Pictures I Like: “A Walk To The Paradise Garden”, W. Eugene Smith (1946)

My Story: Isn’t that sweet! Those two kids and that wonderful light. All is joy and hope at an age when everything is new! No wonder that this photo was the final shot, the coda to Steichen’s Family of Man exhibit.

The Facts: Eugene Smith was an ordinary photographer before the Second World War, handling routine assignments for Life, Newsweek, and Parade magazines. After Pearl Harbor, he tried to join Steichen’s Navy photography unit but was refused because of his small size and an injury that hampered his movement. Smith persevered and managed to contract with Ziff-Davis Publishing and was assigned to the Pacific. He photographed combat at Rabaul, Tarawa, and in the Marianas. After his contract with Ziff-Davis ended, he got Life magazine to send him back in time for the fighting on Saipan, Guam, and Okinawa.
Smith’s father had committed suicide in 1936 and…:

…the sensational­ism of the local newspaper’s coverage of his death caused Smith to bitterly hate dishonest journalism. Smith almost decided to quit journalism, but a friend convinced him that, “honesty is not of a profession, but within the individual and what he brings to his work.”

This passion for honesty caused him to despise sentimental depictions of war’s glory (such as the Iwo Jima flag-raising); Smith was determined to show the gritty realities. These included dying soldiers caked in mud, and civilians caught up by chaos and fear.

Saipan, 1944. Smith: “They burst out through the opening, stumbling, dazed, choking, and nearly blinded by the fumes, trying to lurch and claw their way past the still warm body of a man, and another of a boy. Trying for an escape when there was no escape.”

The Pacific war was brutal and nasty, and the battle for Okinawa was a horror show. This was the bloodiest battle Americans had fought since the Civil War and it included mass suicides by civilians who feared capture. Smith photographed it all. He hated what he saw but:

If I could photograph powerfully enough… If my photographs could grab the viewer by the heart, making the enormity of the terribleness of war lodge heavilly, they might also prod the conscience and cause him to think. [Smith]

Okinawa, 1944. Smith: “In his first action he had been quickly hit and was now lying on a stretcher… The blood had sprayed the length of him and behind him as he ran… it now was mixed with the muck of Okinawa from his boots to the head wound from which it had come… As he lay there he touched the tips of his fingers together… The last I saw of him…two men running and creeping with the recent replacement between them… I think the boy on the stretcher was already dead.”

While photographing the fighting, a shell hit near Smith and shrapnel tore through his body. One shell fragment passed through his left hand that was focusing the camera, and then ripped through his face, shattering parts of his skull. Smith was shipped back to the US and spent two years having metal and bone splinters removed from his face. His skull was reconstructed and his hand rebuilt, but fluid constantly dripped from his nose and he could not fully close his hand. For a time Smith thought he would never use a camera again.

Two years after he was wounded, Smith determined to make an effort to create a photograph. He decided to photograph his youngest children who were too small to recognize the struggle he was undertaking. He got his wife and oldest child out of the house, not wishing witnesses to what might be a failure. Once they were gone, Smith faced his first trial:  he had to load the camera with film.

I struggled to tear open the cardboard container, and then struggled to open the camera and insert the roll. This, at the beginning, almost proved my undoing, for as I fought to give my mangled left hand a strength and a control it did not have…the pain and the nerves and the fear and the inadequate fumbling left me trembling, sweating, and coldly hunched in cramp. [Smith]

Now, with the camera loaded, he and the children went outside. It was a lovely day and the children scampered about as Smith walked behind, trying to work the focus with his ruined hand. Whenever he brought the camera to his face, nasal fluid splashed on the glass viewfinder and obscured his vision. He struggled along, forcing his hand to work and swallowing the vile, bitter, seepage from his wounds.

Then Smith saw the opening in the trees, full of light, and thought his children might walk into it. It was the shot he hoped for.

I became acutely sensitive  to the lines forming the scene and to the bright shower of light pouring into the opening and spilling down the path toward us. Pat saw something in the clearing, he grasped Juanita by the hand and they hurried forward. [Smith]

Smith struggled with the camera, pain ripping from his hand through his arm as he focused, sucking down the “ugly tasting serum”, gauging the light and composition, and trying to determine exactly when to press the shutter to make up for his slowed reaction time. He squeezed off a shot and knew that he had something. He forced himself to take another. Then he turned away from the children so that they would not see him weep.

More:

Life photographs by Smith
a biographical essay
interview
the lengthy piece by Smith excerpted above
Photography Made Difficult, American Masters documentary

Lynd Ward

The story goes that when Lynd Ward, as a child, discovered that his name spelled backwards was “draw”, he determined to become an artist.

Ward self-portrait from the 1930s

God’s Man, the first of six pictorial narratives that Ward completed, was published in 1929 and became a best-seller. The story is that of an artist who signs a contract with a mysterious stranger who gives him a magic brush. Using this tool, the artist creates paintings that win him wealth and fame. [The first ten pages of God's Man are reproduced here.] But the artist becomes disenchanted with the emptiness of his fame and the falsity of the things offered him. He strikes out, is arrested, breaks free, and escapes the city.

