A buddy of mine once joked that the traffic signals, lane markers, etc. in India are the world’s biggest public art installation, since they have exactly the same effect on motorists’ behavior as those butt-ugly steel-and-concrete things your city council keeps insisting on sticking out in front of city hall. Long after I returned from my sojourn in the Raj, friends remarked on my newfound sangfroid. It’s no mystery, I explained to them. Delhi’s a big place, so usually took several autorickshaw rides a day — each and every one of them, by necessity, a dance with the Grim Reaper. As P.J. O’Rourke once quipped back when he was funny, on the Subcontinent it doesn’t even count as a car crash unless there’s probable loss of life involved. Death come for us all, I told my buddies; when my time’s up, my ticket’s gonna get punched regardless.
Severian, “Cars, Bikes, Motorcycles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-25.
November 14, 2021
QotD: Traffic in India
October 10, 2021
QotD: The taste for ugliness
The word ugly does not quite capture the connotations of the word “moche“, which include those of bad taste. If I were to try to make a table, it would probably be ugly due to my incapacity as a woodworker, but not moche.
I must say that the publishers of the book (Fayard) have done the author proud. The shiny cover of the book is vivid purple at the top, descending by various shades of unpleasant colours to a bilious yellow at the bottom. The typeface is also in purple, and the pages the same shade of yellow where they are bound into the spine. It is, as an artifact, aesthetically appalling, as obviously it was meant to be.
If we lived in a normal world, the deliberate creation of something ugly would be regarded as reprehensible: but we do not live in such a world.
The author is an apologist for the ugly, seeing the search for beauty as a kind of totalitarian dictatorship against which the ugly is a justified or necessary revolt or uprising, a cry for individual freedom.
She is a Parisian bourgeoise who has been taught to decry and therefore to reject her own previous privilege. In her own estimate, she was unfortunate to have been so fortunate as to have been surrounded by beauty.
This highly ideological, dog-in-the-manger attitude to beauty is commonplace and has almost been made the basis of official policy — or if it has not, it might just as well have been.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Kitsch and Our Taste for the Ugly”, The Iconoclast, 2021-06-18.
October 5, 2021
Lars Vilks, RIP
Mark Steyn remembers Swedish artist Lars Vilks, best known for his defence of free speech rights after coming under (literal) attack by Islamist terrorists enraged that he drew a cartoon of Mohammed:
Lars Vilks, 1946-2021.
Cropped from a larger image by OlofE via Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, he was being driven in a bulletproof car by two of his protection officers when there occurred what Swedish police regard as a freak collision with a truck. An almighty fire ensued and neither Lars nor the policemen survived; the driver of the other vehicle is seriously wounded and in hospital. This all happened near Markaryd, about an hour north-east of Helsingborg, where Lars was born. Helsingborg, like many Swedish cities, is utterly transformed, which is why Lars Vilks ended his life in an unmarked car being driven home under police protection from a guarded lunch with an old friend.
[…]
Lars was very funny about his newfound celebrity: He carried with him a picture of a Pakistani mob that had been whipped into a frenzy by somewhat inaccurate intelligence, so they were all jumping up and down in the streets demanding “DEATH TO LARISH”. And for a while that day in Copenhagen we all called him Larish: “Hey, Larish, another beer?”, etc.
Larish was likewise a hoot about two of the first jihadists sent to dispatch him. He came home one night to find that a couple of Kosovars had set his kitchen alight. As they escaped across the snowy field heady with the warm glow of their glorious victory over the infidel, they chanced to glance down and noticed that that warm glow was because they’d accidentally set their trousers on fire. After some effort to extinguish the blaze, they were forced to abandon their flaming pantaloons and scamper off into the chill night in their jihadist BVDs. Alas, the best-laid plans and all that: in addition to being trouserless in a Nordic winter, they had neglected to remove from their smouldering pants the charred driving licenses and other identifying documentation. Police were able to track them down rather easily, not least because they were the only two men in Scandinavia taking a late-night stroll in their Y-fronts.
