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After World War I, Horror Movies Were Invaded By an Army of Reanimated Corpses

"J'accuse!" 1919.

W. Scott Poole | an excerpt adapted from Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror | Counterpoint | October 2018 | 23 minutes (6,219 words)

The murderous folly of the Great War chilled western Europe to the bone, and the new, gruesome entertainment of the horror film became neither escape nor catharsis but rather a repetition of trauma. Telling these stories sometimes had the effect of ripping the scab from the wound so that it never became healthy, or grieving until grief became an end in itself. At times, the stories included social criticism. In all cases, the horror film included a long, angry procession of unquiet corpses.

Not everyone would agree, or at least believe, that horror films carry so much weight. “You are reading too much into the movies” is a fairly common response to such claims. “They’re just entertainment.” This idea of course has its own history and, paradoxically, it begins with a writer who thought that the films made after the Great War did contain coded messages about the era. He saw in them a dangerous message that explained the path from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to its resurgence as a threatening power twenty years later.

Siegfried Kracauer left Germany in 1933, emigrating to Paris the same year that Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. After the beginning of World War II and the invasion of France, he fled for the Spanish border with the renegade essayist Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1940. Unlike Benjamin, however, Kracauer found a way to make it to the United States, where a Rockefeller Fellowship awaited him in the spring of 1941, thanks to his fellow exile the philosopher Max Horkheimer. New York City’s Museum of Modern Art offered Kracauer a position that involved studying the German films made between 1918 and 1933, a task he hoped might yield some clue as to what had become of his homeland. Read more…

The Masterless People: Pirates, Maroons, and the Struggle to Live Free

Leonard Parkinson, Maroon Leader, Jamaica, 1796 / Wikimedia Commons

Joseph Kelly | an excerpt adapted from Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origins | Bloomsbury | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,192 words)

The English word maroon did not yet exist in 1607. The Spanish word from which it derives, cimarrón, was first coined to describe domesticated cattle brought to Hispaniola that escaped into the wild parts of the island. Most scholars today accept some form of this derivation, which dates at least to 1535, just forty years after Columbus landed on Hispaniola. By 1540, cimarrón was applied to Africans who, like the chattel before them, fled to the remote, wild places behind Spanish coastal colonies. Maroon first appeared in English in 1666 when John Davies, translating a history of Barbados, wrote that slaves, like those animals, would “run away and get into the Mountains and Forests, where they live like so many Beasts; then they are call’d Marons, that is to say Savages.” Sometimes, these escapees formed new communities in the wilderness, a phenomenon that anthropologists call grand marronage. Cimarrón and eventually the shortened word, maroon, carried a heavy metaphoric or perhaps even literal sense that these fugitives devolved to an animal ferocity, wildness, and savagery. That is to say, they left civilization to live like Native Americans.

Indians were often midwife to marronage. Siouan tribes or Yuchi Indians living on South Carolina’s coast helped the first maroons on the soil of what is today the United States. In 1526, five hundred Spanish with one hundred African slaves settled near the mouth of the Pee Dee River. The summer “seasoning,” mosquito-borne illnesses like yellow fever, began to carry off the settlers. In the midst of this crisis, several slaves escaped into the hinterland, taking refuge among the Indians, and when in October the 150 surviving Spanish abandoned the settlement and sailed for Hispaniola, they left behind those escapees. Eighty years before Jamestown, the first intercontinental settlers on the East Coast of the United States were maroons: Africans who had escaped Spanish slavery.

Although maroons escaped from slavery, it was no Exodus. No God tendered them a land of milk and honey as reward for keeping faith. They retained no orthodox hegemony. They were heterodox. Typically, they came from various districts in Africa, and although they might share a creole language and common suffering, they shared little else. They entered no promised land. The wildernesses to which they fled were not their natural element, though the Europeans often thought they were. The mountains of Jamaica were just as inhospitable to Africans as they were to Europeans. The jungles of Suriname and the swamps of Carolina posed the same dangers for blacks as for whites. These places terrified the escaped slaves as they would terrify you or me were we suddenly hurled into them with only the resources we could steal and carry. Maroons embraced these dangers in desperation, preferring them to the certain dangers and degradations of slavery. They pledged faith to each other, formed communities according to their own liking, and kept sacred above all else the principal of freedom. Read more…

Shelved: The Sound of Big Star’s Self-Destruction

Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (3,146 words)

 

In 1948, Columbia Records introduced the first commercial long-playing record, which revolved at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute and could hold more than 20 minutes of music per side. The older technology, 78-rpm records, couldn’t hold more than three and a half minutes per side. It was now possible to make a self-contained album.