God’s Man: Arrest, Imprisonment, Escape, Pursuers gloat after the Artist falls from a cliff.

Outside the city, the artist finds artistic completion, love, and family in a wilderness paradise. One day, the mysterious stranger returns and asks the artist to fulfill the contract by painting his portrait. The artist complies but when the stranger removes his mask, he is revealed as Death and the artist dies.

God’s Man : block and print.

Susan Sontag called God’s Man kitsch and Art Spiegelman, though sympathetic to Ward’s work, has said that he finds the depiction of the wilderness idyll unconvincing. Part of the problem is the nature of Ward’s medium, wood engraved prints. The printed images are stark black and white and the carved blocks leave little scope for individual nuance — the images are direct and symbolic, the pictorial language is dramatic by its nature. The artist’s eye has been influenced by silent movies, which in turn were influenced by histrionic stage drama styles of the late 19th Century. Gestures are exaggerated and every pose exudes meaning. German Expressionist cinema further developed, but refined, this kind of vision.

Frans Masreel from The City.

Ward engraved his images in the dense endgrain of maple blocks, an exacting process that, as Spiegelman has pointed out, often results in bloody fingers. Still, it was a process that Ward loved, even though he was also proficient in other techniques. Ward spent a year in Germany, 1926-27, studying the work of Flemish master Frans Masreel and others who had pioneered wood-cut stories. This work was largely unknown in the United States and God’s Man became a bestseller, popular enough so that, a year later, Milt Gross published a parody, He Done Her Wrong, which was called the second American all-graphic novel.

Milt Gross parody of Ward in He Done Her Wrong

Ward’s second novel told in woodcuts was Madman’s Drum, [many illustrations here] an incredibly ambitious undertaking that sought to examine the corrupting influence of accumulated wealth over time. The story opens with a man stealing a magic drum in Africa. He uses the drum to enslave people and these slaves are the foundation of his wealth.

Two pages from Madman’s Drum. As I understand it, the woman is reading of Justice but sees that, applied to her family, Justice = Death.

We see the family’s history over three generations as its members disintegrate. But it is not the drum itself that is the agent of this family’s difficulties, rather it is profiting from enslaving and exploiting other human beings that corrupts them. The great problem with Madman’s Drum is that the limits of wood-cut mean that it is difficult to tell the characters apart over three generations. Ward’s art was better suited to symbolic narratives where the main character was The Artist or The Woman or some other typed person, rather than an individual with nuanced personality.

Wild Pilgrimage The lynching.

Ward returned to this concept with Wild Pilgrimage, where a young man escapes the city and the crushing demands of industrial society. He wanders into the idyllic countryside and is kneeling to pick a flower when he witnesses a lynching. Ward’s is not a simplistic back-to-nature story. The title is derived from a quote from Arturo Giovannitti, poet and activist, organizer of the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike:

…thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal.

Wild Pilgrimage: The Young Man is introduced to political theory; he thinks that he is pulled from the pit of ignorance; he sees the cause of all injustice (echoing the lynch scene);he and the Philosopher will change the world!

The man runs away and, after a clumsy attempt at love, stumbles onto the farm of a backwoods philosopher who introduces him to leftist thinking. The young man, now full of ideas to shape his passion, returns to the city, meaning to effect change. He is drawn into a confrontation between police and strikers that becomes a riot. At one point he grabs a policeman by the throat and is strangling him but he sees the man’s face as his own and suddenly recognizes their shared humanity. Too late! He is killed in the riot and we close with a view of his corpse.

Wild Pilgrimage: The Young Man sees the factory floor as Hell; company police break up a workers’ meeting; the Young Man realizes that he is assaulting his own humanity.

One innovation Ward tried in this book was printing some pages in red that show the thinking of the main character. He sees a young woman and imagines them making love in the moonlight, but in black-printed reality, she pushes him away and he runs from rape charges. Factory life becomes a scene in Hell presided over by a whip-wielding demon foreman, after the young man (or The Young Man) reads a bit of socialist literature. The scenes of urban industrial life as Hell inspired Allen Ginsberg’s notion of Moloch in “Howl”. In 1978, a reprint of “Howl” was illustrated with a brand new Lynd Ward woodcut.

Ward’s illustration for the 1978 reprint of Ginsberg’s “Howl”

Ward had similar political beliefs to those of his father, Harry F. Ward, a Methodist minister in the days when Methodism was deeply involved in social issues. Harry Ward was leader of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1920 until he resigned in 1940 because the organization banned communists.

Ward’s hand with graver. Photo from The Complete Printmaker by Romano et al. All of the wood engraving photos in ths manual were of Ward and his work. (For a look at Ward wielding his graver see the film trailer for <em>O Brother Man</em>).

