Greetings
And lo, it was time for another anthology of wonders. Coming up:
The Silicon Eugenicist
Massive Luxury Overdose
I Had a Dream, Joe
The Best Album (Back) Covers of All Time IV: From the Inside
Wondrous and Strange: Al Columbia
Going to the Mall in 1978
The Silicon Eugenicist
Recently I wrote a piece for UnHerd about Robert F. Kennedy’s successful fundraising efforts in Silicon Valley, exploring why some wealthy venture capitalists are so willing to throw away so much money on a candidate who is clearly going to lose. As many of you may have an extremely rational and justified aversion to reading about the raging garbage fire that is American politics, I have limited the extract to this charming anecdote about William Shockley, the father of Silicon Valley:
But although Silicon Valley may have been largely absorbed into a monolithic political orthodoxy, this has distracted us from the quintessential strangeness of the region — that for decades it was a place where you could really let your freak flag fly. Far from an aberration, in many ways RFK constitutes the ideal Silicon Candidate, personifying a turbulence and weirdness that goes back to the very dawn of the valley.
The USA’s technology industry was not originally centred on the west coast. UNIVAC, the first commercial computer was developed in the east, while IBM, dominant in the industry for many decades, was (and is) headquartered in New York state. The man who put the “silicon” in Silicon Valley was William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor. Shockley founded his own company in Mountain View in the mid-Fifties, attracting some of the best and brightest to move there; when they discovered he was a terrible manager, some went on to start their own companies. But besides being a brilliant scientist, Shockley was also a rampant racist and enthusiastic eugenicist decades after such ideas were regarded as being beyond the pale. While the battle for civil rights was raging, he argued for the sterilisation of black women, and in his 70s donated his sperm to a depository of semen collected from Nobel Prize winners. When interviewed by Playboy he complained that his children represented a “very significant regression” due to the lower intellectual capabilities of their mother.
Compared to the positions held by the father of Silicon Valley, then, RFK’s much criticised anti-vaccine stance is exceedingly mild as far as controversial ideas go.
For the rest of the article, please go here.
Massive Luxury Overdose
Selections from Hotels of the Intourist Moscow Branch, Planeta, 1984.
An enormous stuffed bear welcomes guests to the sumptuous confines of the Hotel Berlin. Ulitsa Zhdanova 3, Tel: 225-69-10.
Bring on the dancing girls at the Hotel Intourist! Ul. Gorkovo 3/5, Tel: 203-01-31
Amuse yourself to death in the Hotel Cosmos. Prospekt Mira 150, Tel 217-06-53
Drink fully clothed or wrapped in a towel at Hotel-Camping Mozhaisky. Mozhaiskoye Shosse, 165 Tel 446-36-75
Enjoy the roadside tents at Hotel Camping “Sunny”. Varshavskoye Shosse, 21st km, Tel 119-87-39
I wish I lived when Lenin did at the Hotel National. Prospekt Marksa, 14/1 Tel: 203-65-39
I had a dream, Joe
Recently I dreamt that I was back in Russia and in a lot of trouble: so much trouble, in fact, that I felt it was necessary to change my appearance.
I stopped by a barber’s for a hair cut and to have my beard shaved off. As the barber worked meticulously away I realized that he reminded me of someone; at first I thought he looked like Roman Abramovich, the billionaire oligarch and former owner of Chelsea FC. Then it dawned on me that he also bore a strong resemblance to Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya.
Either way, the barber exuded menace and I wondered if this haircut wasn't going to land me in even more trouble. At 5pm exactly, Roman-Ramzan downed tools, even though a patch of beard remained on one side of my face and he hadn’t finished cutting my hair, leaving me with a mullet.
Concerned that this freakish hairdo would attract attention and thwart my efforts at evading trouble, I asked him to finish the job, but he was adamant that I come back the next day, and left. Then I realized that not only did I have to continue to elude those who would do me harm, but I had no money on me and so would have to quickly find the funds to pay for the unfinished haircut.
By this point I was certain that Roman-Ramzan was some kind of gangster-barber and that my attempt at avoiding trouble by changing my appearance had only increased the amount of trouble I was in.
And then I woke up.
The stuff of nightmares: thanks to Morten Traavik for the mask.
The Best Album (Back) Covers of All Time IV: From the Inside
Back in the 1970s, luxurious rehab clinics for celebrities did not exist, and so when Alice Cooper decided it was time to get sober he checked himself into a sanitarium where he lived among some severely disturbed people for several months.
The experience inspired his 1978 LP From the Inside, in which Alice sings about the various troubled characters he met during his period of institutionalization. “Jackknife Johnny” is a song about a damaged Vietnam vet, “Nurse Rosetta” tells the tale of a preacher lusting after his nurse, while “Millie and Billie” is a heartwarming duet between two star-crossed lovers, in which Billie expresses regret for slicing up Millie’s husband and sealing the pieces in plastic bags (“Guess love makes you do funny things…”).