Prior to that, the term “album” was used to describe a printed collection of short classical music pieces, such as Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Later, 78 records would be bound in volumes called albums, which would allow the limited medium to communicate longer orchestral works. By the same token, the books that contained family photos also became known as albums.

With the new technology, it wasn’t long before albums were used to communicate a collection of songs united by a common theme. Frank Sinatra is widely credited with releasing the first concept album, 1955’s In the Wee Small Hours. All of the songs were arranged by Nelson Riddle and were united in their themes of love, loss, and romantic dissolution.

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On Blackface, Bert Williams, and Excellence

Publicity still portrait of American stage actor and Vaudeville comedian Bert Williams, 1915. (Photo by John D. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive/Getty Images)

“Who doesn’t wanna look like Diana Ross?” journalist Megyn Kelly asked panelists Tuesday morning on her news show, during a segment about Halloween costumes. She was defending former Housewife Luanne de Lesseps, who dressed up last year in a crude costume that looked nothing like the glamorous Ross, with a white jumpsuit, a tower of a curly wig, and darkened skin. “She wants to look like Diana Ross for the day — I don’t know how that got racist on Halloween,” Kelly said. Her claim to the harmlessness of blackface betrayed an empathy problem, but also an ignorance that was too much to ignore; NBC’s top brass reacted swiftly. It seems for that and, (likely, mostly), the show’s lackluster ratings, the commentator’s morning show was canceled. At least publicly, blackface is universally condemned now, and understood to be borne of racist intentions. But Kelly’s comments reveal several truths about a complicated anxiety at the heart of American entertainment and the tradition of minstrelsy upon which it all resides.

* * *

I caught a screening of the silent film Lime Kiln Club Field Day earlier this fall, at an independent theater in Brooklyn. Possibly the oldest surviving set of moving images with a cast of Black actors, Lime Kiln has made rounds on the independent circuit since 2014, when it first released to the public. It was made a century earlier, in 1913, and restored from a trove of negatives found in MoMA’s film department. Legendary vaudevillian Bert Williams, born in Nassau, Bahamas in 1874, stars. He plays a lovable, almost clever oaf who competes with three other gentlemen for a local woman’s favor.

The actors in Lime Kiln filmed scenes of leisure: sitting in a local club and at tables in their homes, walking on sidewalks, and, at a raucous field day, dancing a cakewalk. Bert Williams is excellent in the role. His impressive comic timing, flexible, open face, long-limbed stature and commanding posture make it impossible to look anywhere else. He plays the role in blackface — a mask of burnt cork, a kinky wig, long black gloves. The rest of the cast does not. MoMA’s associate curator Ron Magliozzi called this “a sop to the white audience,” and noted “the fact that the lead wore blackface allowed the rest of the cast not to wear blackface before white audiences.” Camille Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Star told me in an email that the mask for Black performers of that era “might be considered the price of admission to the entertainment world,” and that fair skinned Blacks, especially, were under pressure to cork up.

It is because minstrelsy, the theatrical practice that began in the urban North in the 1830’s, in which white men ridiculed southern Blacks, “established the representation of blackness, in the society at-large and entertainment in particular,” said Forbes. Its singular popularity fueled its influence. According to the scholar Eric Lott:

Minstrel troupes entertained presidents (including Lincoln), and disdainful high-minded quarterlies and rakish sporting journals alike followed its course. Figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Bayard Taylor were as attracted to blackface performance as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany were repelled by it. From “Oh! Susanna” to Elvis Presley, from circus clowns to Saturday morning cartoons, blackface acts and words have figured significantly in the white Imaginary of the United States.