After Wild Pilgrimage, Ward created two graphic novels not meant for a general readership. Prelude to a Million Years was a collection of thirty woodcuts that showed Ward’s more developed ideas about art and artists since God’s Man. It was printed directly from woodblock onto rag paper and hand-bound in a very small printing.

Prelude to a Thousand Years: A bitter commentary on the ephemeral nature of art? Perhaps.

In 1936, Ward and many other people could see that the future looked grim. Lynd and his wife, May McNeer, were debating whether to have another child. This is the old “how can I bring a child into existence in a world like this?” problem. So Ward did a series of twenty-one blocks that showed one woman facing the prospect of death and destruction as she considers having a child. The blocks were published as Song Without Words. In the end, life triumphs over death, as always, and a child is born. The Wards’ child was their daughter Robin, who has become a keeper of her father’s legacy.

Song Without Words: The Woman desires a child; but the future seems terrible; life triumphs over fear.

In 1940 Ward published his last completed novel in woodcuts, Vertigo, [sixteen examples plus a bit of synopsis here] where he attempted to apply all the lessons he had learned over a decade. There are three main characters: A Boy, A Girl, An Old Man. There are three time periods, shown in periods of years, months, and days: in the first, we see The Girl, a violinist, sacrificing herself to care for her father while The Boy yearns for her; in the second, The Girl takes up with The Old Man, a capitalist who is presented in terms quite different from the top-hatted, pot-bellied stereotypes of Ward’s earlier work — here he is simply old and lonely, with no purpose other than clipping his stock coupons; then, The Old Man is out of the picture, The Boy and The Girl are reunited and we are left to wonder how successful their union will be. Spiegelman considers this the best of Ward’s Novels in Woodcuts, though personally, I prefer Wild Pilgrimage.

Vertigo The young couple.

During the years that Ward did his woodcut novels, he also did other work — a lot of other work. He illustrated Alec Waugh’s Book of Women… and Hot Countries, a series of ghost stories, and Frankenstein [all of the Frankenstein illustrations here] in woodcut but he also did other kinds of illustrations for work like Beowulf. And, like many illustrators of the era, he worked on children’s books.

Illustration for Waugh’s Most Women…. Note the incredible textures produced by Ward’s graver. [via thomas shahan 3's photostream on flickr.com]

“Sanctuary”, 1939. The ivory tower above the fray. An artist is one of the residents.

from Beowulf

“The Beast with Five Fingers”

from The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge

Lynn Ward’s children’s books deserve a post or two all by themselves. Over the years he illustrated books by his wife, May McNeer, his daughters, and himself as well as those of other people. He won numerous Newbery Awards and finally a Caldecott for his own book, The Biggest Bear. In all, he had six Newbery Honor Award books and two Newbery Award books besides the Caldecott award books that he illustrated. No other illustrator has matched this record.

The Biggest Bear

Ward was working on a new Novel in Woodcuts. The Silver Pony, when he died in 1985 at the age of 80. The extant prints were issued as a limited edition to a lucky few. Robin Ward has collaborated in a documentary on her father’s work, O Brother Man, the title taken from a Whittier poem later set to music as a hymn:

O brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;
Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other,
Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

If you can’t find it at your local theater, O Brother Man; The Life and Work of Lynd Ward will probably turn up on PBS’ American Masters. And that is a fitting title for Lynd Ward.

More:

The Library of America has issued Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcut with an introduction by Art Spiegelman.
If you can find it, the Out of Print Storyteller Without Words has the same six novels, a few extra illustrations, plus intros by Ward (also in the LoA version).
Dover has reprinted Gods’ Man: A Novel in Woodcuts, Mad Man’s Drum: A Novel in Woodcuts, Wild Pilgrimage: A Novel in Woodcuts, Prelude to a Million Years and Song Without Words: Two Graphic Novels, and Vertigo: A Novel in Woodcuts at rather cheap prices.
The illustrations for the unfinished The Silver Pony: A Story in Pictures is available. Also, the illustrated versions of Frankenstein: The Lynd Ward Illustrated Edition and numerous children’s have been reprinted.
If you are an aficionado, you may find original printings of God’s Man or Wild Pilgrimage at your local used book dealer. Other titles are more expensive.
A Lynd Ward bio.
A very good essay here.
Art Spiegelman on the Wordless Book.
Chris Lanier blogs on the artists featured in the exhibition “Silent Witness”
As always, for more Ward picyures Google Image Search anf Flickr.com are your friends.

The Christian War On Christmas

It’s that time of the year again, that time when right-wing fantasists bloviate about the War On Christmas. In a sense, they are correct — there have been efforts to do away with Christmas for centuries — but these anti-Xmas efforts have been Christian in origin. My mother’s Scots Presbyterian ancestors banned Christmas in 1583, faced down a royal attempt to reinstate the holiday, and outlawed it by Parliamentary decree in 1640. English Puritans followed suit. During the period when England’s government was a Christian dictatorship, it was illegal to throw a party or hang any decorations.