When Lars told this story in Copenhagen, the whole room was roaring with laughter. Afterwards we all went to dinner. And news came to us somewhere between the soup and digestifs that a one-legged Chechen from Belgium, seething with resentment at Lars and the rest of us infidels, had prematurely self-detonated in his Copenhagen hotel room while assembling his package and preparing to hop into Paradise. And we all had a grand laugh about that, too. As I put it that day, Islamic terrorists are like Yosemite Sam, forever shoving the stick of dynamite in their own pants – until one day Yosemite Ahmed manages to get it right. After the bombing of the Conservative Party conference in 1984, the IRA taunted Mrs Thatcher: “You have to be lucky every day, we only have to be lucky once.”
Those jihad incompetents with the smoking trousers would modify the line: We only have to be competent once. Al-Qa’eda had put a six-figure bounty on Lars’ head, and there was no shortage of takers. In Ireland, the gardai arrested four men and three women from Waterford and Cork for a well-advanced plot to fly to Stockholm and kill him. At the height of the so-called “Troubles” you’d have been hard put to find five men in Waterford willing to travel to London to kill Mrs Thatcher or Willie Whitelaw. But an obscure artist in southern Sweden? Pas de problème!
As the report in the Daily Mail shows, the circumstances of Vilks’ death are at the very least, suspicious:
Swedish police investigating the car crash death of a controversial artist who had survived multiple assassination attempts after drawing a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed cannot explain why his car was travelling so fast.
Lars Vilks, 75, was killed on Sunday when the police car he was travelling in veered onto the wrong side of the road and collided with a truck in Markaryd, in the Swedish province of Kronoberg.
Both vehicles caught fire and the truck driver, 45, was taken to hospital with serious injuries, while the two police protection officers and Vilks were killed.
Investigators believe there were no external influences that led to the deaths and say the crash may have been caused by a burst tyre.
However, they are unable to explain why the car was travelling at around 100mph, according to witnesses, in a 68mph zone.
September 9, 2021
Did Freudian Psychology Create Modern Art? | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.25 Harvest 1924
TimeGhost History
Published 8 Sep 2021The Surrealist Movement is born this season with unsurprising eccentric drama. Salvador Dali will one day be a part of it, but for now he is still in art school and has actually only just come out of prison. Also this season, a crime which sees police chasing America’s first ever “Public Enemy No. 1”
(more…)
August 10, 2021
Art Deco in the 1920s
The1920sChannel
Published 1 Nov 2019The aesthetic of the 1920s was certainly unique and instantly recognizable. For those of us (me included) who don’t know much about art, it’s difficult to pinpoint the characteristics. The most important art movement of the ’20 was Art Deco. So here’s a closer, though unprofessional, look at 1920s aesthetic.
July 20, 2021
Kurt Westergaard, RIP
Mark Steyn on the life and work of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard:
Kurt Westergaard and I were successive winners of the Danish Free Press Society’s Sappho Award. I was very flattered to find myself in his company, but couldn’t honestly say I deserved to be. Kurt was one of the bravest men of our time – not because he was inclined to bravery, but simply because, when it was required, he met the challenge and never backed down.
Sixteen years ago Flemming Rose of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten decided to conduct a thought experiment in public after an author casually revealed that he couldn’t find any Danish artist willing to illustrate his book about “the Prophet Mohammed” (as the BBC now routinely styles him). So Flemming called twelve cartoonists and invited them to depict the late Prophet. Kurt Westergaard’s cartoon was the memorable one, and the one you recall as the years roll by. It was a pithy visual jest: Mohammed’s turban as a bomb with a lit fuse. See picture at top right.
“I attempted to show that terrorists get their spiritual ammunition from parts of Islam, and with this spiritual ammunition, and with dynamite and other explosives, they kill people,” Kurt told my old newspaper The National Post a few years back. “I showed this in a cartoon and what happened? They want to kill me, so I think I was right.”