When Williams filmed Lime Kiln Club Field Day, America’s motion picture industry was not yet two decades old. Production on D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation began the same year. When it released in 1915, it became the first blockbuster, and its direct nods to minstrelsy (white actors blacking up to play one-note, not-quite-human black characters and blatant Confederate nostalgia) reinvigorated the Klan. Lime Kiln Field Day lingered in post-production and, despite its shortcomings, forms a contrast, an alternate history —one of  Black excellence in American performance. It showed Black characters struggling toward their own goals, with back stories.  Lime Kiln’s cast of 50-100 actors haven’t yet been all identified, but we know some performers had previously worked in the Harlem-based musical revue, “Darktown Follies,” which drew white audiences uptown. “Darktown Follies” anticipated the all Black Broadway musical Shuffle Along, which played a part in Harlem’s artistic flowering of the 1920s and 1930s and helped launch the careers of Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson.

Williams had been a working actor since starting out in 1893 in minstrels. He was a featured performer at Zeigfield’s Follies for nearly a decade starting in 1909. He also became a legitimate star of the record industry, composing and recording songs for Columbia Records. Once he started, he never abandoned blacking up, and he played several variations of the long-suffering “Jonah Man” throughout his career.

At my Brooklyn screening of Lime Kiln, a piano accompanist followed the drama in a jaunty ragtime. The reconstructed film lays out alternative takes of many scenes, arranged with an estimated chronology of the storyline, based on the feedback of lip readers MoMA hired to study the actors’ encounters. There’s also footage of the cast and crew between scenes. It is dizzying to watch some of the scenes in public space — there’s the blackface, as well as other humiliations like a wrestling match for discarded shoes and a watermelon eating contest. The audience was mostly white, with a smattering of Blacks, and sometimes, during close ups of Williams’ facial contortions, I felt a simmering discomfort at the laughter of my white neighbors. Still, Williams was known to have performed in only two other films, both shorts — A Natural Born Gambler and Fish — both released in 1916. The multiple takes in the Lime Kiln restoration reminded me how rare it is to see these particular actors in this particular way, how invaluable is every frame.

* * *

Williams stated in an interview that blacking up allowed him to find his actual humor, to conceive of himself, finally as a character. It explains the unsettling mix of feelings I had watching him being excellent, yet, still, to my eyes, debasing himself. By most accounts, he was an apolitical artist in a politicized age. During his professional life, the U.S. formalized rollbacks to Reconstruction and institutionalized Jim Crow; concerned citizens created institutions in response. W.E.B. Dubois’s Niagara Movement, the NAACP, Black Greek Letter Organizations, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs all arose during this era. What the scholar Imani Perry calls Black formalism — ritual practices “internal to the black community,” concretized. Some of the new Black organizations and associations that employed these rituals were purely social, with no explicit connection to politics, yet had an implied, vested interest in the sustenance and uplift of Black people in an apocalyptically difficult time.

Williams made no formal statement of protest, expressed no pro-Black sentiments on the record. He did chafe at the racist treatment he could not avoid, and claimed concern for racial uplift. He and ten other Black men in entertainment started the Frogs, a social club for Black artists based in Harlem. Williams led the art committee. Their aims were philanthropic, and also, to create an archive collection for a theatrical library. They held a popular annual social event, “The Frolic,” with a ball and vaudevillian revue. Many Black people held Williams’s accomplishments in esteem. The Black press assiduously and soberly covered his performances and business dealings. When he died in 1922 at age 47, after working through illness and collapsing near a stage after performing in Detroit, Forbes says Black critics “assess[ed] his role as a black man as well as his influence as a performer.” (Emphasis mine).

Eric Lott described the pull of minstrelsy as a combination of “love and theft,” which suppressed “the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed.” It was an attempt, in the anxious antebellum period, to enforce a social order, and in various eras of rampant social confusion, its tropes and formulations, which never really disappear, become lightning rods again. Kelly’s comments about walking in the skin of Diana Ross mirror this “love and theft,” and our current era is one where we may be approaching another nadir, another near-apocalyptic, broad loss of hard-won rights and access to the privileges of citizenship, similar to the cascading losses of Bert Williams’s time. It’s probably why our discourse is so contentious, even among friends and comrades. It helps explain our interest in relics like Lime Kiln. 