Christian opposition to Christmas reflected a deep suspicion of its pagan roots. Besides the north European Yule celebration, there was Roman Saturnalia, a celebration of the Winter solstice, when people dressed up, sang and danced, gambled, exchanged gifts, feasted and partied. There was a notion of turning things around (so that the dying day would begin to lengthen once more) and masters served slaves, high was low, and rules were broken.

December illustration for a Roman “calendar” of 354. Dicing is part of Saturnalia. [via Wikipedia]

Early Christians were generally conflicted about the idea of celebrating. Birthdays were regarded with suspicion because emperors had public celebrations of their own birth and anything that seemed like emperor-worship was anathema. Celebrating the birthday of a god was a serious problem. Still, pragmatic religious followers recognized that folks love a party and eventually came around to giving a date to Jesus’ birth (different dates for different sects) and naming it a holy day. Christ’s Mass was the early medieval version.

Medieval Christmas was a wild affair that incorporated many aspects of both Yule and Saturnalia. There was a Lord of Misrule, adapted from a similar figure in the Roman holiday, who presided over merriment and foolishness. There was a feast. There were holiday trappings like holly and miseltoe and Yule logs — all this was given a Christian plating of course, but underneath it was still the same old mid-winter party.

Frontispiece for The Vindication of Christmas, published 1652. The Puritan on the left says “Come not here.” to Old Christmas in the center who replies, “I bring good cheer.” The man on the street bids Old Christmas welcome, “Do not fear.” Yes, it all rhymes.

Still, some Christians were suspicious of Christmas and after the Reformation, many Protestants denounced Christmas as wicked Popery. In England, it didn’t help that the champions of Christmas, the Stuart kings, were suspected of Catholic sympathies. This all culminated in the Puritan shut-down of the holiday which resulted in pro-Christmas riots. The Restoration brought back Christmas right away and it has been a great British holiday ever since. Mind you, the Puritans and Presbyterians still didn’t do much celebrating — then or any other time — but eventually they were worn down. American Presbyterians began joining in Yuletide celebrations in the mid-19th Century and there was little objection when President Grant declared December 25th to be a national holiday.

This license to party was questioned by certain Christians. New American faiths such as Seventh Day Adventism and Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to celebrate either Christmas or birthdays, so reverting back to earlier beliefs. And, as Christmas became more and more a day characterized by consumer values, American preachers began advocating that people “put Christ back into Christmas”. This also echoed some early Christian thinkers opposed to the holiday:

This festival teaches even the little children, artless and simple, to be greedy, and accustoms them to go from house to house and to offer novel gifts, fruits covered with silver tinsel. For these they receive, in return, gifts double their value, and thus the tender minds of the young begin to be impressed with that which is commercial and sordid.
[Asterias, Bishop of Amasea, in a sermon given January 1, 400 AD]

[via irregular.com]

But those who inveigh against the “War On Christmas” generally are supporting consumerism — Christmas trees in shopping malls and the like. Of course it could not be otherwise since the War On Christmas is part of the cynical right-wing project to enlist Christians as political supporters. The large enterprises behind this project are not about to oppose the commercialization of Christmas or anything else that is good for business.

Well, I’m what Jimmy Swaggart calls a Secular Humanist, a label that I embrace. And I love Christmas. Not speaking for Christians but just for me, Christmas is a big party right when you shouldn’t have one. You know things are going to get worse. There’s going to be more snow and it’s going to get colder, cold enough so your pipes may freeze,  so cold that trees freeze in the forest and you hear them in the night cracking. Then even when it gets warmer all that snow thaws and refreezes and there’s mud and nasty slush everywhere. Christmas comes right at the beginning of the worst time of the year. And the days are short. You get up in the dark, you go to work, the sun comes up a little after, just gray light though, the sun is weak. Then, about three, you look up and the sun is setting and it gets dark and you go home in the dark. But at Christmas the days start to get a little longer and that’s the thing, you know you’ve turned some kind of corner, the light is coming back and things will get better eventually, even though you’ve got three miserable months to go. So, you throw a party, a big party, and everybody celebrates! They eat too much and they drink too much and they spend too much money and do stupid silly things and it’s all a kind of defiance. It’s saying, “Come on, show me the worst you got, I’m laughing!” This setup, this deal that humans get here on Earth – that’s what we’re defying. We’re saying, “I can take the worst there is and still celebrate!” Because, you know what? No matter how bad it sometimes gets, life is still pretty good.