As with all Alice Cooper records, it’s more Vincent Price than George A. Romero; despite Alice’s own brush with the abyss the tone of the album is wryly humorous. The sound, meanwhile, is quite polished: Alice collaborated on the songs with Elton John’s lyricist Bernie Taupin, while two members of Elton John’s band, Phil Collins’ bassist Leland Sklar, and Steve Lukather of Toto also play on the album.
This relative slickness compared to Alice’s earlier records has made it a somewhat controversial entry in his discography, although I have enjoyed its strain of mutant soft rock since I was first exposed to it many years ago. Yet while reasonable people may disagree on the quality of the music, that it has an excellent back cover is surely beyond debate. At first glance, it’s nothing special: the doors of a sanatorium.
But when you open those doors, Alice and his fellow inmates come charging towards you.
Pretty nifty.
Wondrous and Strange: Al Columbia
Recently I’ve been getting interested in avant-garde pamphlets with tiny print runs and the output of small presses more generally. My hope is that when I die, and my heirs call in a bookseller to liquidate my library, he or she will have some work to do.
To that end, I feel very satisfied with my recent acquisition of Amnesia Supplementary Newsletter No. 2 from Hot Moon Press. The newsletter purports to be a collection of lost movie posters by Francis D. Longfellow (1900-1947), who “spent his whole life in his grandmother’s house where he worked feverishly on his animations in his grandmother’s low ceilinged basement, crawling around on all fours like a spider.” Alas, Longfellow’s career was cut short when the top of his head was sliced off by a ceiling fan: “He collapsed onto the floor in a puddle of blood and brains and he was never heard from again.”
The posters, in fact, are the work of Al Columbia, an artist who briefly worked on Big Numbers, an abandoned graphic novel about the construction of a shopping center written by Alan Moore of Watchmen, From Hell and V for Vendetta fame. After the original artist Bill Sienkiewicz bailed on the series because it was too boring to draw, Columbia stepped in, completing one issue that was never published before — so the story goes — drawing and ripping up the fourth. Since then he has periodically reemerged with nightmarish works that draw upon the innocent visual language of 1940s Max Fleischer cartoons which Columbia then infuses with imagery of monstrosities, severed limbs, top-hatted businessmen, children in peril and general scenes of murder and carnage.
Amnesia Supplementary Newsletter No. 2 continues in this vein. Columbia’s posters for the non-existent animations of Francis D. Longfellow depict rooms and landscapes invaded by a series of horrors: a man wanders around searching for his head which lies at his feet with an imbecile grin; innocent children who look like kewpie dolls flee a man with a grotesque circular head who is on the verge of running them over with his motor car; crowds of top-hatted spiders with human heads close in on a man and woman on a tree limb, and then there’s the beast of Revelation as filtered through the style of Ub Iwerks…
It’s magnificently strange stuff and will quite certainly go out of print very soon. I feel confident that any future bookseller picking over the bones of my collection will take a while to figure out what was going on with Amnesia Supplementary Newsletter No. 2. Copies are still available here, should you be sufficiently intrigued to investigate further.
Going to the Mall in 1978
Lastly, here is some footage of people wandering around a mall in 1978. It comes from a YouTube channel dedicated to people doing mundane things across the decades — going to the cinema in 1982, visiting a Blockbuster store in 1993, etc. There are no narratives, no main characters, only footage of the types of places we all used to visit all the time, and what we did there. And yet, despite their ubiquity, and the mass nature of these experiences, the texture and the details of these places quickly disappear from memory once they close or are remodeled.
This particular video made me think about how film makers in the ‘70s creatively engaged with the setting of the shopping mall. In Dawn of the Dead it was a refuge from zombies, in Logan’s Run a gleaming, hermetic world where people were vaporized at the age of 30. Dundee, too, had a mall a little bit like this in the 1980s, where everything was brown, except for a clock themed around the Wizard of Oz. I watched the video from start to finish. It was sublimely slow, decidedly dull, and all the better for it. Come, step through the portal.
That’s it from me for now. Thank you for your kind attention and please consider sharing TSDK with other enlightened souls, that the ranks of the illuminati may increase further.
Regards,
DK
Great post! Getting a copy of Amnesia Supplementary now. I worked at a Half Price Books for many years and used take home the lp covers for undesireable/unselleable lps for creative projects. Lots of Lawrence Welk and Burl Ives masks that remind me of the Kadyrov one.
The bear really makes the lobby.
I assume you're familiar with Adam Curtis's "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," about Silicon Valley's weird origins?