In a piece from the New York Times Magazine’s culture issue, Wesley Morris laments, “Everything means too much now.” He bemoans how “we’re talking less about whether a work is good art but simply whether it’s good — good for us, good for the culture, good for the world.” It annoyed Morris that he couldn’t pan Insecure the way he wanted, without blowback, because it feels so “necessary” to see a Black woman beautifully shot, performing irreverent messiness and coming into her own. He’s right — we’re all entitled to art for its own sake. But everything has always meant a lot, and excellence has always been a factor, and the threads of politics and aesthetics rub up against each other all the time. Probably, we need to imagine even more lenses through which to think and talk about art and culture, and demanding the best, from everyone, on all fronts, may be the way we get through the difficulty that could be coming.

 

 

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Sonogram of a complete miscarriage
Sonogram of a complete miscarriage. Mikael Häggström / WikiJournal of Medicine

This week, we’re sharing stories from Natalie Kitroeff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Brendan I. Koerner, Eve Peyser, Darius Miles, and Bill Wyman.

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Who Killed Canada’s Pharmaceutical Giants?

Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press via AP

Last December, the murder of Barry and Honey Sherman became the biggest story in Canada. Barry founded Apotex Inc. in the 1970s, the ­generic drug company which was responsible for approximately one  in five Canadian prescriptions. But the Shermans weren’t like that scumbag Pharma Bro who raised his AIDS drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill. The Shermans donated generously to charitable causes, from antipoverty initiatives and educational institutions, to the Jewish community. Yet someone still murdered them. For Bloomberg Businessweek, Matthew Campbell narrates their triumphant lives and horrific end, and he looks at some prime suspects in the police’s inconclusive investigation.

The private investigators briefed the police on their conclusion that a murder-suicide couldn’t be the correct explanation, the person said. More than a month after the bodies were found, police officially endorsed that view. On Jan. 26 a homicide detective, Susan Gomes, told reporters that the police were now describing the case as “a double-homicide investigation” and that “both Honey and Barry Sherman were in fact targeted.” Asked what had convinced police, Gomes replied “six weeks of evidence and its review” and refused to elaborate.

This short briefing remains the most recent substantive update from Toronto police, a level of reticence unusual even for Canadian cops, who tend to be tight-lipped. A detective leading the inquiry, Brandon Price, didn’t respond to requests for comment; on Oct. 19 a spokeswoman told Bloomberg Businessweek that the force had no new information to provide.

In this vacuum, the theorizing about the Shermans has taken on a Murder on the Orient Express quality, with everyone a potential suspect. During more than 40 years in the generics industry, Sherman had cost his competitors billions of dollars. His fierce conflict with his cousins, the Winters, was also well-known. But more suggestive, to many, was Sherman’s affinity, if not affection, for inadvisable financial relationships.

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The Unsolved Murder of an Unusual Billionaire

Longreads Pick

Everyone in Canadian high society knew the Shermans, who owned a lucrative generic drug company and were some of the country’s most active philanthropists. But Barry Sherman also sued a lot of people, battled his cousins, made questionable business relationships, didn’t use a bodyguard, and kept their one home security camera off.

Published: Oct 24, 2018
Length: 26 minutes (6,568 words)

The State of the Bookstore Union

Illustration by Vinnie Neuberg

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | October 2018 | 13 minutes (3,497 words)

The Strand is the largest and most divisive of New York City’s independent bookstores. For its customers, it’s a literary landmark, a convenient public bathroom in Union Square, and one of the last places in Manhattan where tourists can see real New York Bohemia up close — like Colonial Williamsburg, but with poor people (booksellers) instead of settlers. For its employees, the store has more often been an object of resentment. Patti Smith worked there briefly in the early 1970s, but told New York magazine she quit because it “wasn’t very friendly.” Mary Gaitskill worked there for a year and a half and described it, in a thinly veiled story from Bad Behavior, as, “a filthy, broken-down store” staffed by “unhappy homosexuals.” In 2005, an anonymous employee ran a (pretty dumb) blog called “I Hate the Strand” and the reviews on the store’s Glassdoor page are still largely negative. “Employees who were so miserable they joked about torching the building,” wrote one former employee. “Honestly, shut up with the tote bags,” wrote another. (About twenty percent of the Strand’s revenue comes from merch. They sell a lot of tote bags.)