Pictures I Like: Diane Arbus, “Xmas Tree In A Living Room In Levittown, Long Island, 1963″

My Story:

“Here it is, the most beautiful tree on the lot. Cost me $18, but what the hell it goes to a good cause. At least I think it does. Depends on what the firemen do with it. Probably buy booze for themselves. So what! I got the tree, the best tree. Just have to get this damned stand screwed on, Fill the thing with water later so the tree won’t dry out so fast and shed needles all over the rug. Love that evergreen smell! Okay, upsy-daisy. Jesus, this thing’s heavy. Move the stand over. Try again. Stand up goddamit! Jesus, it’s too tall! Oh hell it’s falling over. Christ! My back! Okay, okay. It’s still a beautiful tree, nice shape, I’ll just trim a little off the top. Get the fucking saw. Where did I leave it? Out in the shed. There it is, under the lawnmower. Okay, back inside. God, my back! Okay, saw off a little. Now heave the damn thing… Still too tall goddamit! Okay, okay. Saw off a little more. And up… Just fits! Ha! Got you you bastard! Okay, no angel on top this year but put the damn presents around and who gives a shit. My back! Every step is agony! I need a drink a really really stiff drink. The most beautiful drink in the house.”

The Facts:

Diane Arbus got a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a project called “American Rites, Manners and Customs” that she completed in 1963. This photograph was made during the end of that project as she was perfecting her head-on square format style. Arbus’ work is often called strange or freakish but it is really just ordinary life in photographs — trees like this one are the subjects of millions of family snapshots — the problem is that people don’t recognize just how strange the ordinary actually is.

“…if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is fantastic that we look like this and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.”
(Diane Arbus quoted in the 1972 Aperture monograph Diane Arbus published shortly after her death. New edition which may or may not include this quote: Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph: Fortieth-Anniversary Edition)

Manchurian Candidates

Twelve years ago the parents of an autistic boy won $2.1 Million from the estate of a deceased neuropsychiatrist who had tried to turn the boy into a weapon. Doctor Donald Dudley began treating the boy in 1989 and, in 1990, started injecting him with sodium amytal, attempting to “erase” part of his brain. Dudley intended to fill these erased areas with murderous notions implanted through hypnosis.

The boy’s condition deteriorated and

[w]hen Jeanie Drummond confronted Dudley about her son’s treatment in November 1992, he told her he was going to take over hospitals, police forces and schools, and that she was fortunate he wanted her son to be one of his trained soldiers, attorneys said.

That was the end of Drummond’s treatment by Dudley.

Following complaints by Mrs. Drummond and others, Dudley’s license to practice was revoked. He himself was diagnosed as manic-depressive. Among his patients was a suicidal fifteen-year-old who had threatened people with a gun, possibly supplied by Dudley from his huge stash of weapons.

Sirhan Sirhan under arrest.

Doctor Dudley claimed to be working for the CIA and he may have been involved in the CIA’s investigation into human manipulation via psychotropic drugs. Some people died in these experiments, some became artists, one became the Unabomber. In 1973, Richard Helm, panicked by Watergate, ordered the CIA files on these experiments destroyed, but a number have survived and been declassified. Still, no smoking gun linking the CIA to mind-altered assassins has been found.

Sirhan Sirhan now [Ben Margot/AP]

Meanwhile, the lawyers for Sirhan Sirhan claim that their client was hypnotized into murdering Robert Kennedy in 1968. At that time and for years later, Sirhan claimed that he shot Kennedy out of anger over US policies in Palestine. Now he claims not to remember that confession. But a year ago, illusionist Derren Brown claimed to replicate Sirhan’s programming in a test subject who was sent to murder Stephen Fry.

In 1971, Jerome Johnson, an African-American admirer of Hitler, shot mobster Joe Colombo to death. Colombo’s associates blamed Joey Gallo and went to war against the Gallo faction. Although the FBI called Johnson a “lone assassin”, Colombo’s friends said that he was a tool used by others. Knowing mafiosos claimed that the practice of manipulating some “yoyo” to commit murder was a very old one. We will never hear from Johnson, who was shot to death by Colombo’s bodyguards at the scene of the assassination.

Jerome Johnson subdued by police just before he was killed. [Life]

Nicholas Deak, who was an OSS operative during World War II, became an international financier after the war ended. His firm was used by the CIA to launder money but after the Church Committee investigations of 1975 revealed that he had bribed Japanese ministers on behalf of Lockheed, Deak became someone the CIA didn’t want to know — at least officially. In 1983, Deak was accused by the Reagan administration of laundering Colombian drug money and, the following year, he was subpoenaed to testify before Congress. Deak’s empire came crashing down. His clients, many of them criminal organizations, began pulling their cash out of Deak’s companies only to discover that there wasn’t enough money to go around. Deak was on the verge of bankruptcy. He felt angry and betrayed by the government he had worked for and he was disgusted by the hypocrisy of being accused of dealing with drug lords by the same administration that was funding Nicaraguan contras via cocaine sales. Perhaps some people in high places feared that he might talk about things that they wished to have kept secret. In 1985, Deak was shot to death in his office. His killer was a homeless madwoman named Lois Lang.

Lois Lang was an outstanding college athlete and one-time homecoming queen. In the mid-60s, while coaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Lang began showing signs of mental instability. In 1970, the university declined to renew her coaching contract. Lang became convinced that many of the people around her were “fakes”. Her behavior became more and more erratic. Her marriage fell apart. In 1975, police found her “naked and catatonic” in a Santa Clara motel.

