spread through the mail in a powder. Twenty-two people were infected. The events that occurred in Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1979 demonstrate what can happen when anthrax is released into the air.

Read the full article on Medicine Net here

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Originally poster in comments section here on Imagefap (NSFW)

R.I.P. Cristina

R.I.P. Cristina

1959 - 2020

new wave singer

Cult ov the Womb - Satanic Global War

Cult ov the Womb

Satanic Global War

video by Brex Green

from the 23 Eazy Pieces VHS compilation

The Value of Science Fiction

The Value of Science Fiction

short film with science fiction authors