An otherwise courtly, cultured Dane, Kurt Westergaard had a somewhat arresting dress code, preferring le rouge et le noir, the colors of anarchists, although, as a practical matter, it’s hard for a man of advanced years to carry off red trousers, whatever his motivation. He would qualify his pantaloons by explaining that he was not a political anarchist but a cultural one. Still, one can gather from the garb alone that Westergaard was no “right-winger”. Like most of the men and women I have shared a stage with in Europe this century, he was an old Sixties radical sufficiently principled to think the same kind of jokes he’d applied to church, monarchy, parliament and every other societal institution should also be applied to Islam. He never wanted to be a “free speech hero”, but gamely bore the burthen once it had been dropped on him. He certainly never wanted to be world-famous, albeit more so in Mogadishu than Manhattan and Lahore than Los Angeles. It cost him a comfortable retirement, weakened his health, and an ever more craven culture denied him the consolations of monetary exploitation. When I expressed sympathy, he laughed and said he’d do the same cartoon all over again even knowing what he was in for.
The blood lust began with a trio of imams on the make shopping the twelve cartoons (plus three cruder fakes) round the Muslim world, and leaving it to the usual Islamonutters to take it from there: In nothing flat, over two hundred people were dead – which meant that CNN & Co were obliged to cover the story. They did so by modifying Westergaard’s cartoon, with Mohammed’s face pixilated, as if he’d entered the witness protection programme. If only. In reality, it was that dwindling band of people who believe in free speech – and, indeed, free speech itself – that found itself in the witness protection programme.
July 10, 2021
A History of Caricature: the Art of Exaggeration
J.J. McCullough
Published 27 Mar 2021Let’s look at the history of caricature, the art of drawing exaggerated cartoon pictures of famous people like celebrities, politicians, and movie stars. We’ll look at the style of great artists like Al Hirschfeld, Gerald Scarfe, and Robert Risko among others.
Voice cameo by Alec: https://www.youtube.com/user/bostwiki
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June 29, 2021
History Summarized: Rise of Islam
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 16 Nov 2016Note to viewers: This video contains images of the *Blue Mosque* in Istanbul, which is Not the Hagia Sophia. The Hagia Sophia was a church, later converted into a mosque, but the Blue Mosque, which, to be fair, looks fairly similar to the Hagia Sophia, is a totally different building, and was built by the Ottomans.
HE LIVES! … by at least a few medical metrics. Blue went on a huge training montage for the entirety of Autumn and is back to talk about the history of Islam!
If you have any questions about anything in the video and would like to learn more, leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer!
MERCH LINKS:
Shirts – https://overlysarcasticproducts.threa…
All the other stuff – http://www.cafepress.com/OverlySarcas…Follow us on Twitter @OSPYouTube!
June 8, 2021
History Summarized: Ancient Egypt
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 3 Feb 2017This video was commissioned by our loyal Patron Karl Erik L. Hoftaniska! To become our Patron and get access to sweet rewards, hop on over to PATREON.COM/OSP
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised about the things I learned about Egypt in the process of making this video. The feeling of learning cool new things never gets old.
Coming soon in Blue’s History Summarized line-up will be the next part of his Abrahamic Religion series: Judaism!
In the meantime, WOO EGYPT!Have a question about anything mentioned or not mentioned? Leave a comment! Blue will do his best to answer.
PATREON: www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797
MERCH LINKS:
Shirts – https://overlysarcasticproducts.threa…
All the other stuff – http://www.cafepress.com/OverlySarcas…Find us on Twitter @OSPYouTube!
May 12, 2021
QotD: The true artist
Christopher Shinn, Twitter, 2018-10-04.
March 29, 2021
The Bayeux Tapestry – all of it, from start to finish
Lindybeige
Published 18 Oct 2017A complete guide to the story as depicted on the famous Bayeux Tapestry. There is a lot more to it than just the Battle of Hastings.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige
Other than The Adventures of Stoke Mandeville, this is the longest editing job I have ever done. It took eleven very long days of work to put this together from the opportunist footage I snatched when changing trains near the museum where it is on display. The shoot was not without its problems, one of which was the fact that because the tapestry is behind glass, and the museum has many illuminated displays, the reflections in the glass were a bane, and I didn’t manage to get rid of them all. Another was that my stills camera refused to work after taking a small number of pictures. It had always worked fine before, and has always worked fine since. It wasn’t the battery and it wasn’t the SD card. It was a mystery.