For the next month, she was put under the care of Dr. Frederick Melges, a psychiatrist associated with the Stanford Research Institute. One of Dr. Melges’ main areas of research: drug-aided hypnosis. A few years after Lang was put in Melges’ care, the New York Times exposed the Stanford Research Institute as a center for CIA research into “brain-washing” and “mind-control” experiments in which unwitting subjects were dosed with hallucinogenic drugs and subjected to hypnosis.

Recent shot of Lois Lang, who has let her post-menopausal beard grow. [via Salon]

By 1980 Lang returned to Washington state, where she had grown up, and began hanging around the university campus where she became a familiar sight, an eccentric derelict. Did Lang ever meet Doctor Dudley? She said that someone gave her the gun that authorities claim she bought in a Florida pawnshop. Someone, she said, had shown her Deak’s office and taught her how to shoot. But, since her incarceration in a mental facility, Lois Lang has not said anything else. There are many who think that she was a puppet of people out to get Deak: the Macao mob, Argentineans, the CIA — there’s a long list of suspects.

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist; I figure a lone gunman killed JFK. But each of the killers named above was a lone gunman and that brings up the main point: were they manipulated into murder? And that is something we’ll probably never know.

NOTES:

This post was prompted by reading the Salon article by Mark Ames and Alexander Zaitchik on the Deak killing.

A book on the CIA’s experiments in mind control by John Marks is available free on-line: The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control

Spain Rodriguez

Spain Rodriguez died yesterday after a six year battle with cancer. He was 72. Rodriguez was one of the major underground comics artists, of course, but he created or illustrated many other kinds of work from Sherlock Holmes to personal stories of “What the Fifties Were Really Like”.

His work was political, from a proletarian perspective. He was pleased to work in a mass medium that was disdained as lowbrow. When he knew he was dying, Rodriguez said, “I’ve enjoyed immensely being a Zap artist. I’ve enjoyed being an underground cartoonist. I generally wish everybody well.”

Self-portrait, 1974

Some of his political comics include: The Dark Hotel about an attempted American coup in the 1930s, a biography of Che Guevara , and stories about The Long War aka the War On Terrorism.

I particularly liked his work based on the great struggle between fascism and communism in the twentieth century. His direct, thick lines were well suited for depicting the industrial scale combat of the 1940s. Although a collection of these strips was proposed once or twice, it never was published and that’s too bad.

from “Durrutti”, Anarchy Comics #3

from “Stalin”, Arcade: the Comics Revue #4

Interview from 1998.

This link includes a fifteen minute documentary.

Much of Spain Rodriguez’ work, such as The Dark Hotel , is out of print. His most recent book in print is Crusin’ With The Hound: The Life And Times Of Fred Toote , a series of stories from the 1950s.

“The Inheritance of Rufus Griswold” and other graphic stories from the classics

Dies Irae – “One man against the American empire.”

The End Is Nigh, Find The High Ground

As everyone knows by now, the world is coming to an end in about a month. The Mayans say so. People everywhere are looking for a viable escape plan. Many believe that a mountain in France, Pic de Bugarach, where UFOs have been sighted, is really a kind of dome covering a huge flying saucer hangar that will open up on Doomsday to reveal a giant spaceship that will take all its passengers to another world. The French government is concerned that legions of idiots will converge on the mountain and create difficulties before dying of hunger, thirst, accident, or suicide; so the area will be closed off.

Pic de Bugarach [Wikimedia Commons]

This is not the first time that the world has ended and believers have sought the high ground — in fact, this has been a fairly common event over the centuries. One such doomsday was prophesized in Chicago in 1954 by Dorothy Martin who was receiving messages from an alien being named Sananda. Most of humanity was to be wiped out by a huge flood on December 21 and those who would be saved needed to build a special altar on a mountain top where a flying saucer would land and carry them away. A group of believers formed around Martin and the mountain idea was abandoned. The altar became Martin’s sun porch where the group would wait for the saucers to carry them away. Among the people joining the group were students of a sociologist named Leon Festinger. These were not believers, these were skeptics who wanted to study the group’s dynamics when the great deluge did not materialize.

Festinger published his findings as When Prophecy Fails and it is regarded as a classic by social scientists. The members of the Chicago group have their names changed — Dorothy Martin became Marian Keech, for example — and the locale was shifted to an imaginary city in Michigan.

Many of the group are from a nearby college. Some are students and some employed by the school. The other members have disparate backgrounds. One, called Bob Eastman in the book, has led a “rough” life after leaving the military and sounds somewhat like the Joaquin Phoenix character in The Master. The group appears to do him some good — he gives up alcohol and tobacco and settles down a bit; he has direction and purpose. What the group members have in common is a desire to find a spiritual path for themselves. They called themselves “Seekers”.

