Former Black Panther patches together purpose in Africa exile. 'Most of O'Neal's big dreams have faded over the years, or come to feel silly. Like beating the 42-year-old federal gun charges that caused him to flee the United States. Like the global socialist revolution that he was supposed to help lead. Like returning home to the streets of his Midwestern childhood. Like winning citizenship in his adopted African country, and the prize that's eluded him on two continents: the feeling of belonging somewhere.'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Jan 28, 2012 -
11 comments
A Portrait in Postcards. Twenty years after her death,
Angela Carter's literary executor and friend,
Susannah Clapp, remembers Carter through the cards she sent, "These cards make a paper trail, a zigzag path through the 80s. They are casually dispatched – some messages are barely more than a signature – but are often the more telling for that: they catch Angela on the wing, shooting her mouth off. She would have hated the idea of a soundbite, but she had a gift for a capsule phrase, for a story in a word. "
The postcard gallery.
posted by gladly
on Jan 23, 2012 -
4 comments
One of the more famous suppressed films of recent years is Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an early work by writer/director Todd Haynes (Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven). Filmed in 1987, the short film -- which relates the rise and fall of Karen Carpenter with a cast of Barbie dolls -- barely got a year's worth of festival time in 1989 before the twin iron boots of A&M Records and Richard Carpenter came down on Haynes.* [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Dec 31, 2011 -
29 comments
We've all seen variations on the personal time-lapse video --
a snapshot every day for six years, or a look at
a young girl's first decade. But nobody's done it quite like
Sam Klemke. For thirty-five years the
itinerant freelance cartoonist has documented his life in short year-end reviews, a funny, weary, eccentric, and hopeful record dating all the way back to 1977. Recently optioned for
documentary treatment by the
government of Australia, you can skim Sam's opus in reverse in the striking video
"35 Years Backwards Thru Time with Sam Klemke," an ever-evolving home movie montage that grows grainier and grainier as it tracks Sam
"from a paunchy middle aged white bearded self deprecating schluby old fart, to a svelt, full haired, clean shaven, self-important but clueless 20 year old."
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 31, 2011 -
7 comments
Lewin was Parrish's constant companion for 55 years. "He and Lewin must have had a magical life together out in the country. When Parrish was 90 years old and Lewin was 71, Parrish's wife finally died, leaving him free to marry Lewin. However, he declined so she packed her bags, left the estate and went back to her village where she married someone else."
Part one in an occasional series on artists and their love life.
[some NSFW] [more inside]
posted by unliteral
on Aug 23, 2011 -
21 comments
The Witness to War project is not about the set piece movements of armies, the military strategies of generals, nor the geopolitical nuances that led to war. Instead, it is about the 'foxhole' view of combat as seen by the soldiers who experienced it.
posted by Horselover Phattie
on May 31, 2011 -
4 comments
Still Life with Animated Dogs is a witty and candid cartoon by Paul Fierlinger, animator of Sesame Street's
Teeny Little Super Guy, recounting his life from being a dissident artist in 1960s Czechoslovakia to being a successful animator in the US. He tells his lifestory by talking about the dogs he's owned over the years, Roosevelt, Ike, Johnson and Spinnaker. Warning: Something may get stuck in your eye.
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 27, 2010 -
8 comments
Snippets of poetry from the Imperium; a sample folk tale from the Oral History; brief biographies of over a dozen Duncan Idahos; two differing approaches to Paul Muad'Dib himself and to his son Leto II; Fremen recipes; Fremen history; secrets of the Bene Gesserit; the songs of Gurney Halleck -- these are just some of the treasures found when an earthmover fell into the God Emperor's no-room at Dar-es-Balat. Out of print for more than two decades, disavowed by Frank Herbert's estate, and highly sought-after by fans, the legendary
Dune Encyclopedia is now available online as
a fully illustrated and searchable PDF [direct link].
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Sep 1, 2010 -
55 comments
Bringing It All Back Home. The relatively long-running (
since 2006) webcomic
Bellen! will come to a close in early September as its author
goes on to
other things (pdf). In preparation for the end of the series, the creator is taking "a longer eye-opening look into the origin of Bellen!" which dispenses with the strips regular
old timey-yellowing paper style "because there are no more veneers in Bellen! it’s the pure unadulterated truth from here on out." An interesting look at the creative process in the digital age.
posted by ND¢
on Aug 13, 2010 -
11 comments
The Rehabilitation of Ernest Gellner -
It is easy to imagine why Ernest Gellner would be one of the universally known figures in Anglophone intellectual life. A polymath whose work ranged across anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology, his mind wrestled with an encyclopedia's worth of nagging questions about nationalism, modernity, civil society, imperialism, Islam, psychoanalysis, ethics and epistemology ... All of this, to repeat, should explain Gellner's monumental prominence – except for the fact that he has no such prominence. (via
mr)
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Jul 25, 2010 -
7 comments
The Life of Shelton Doyle Blalock, Everyday American. Doyle Blalock was a son, submariner, husband, mailman, father, gardener, rockhound, artisan, grandfather, and friend: a regular guy with a remarkable life. What makes him particularly remarkable, though, is that his grandson,
Lance Dean, created such a thorough record of his life to share with the internet, from
Doyle's childhood in Golden Grove, Mississippi, his service as
a sailor during World War II, his return to Mississippi and marriage to
the lovely Lodena Alexander, to his post-retirement vocation as an artisan,
creating "sand paintings" and
demonstrating his art.