For the curious, the edit involved seventeen tracks on the timeline, and has twenty-two animated scenes. Unfortunately, the main animation software I was using could not handle full HD images, and so there is a slight loss of picture quality during most of the animated scenes. You will notice that the close-ups have a better picture quality than the wide shots. This is because they were taken with the camera pushed up against the glass, which improved focussing, and got rid of almost all of the haze and reflections caused by the glass.
It is important to understand that this ‘tapestry’ is a piece of propaganda, and does not tell an accurate version of events. The story I tell here is the one depicted, not what actually happened.
I have enough material for more videos on the tapestry, but am in no great hurry to spend many more days editing this difficult footage. Trying to match the writing and speaking of narration to panning camerawork that had no notion when shot of what might need to be said about some passing scene, was a nightmare, and many editing compromises had to be made, with some scenes skipped past quickly, and others drawn out.
Clarification on the nudity: I said that the figure under the mysterious Cleric and woman was the the only figure displaying genitals on the tapestry. This was misleading. Several animals clearly are pictured with genitals, and on the tapestry in Bayeux today it looks as though a couple of other human figures have genitals. Some of these may have been added later, and these are not being ‘displayed’ as the displaying figure is clearly doing, but look more incidental.
I describe the tall figure emerging from the building with a lance and pennant, being brought his horse, as “William”. It occurred to me after making the video that all the sources I consulted describe this figure as William, but the text does not name him as William, so possibly he is just a Norman knight, representing any and all of the knights setting out for the battle, and that this figure is meant to be “William” could be a modern tradition that has become accepted fact just by repetition.
Buy the music – the music played at the end of my videos is now available here: https://lindybeige.bandcamp.com/track…
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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March 25, 2021
Modern Artists: The Original Shitposters! | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.14 – Winter 1922
TimeGhost History
Published 24 Mar 2021The interwar era has seen an explosion of art movements all vying to offer the most revolutionary response to modern society. The competition is intense and, as we shall see, often spills over into open conflict.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Michał Zbojna
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…Sources:
Some images from the Library of CongressSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
“Epic Adventure Theme 3” – Håkan Eriksson
“Crimp” – Hysics
“Substage” – Jay Varton
“Appeased Soundscape 01” – August Wilhelmsson
“Stranger Days” – Alexandra Woodward
“Superior” – Silver Maple
“Rememberance” – Fabien Tell
“Ghost Dungeons” – Ethan Sloan
“Ancient Discoveries” – Gabriel LewisArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
The original idea for this episode came from me (Francis here, hello) stumbling across a passing reference to the 1922 trial of André Breton buried deep in a Wikipedia article. It led me down a huge rabbit hole on the history of the chaotic artists milling around in Paris, New York, Zurich, and beyond.Considering that it also takes place in the same season as the publication of Ulysses, the release of Nosferatu, the birth of Brazillian Modernism, and more, I realized that it was the perfect opportunity to dedicate an entire episode to the weird and wonderful artistic movements of the modern era. If this kind is new to you then consider this episode your introduction to the topic. Indy talks about the Cubist revolution, then Dadaism, Expressionism, and more.
In case all that seems a bit too niche for your liking then look at it this way: if you want to understand how people processed the horrors of the Great War, the rise of mass production, and modern geopolitical machinations, then diving into the art of the time is a great place to start.
Watch the video to find out why.
March 6, 2021
Vaccinations and Communist Famine | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.12 – Summer1921
TimeGhost History
Published 5 Mar 2021This season there is a major breakthrough in combatting one of humanity’s oldest diseases, but a deadly famine also strikes Soviet Russia. Will the international community come to the fledgling state’s aid?