I worked at the Strand for a little over two years and honestly I liked it! I’d worked as a bartender previously, but by the time I was hired as a bookseller five of the seven bars at which I’d been employed had shuttered, either because of rising rents, the death of the owner, or, in one case, because too many of the regulars died or moved away. The Strand offered stability and a less traumatic day-to-day experience. I liked my co-workers, I attended fewer funerals, and I didn’t have to stay up until 4 a.m. every night when I had class in the morning; although because I was hired at $10 an hour, I still had to bartend on my days off to make ends meet. The store unionized in 1976 with the UAW, and it’s one of the only places in New York where bookselling — a notoriously ill-compensated industry; the drunken, wistful uncle of Publishing — can be a sustainable, long-term career for people who are not independently wealthy. The unionization has also given the store a measure of leftist cred that management has been quick to monetize: #Resistance merchandise lines the walls — ”Nevertheless She Persisted” tote bags, Ruth Bader Ginsburg magnets, and a t-shirt that reads “I Love Naps But I Stay Woke.” Read more…

The Prank that Killed Andrew Finch

Tyler Barriss makes his first court appearance via video from jail before Sedgwick County District Court judge Faith Maughan on Friday, Jan. 12, 2018. Barriss is charged with involuntary manslaughter in the fatal Wichita swatting case. Travis Heying / The Wichita Eagle via AP Images

As online trolls attempt to exert control over real life, they’ve been “swatting,” a practice where someone calls in a fake threat and police surround the target in a SWAT-team-style response. Tyler Barriss, a 22-year-old unemployed Halo enthusiast made a name for himself by swatting television stations, Net Neutrality hearings, and Call of Duty tournaments at the Dallas Convention Center. At Wired, Brendan I. Koerner reports on how Andrew Finch was shot by Wichita, Kansas police after Barriss called in a fake threat to the wrong address in a bid to get revenge on a fellow gamer.

Barriss quickly became addicted to the thrill of swatting. “It was like a kind of online power,” he says. “Knowing that you’re breaking the law, and knowing that they won’t be able to find you, and knowing you just sent the SWAT team or bomb squad somewhere, and knowing you could do that over and over again.” He crowed to his grandmother about his achievements and described himself to her as a “hacking god.”

Barriss became so renowned for his swatting skill that he was able to parlay it into a business. If a client sent him an agreed-upon amount via PayPal—usually $10, but occasionally upwards of $50—Barriss would swat a victim of their choosing; for a price he would also call in bomb threats to schools, though he typically charged a 200 percent premium for that service. Demand swelled whenever he gained fresh notoriety by pulling off a major operation; the week after he twice evacuated the Dallas Convention Center, for example, he claims to have made more than $700. (His only other source of income was $220 a month in government benefits.)

Some people who’d been tracking Barriss’ malicious deeds questioned why he’d been allowed to act with impunity for so long. Barriss had been frank about his crimes as they’d escalated in frequency and ambition, but law enforcement had seemed in no rush to prevent him from weaponizing the country’s emergency services with fake information. One Twitter user said he’d alerted the Dallas police to Barriss’ activities on December 10, right after the second bomb threat at the Call of Duty tournament. “­@DallasPD ignored this and 2 weeks later this same person swatted someone and a father was murdered,” he wrote. “This death could have been prevented on so many levels.” (A Dallas police spokesperson says the incident was turned over to the FBI but declined to say when that occurred.)

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Tax the Rich

Getty Images / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Livia Gershon | Longreads | October 2018 | 9 minutes (2,206 words)

In May, Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, declared that, if Democrats win power in Congress this fall, they will work to repeal the $1.5 trillion tax cut package passed last year by Republicans. Sen. Cory Gardner, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, responded with apparent glee. “I wish Nancy Pelosi the biggest platform ever to talk about her desire to increase tax revenue,” he told NBC News. “I hope she shouts it from the mountain top.”

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