Festinger thought that the dissonance of having their beliefs shown to be false — at least in terms of the prophecy — might lead to several possible outcomes. One of these would be a shift to trying to convince others to join them. Festinger references similar groups throughout history and very specifically mentions Christianity. At any rate, the group of seekers had been very cautious about bringing in new members and rigorously examined anyone wanting to join. But when the alien spaceships did not arrive, the group members began attempting to convert others to their beliefs. Dorothy Martin went on to found a group called the Association of Sananda which is still active today.

Dorothy Martin after she became Sister Thedra, leader of Sanandra Organization. [wolflodge.org]

It is easy enough to laugh at the delusions of people seeking spiritual comfort but the book avoids that. Certainly there is some pathos:

The Armstrongs’ son, who had never believed firmly but who was committed to the ideology by his parents’ actions, awoke on the morning of the 21st to listen to the news and then returned to bed where he remained, face to the wall and uncommunicative for almost the rest of the day.

So the lesson is, after December 21 there will be a host of people trying to convince you that the Mayan prophecy was the real deal, just misinterpreted. They will have groups and texts and websites. Before you react to them remember this: December 21 is when the sun dies. Thus it has been for millennia and humans have often felt called upon to assist the solar rebirth – sometimes with human sacrifice. UFOs are a far more genial form of delusion and I don’t want to mock them too much for fear that seekers will find a darker path.

More:

After the Prophecy
Apocalypse Oak Park
Field Guide A personal take on the Festinger book
Apocalypse 2011

The Morning After

Some folks are unhappy with last night’s US Presidential election because it didn’t turn out the way they wanted. For instance, here’s Lord Black, the man you love to hate, with a dose of vitriol: “This has been one of the dumbest, most futile and impartially unsatisfactory presidential elections in American history.”

Don’t hold back, Connie! CBC Radio had five-year-old Mitchell Cait-Goldenthal read some of Black’s words on air:

“…some fiscal blunderbuss will be confected that will make a snail’s progress on the deficit and strangle the pitiful squeak of economic recovery that this regime has generated with pelagic blood-lettings of debt.” What does that mean? [Mitchell asks] It’s really weird what I’m reading.

Yes it is, Mitchell, weird and wonderful! Few can match Conrad Black in bombastic bullshit. Certainly not Donald Trump whose much-publicized post-vote tweets just aren’t up to the Lord’s mark. Compare “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” with “dumbest, most futile and impartially unsatisfactory…” What does ”impartially unsatisfactory” mean? Who cares! It’s so wonderfully clumsy that I’m going to use it all the time. “That movie was the dumbest, most futile and impartially unsatisfactory film I have ever seen.” “That hamburger was the most impartially unsatisfactory sandwich I have ever eaten.” “The weather today is the most futile and impartially unsatisfactory in Canadian history.”

Many Romnivores are so horrified by the election results that they are taking drastic action:

Starting early this morning, I am going to un-friend every single individual on Facebook who voted for Obama, or I even suspect may have Democrat leanings. I will do the same in person. All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.

That writer goes on to say that, if your spouse showed any Democratic tendencies, you should get a divorce; if family functions like Christmas or Thanksgiving celebrations will be attended by Democrats, boycott them; if there are Democrats where you work, quit. This is an application of John Galt tactics to social relationships. If folks don’t agree with you, shun them! Deprive them of your valued company while you go out back and eat worms.

Of course a great deal was at stake in the election, including questions of international order:

The greatest satisfaction today over the re-election of Obama is not being felt in the Democratic Party. It is not being felt among the media, who are no longer objective observers but have turned instead into corrupt partisans who ruthlessly censored the truth about Obama and helped peddle his demonising propaganda about his opponent. It is not being felt among the gloating, drooling decadents of the western left who now scent a great blood-letting of all who dare defy their secular inquisition. No, the greatest satisfaction is surely being felt in Iran.

Don’t you just love “gloating, drooling decadents of the western left”. That’s up to Conrad Black standards. Okay, before I go wipe the gloat off my chin, here’s “The Five Stages of Grief at Fox News“. Denial: “I still think Mitt Romney wins when it’s all over.” (Mike Huckabee); Anger: as expressed by just about every Fox commentator; Bargaining: Karl Rove begs Fox to reverse its call that Ohio will go Obama, the anchor goes down to the decision desk and tries to get them to retract their prediction of an Obama victory; Depression: Charles Krauthammer offers to write prescriptions for anyone who needs drugs. So that’s only four stages. They haven’t reached Acceptance yet.

Pictures I Like: The Jap Skull

My Story: Well, maybe I don’t like this picture so much as I am compelled to think about it. From a 1944 issue of Life magazine, the “Picture of the Week”. Here’s the caption:

When he said goodby two years ago to Natalie Nickerson, 20, a war worker of Phoenix, Ariz., a big, handsome Navy Lieutenant promised her a Jap. Last week, Natalie received a human skull, autographed by her lieutenant and 13 friends, and inscribed: “This is a good Jap – a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.” Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo. The armed forces disapprove strongly of this kind of thing.