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
– Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…Sources:
Some images from the Library of Congress
Albert Calmette. Photograph, 1930. Credit: Wellcome Collection
World health : the magazine of the World Health Organization Credit: Wellcome Collection Hannokarlhuber https://www.hanno-karlhuber.at/galeri…
https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/…
art of Atlit-Yam from Hanay
Photo by J P Davidson https://flickr.com/photos/50616401@N0…From the Noun Project:
– people by Gregor Cresnar
– Earth by RF_Design
– sick By Adrien Coquet, FR
– Man by Milinda CoureySoundtracks from Epidemic Sound and ODJB
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree
– “Dark Shadow” – Etienne Roussel
– “Brighter Days Will Come” – Oakwood Station
– “Just Like Old Times” – Jackie MartinArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
3 days ago
As usual this episode sees the balance of dark and light that is so typical of the interwar period. Famine in Russia and the first fast-food chain in America; the turning of the tide against TB and tragic Hollywood scandal.So a mixture of serious and fun. Regular viewers will know that our comment section is the same, running from intense debate to long-running memes. In this episode Indy mentions the first ice-cream candy bar, so to encourage things to stay on the light-hearted side why don’t you comment below telling us what’s your favourite candy bar or fast-food joint?
January 28, 2021
QotD: Art for art’s sake
Severian, “The Entertainer”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-08.
January 9, 2021
The (declining) power of the political cartoon
In Quillette, Jack Reilly outlines the rise of political cartooning from (of all people) Martin Luther to the present day, as it faces the final phase of its long career:
The first influential cartoon published in an American newspaper has traditionally been credited to Benjamin Franklin, who drew his famous serpent divided into eight parts with the legend Join, or Die — the message being that fellow colonists must band together to repel the enemy forces then threatening their territory. Long after Franklin’s death, the image would be dusted off for reuse by supporters of American unity.
Thomas Nast, whom many consider to be the greatest editorial cartoonist of all time, rose to prominence during the Civil War. Still in his early 20s, the young German immigrant began producing such arresting pro-Union material that Abraham Lincoln — flipping Napoleon’s rueful commentary about James Gillray on its head — referred to Nast as “our best recruiting agent.”
During the national election of 1864, conducted amidst the Civil War, the Democrats pushed a platform of reconciliation with the slaving south. In response, Nast created his famous Compromise with the South cartoon, depicting an injured union soldier, bowing his head and lifelessly shaking hands with a victorious confederate who stands atop the grave of a fallen Yankee, with Lady Liberty weeping in the foreground. The epitaph on a tombstone reads “In memory of the Union heroes who died in a useless war.” Nast’s lurid but masterful image created a sensation, and showed how politically powerful the cartooning medium could be in an age of mass newspaper readership. Two months later, Abraham Lincoln defeated the Democrat candidate, George McClellan, to secure a second term.
In the decades following the war, Nast would continue to elevate the medium to high art. In 1871, he began an ongoing series for Harper’s Weekly attacking the corruption of Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that controlled New York politics. Nast so mercilessly lampooned William M. “Boss” Tweed as the machine’s ringleader, that Tweed was heard to rage, “Stop them damn pictures! I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can’t read. But they can’t help seeing them damn pictures!”
Eventually, Tweed was convicted of money laundering. (He attempted to escape justice by absconding to Spain, but was soon apprehended by Spanish officials, who reportedly recognized him with assistance from Nast’s cartoons.) As for Nast himself, he’d go on to conceive of the elephant as a symbol for the Republican party, popularize the use of the donkey for the Democrats, and help create the modern image of Santa Claus that Americans have come to love.
“The Third-Term Panic”, by Thomas Nast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine on 7 November 1874.
A braying ass, in a lion’s coat, and “N.Y. Herald” collar, frightening animals in the forest: a giraffe (“N. Y. Tribune”), a unicorn (“N. Y. Times”), and an owl (“N. Y. World”); an ostrich, its head buried, represents “Temperance”. An elephant, “The Republican Vote”, stands near broken planks (Inflation, Repudiation, Home Rule, and Re-construction). Under the elephant, a pit labeled “Southern Claims. Chaos. Rum.” A fox (“Democratic Party”) has its forepaws on the plank “Reform. (Tammany. K.K.)” The title refers to U.S. Grant’s possible bid for a third presidential term. This possibility was criticized by New York Herald owner and editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Image and caption via Wikimedia Commons.