But Natalie doesn’t show any sign of disapproval. I wonder what is going through her head.

The Facts: The armed forces definitely did not approve of “this kind of thing” and on several occasions warned US publishers that printing such pictures might result in retaliation against American soldiers. Nevertheless, the practice of taking skulls and other parts of corpses as souvenirs was widespread in the Pacific theater during World War II. A contemporary poem, “The US Sailor with the Japanese Skull”, by Winfield Townley Scott, actually detailed one method of cleaning a souvenir skull. Other methods were practiced by US servicemen.

Marines “stewing a skull”. [Wikipedia]

At one point President Roosevelt was presented with a letter opener made from a man’s arm. He is said to have received it warmly but to have had the item interred with other remains later. That story and the photo of Natalie and Tojo found their  way into the Japanese press. Some historians have claimed that stories of US soldiers desecrating remains helped cause the mass suicide of civilians who leaped into the sea at Saipan and Okinawa. After the war, as Japan became a trusted US ally, souvenir body parts ceased to be respectable conversation pieces and were quietly put away. Sometimes they re-emerge to the consternation of police who have to determine their origin.

But the question remains, what is Natalie thinking? Is she pleased and proud? Is she mystified or confused? Is she writing a polite thank-you note to her Lieutenant or a excited demand for lots more skulls? Women’s attitudes toward combat were probably quite different in 1944 then they are nowadays with women serving as active warriors. The division between those who fight and those who need protection was part of the great gender divide of the day and helped bolster male demands for female obedience. But that is a topic that somebody else can analyze.

Sinéad O’Connor Twenty Years After

Twenty years ago today, during a Saturday Night Live performance, Sinéad O’Connor ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II. There was an immediate outcry from critics, journalists, and, a week later, SNL host and noted theologian, Joe Pesci. O’Connor’s career never recovered. When she attempted to perform Bob Marley’s “War” at a Bob Dylan concert, she was booed off the stage. Now, twenty years on, Michael Agresta takes a fresh look at the event.

[click to see performance via YouTube]

Agresta listened to what O’Connor had to say: she added some fresh lyrics to “War” about child abuse as one of the Catholic Church’s sins. This isn’t news today, but it was then. In fact, most people (including me, I have to admit) missed the allusion altogether and thought O’Connor was protesting abortion/contraception policies or something. But O’Connor, when anyone bothered to ask, was quite clear about what angered her:

In Ireland we see our people are manifesting the highest incidence in Europe of child abuse. This is a direct result of the fact that they’re not in contact with their history as Irish people and the fact that in the schools, the priests have been beating the shit out of the children for years and sexually abusing them. This is the example that’s been set for the people of Ireland. They have been controlled by the church, the very people who authorized what was done to them, who gave permission for what was done to them.

The Time magazine interviewer didn’t really grasp what O’Connor was saying, so she tried to explain by giving some personal history. She said she had been subjected to every kind of abuse:

Sexual and physical. Psychological. Spiritual. Emotional. Verbal. I went to school every day covered in bruises, boils, sties and face welts, you name it. Nobody ever said a bloody word or did a thing. Naturally I was very angered by the whole thing… [Time interview, November 9, 1992, behind a pay wall, unfortunately.]

Her mother, said O’Connor, was a Valium addict, a product of Catholic schools. Later, when O’Connor went to an Adult Children of Alcoholics-type group, she got a handle on her situation. The photo of the Pope that she tore up? That had belonged to her mother: “The photo itself had been on my mother’s bedroom wall since the day the fucker was enthroned in 1978.”

Young Sinéad, striped shirt.

O’Connor herself was incarcerated in a Magdalene laundry, an Irish institution for wayward girls, at the age of 15. The Magdalenes have been criticized by the UN Committee Against Torture and one Magdalene being sold by nuns trying to make up stock market losses turned out to have twenty-two unregistered anonymous corpses buried out back.

After Pope Benedict apologized in 2010 for the Irish abuse cover-up, O’Connor criticized him for calling the cover-up “well-intentioned” and called for a boycott of the Church. She told Rachel Maddow that she is a believer who wants to free the Church from those who have brought it into disrepute. And in the Los Angeles Times:

I’m a Catholic, and I love God. . . . That’s why I object to what these people are doing to the religion that I was born into. . . .

I’m passionately in love and always have been with what I call the Holy Spirit, which I believe the Catholic Church have held hostage and still do hold hostage. I think God needs to be rescued from them. They are not representing Christian values and Christian attitudes. If they were truly Christian, they would’ve confessed ages ago, and we wouldn’t be having to batter the door down and try to get blood from a stone.

Sometimes angry people are dismissed when they do or say things other people find disturbing. Often these angry people are absolved over time. Sinéad O’Connor paid a price for expressing her anger and for telling truths that people weren’t ready to hear. She is a brave woman who has finally been awarded some of the respect that she has earned.