(Links are to images out of context. See the first link for descriptions.) [more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Jul 2, 2010 -
4 comments
London Lives 12 London archives – digitised, marked up and tagged – to "create a comprehensive electronic edition of primary sources on criminal justice and the provision of poor relief and medical care in eighteenth-century London".
The
Lives page is a good place to start browsing.
[related]
posted by unliteral
on Jun 8, 2010 -
8 comments
Coloring the Kingdom: the story of the all-female “finishing school” of hand-drawn animation that worked behind the scenes to create the first animated full-length Disney feature, Snow White. (
via.)
posted by 1f2frfbf
on Feb 5, 2010 -
8 comments
Rapper Shaun Boothe is now midway through his 12 part series of "unauthorized biographies", which showcase short history lessons about some of the major black figures of our time. Thus far, he's covered
James Brown,
Bob Marley (my favorite),
Muhammed Ali,
Martin Luther King (and briefly, Barack Obama),
Jimi Hendrix, and
Sean "Puffy" Combs. He's gotten some
play and
good press from major underground hip-hop media, due next in the series is a biography of Oprah Winfrey.
posted by rollbiz
on Jan 11, 2010 -
13 comments
There was a rivalry between the parties, of course, but in Potter's account, it was more like the rivalry between Cal and Stanford than that between today's Republicans and Democrats. The parties had somewhat different constituencies and pledged fealty to a different set of men, but each attempted to encompass as much of the political spectrum as possible rather than merely half of it. The story of the 1850s, by these lights, is about how this changed.
With reference to
David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis, Adam Cadre surveys the four antebellum presidents.
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Oct 22, 2009 -
23 comments
War Dances:
“I wanted to call my father and tell him that a white man thought my brain was beautiful”. Sherman Alexie doing his thing in The New Yorker, excerpted from his upcoming book (
early review; interview
1,
2.)
posted by Non Prosequitur
on Oct 5, 2009 -
45 comments
Sir Humphry Davy
Was not fond of gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
This is the first example of the form that came to be known as the
clerihew.
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Jul 24, 2009 -
66 comments
Marguerite Young - whom Kurt Vonnegut called "unquestionably a genius" - first achieved success with a study of the utopian commune at
New Harmony, Indiana called
Angel in the Forest. She then spent 18 years writing
Miss Macintosh, My Darling - a
1,198 page novel that William Goyen praised in
The New York Times Book Review as "a masterwork". She spent the last 30 years of her life writing an unfinished biography of
Eugene V. Debs that was posthumously published, in heavily edited form, as
Harp Song for a Radical.
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on May 22, 2009 -
4 comments
First libraries started loaning records, then toys, then films and games - now they're loaning out people.
The Living Library Project allows members to hear people's stories not on the page, but in person.
posted by mippy
on Dec 3, 2008 -
16 comments
"There's something very shabby about a noble grave... Political power and the power of wealth result in splendid graves. Really impressive graves, you know. Such creatures never had any imagination while they lived, and quite naturally their graves don't leave any room for imagination either. But noble people live only on the imaginations of themselves and others, and so they leave graves like this one which inevitably stir one's imagination. And this I find even more wretched. Such people, you see, are obliged even after they are dead to continue begging people to use their power of imagination." -
Yukio Mishima via Kashiwagi in
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. On this, the anniversary of Mishima's transformation into a headless god, a collection of video links.
[more inside]
posted by eccnineten
on Nov 25, 2008 -
11 comments
A fascinating story of the first known, Western transsexual, Tibetan Buddhist novice monk:
Laurence Michael Dillon (born Laura Maude Dillon, May 1, 1915 - May 15, 1962) was a British physician and the first female-to-male transsexual to undergo phalloplasty. His brother, Sir Robert Dillon, was the eighth Baronet of Lismullen in Ireland. The editor of Debrett's told Time Magazine that Dillon was unquestionably next in line for the baronetcy: The unwanted press attention led Dillon to flee to India, and then to a Tibetan monastery.
Girls Will Be Boys, a review of
The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution, by Pagan Kennedy.
Photograph of Michael Dillon as a monk.
[more inside]
posted by nickyskye
on Sep 8, 2008 -
15 comments
Who is Alexander Grothendieck? [PDF]
This lecture is concerned not with Grothendieck's mathematics but with his very unusual life on the fringes of human society. In particular, there is, on the one hand, the question of why at the age of forty-two Grothendieck first of all resigned his professorship at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES); then withdrew from mathematics completely; and finally broke off all connections to his colleagues, students, acquaintances, friends, as well as his own family, to live as a hermit in an unknown place. On the other hand, one would like to know what has occupied this restless and creative spirit since his withdrawal from mathematics.
posted by Wolfdog
on Aug 17, 2008 -
31 comments
Paul Theroux reviews Patrick French's frank, full, authorized (!) biography of Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul. Sir Vidiadhar is not, in Theroux's estimation, a very nice man. He tortures his wife emotionally, his mistress physically, and he treats people of all races with narcissistic condescension. But can he write?
[more inside]
posted by sy
on Apr 8, 2008 -
18 comments
Over 30 years ago, Robert Burnham Jr. struggled to get his astronomical (in more ways than one) three volume work published.
Burnham's Celestial Handbook: An Observer's Guide to the Universe Beyond the Solar System "remains a sort of real-life hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, a compendium with something to say about nearly every cosmic destination worth visiting. . . It is rarely compared to other books because there simply is none other like it." It remains a
beloved and relevant book among star-gazers today. Yet few know much about the life of the author, or of his sad and lonely demise:
Sky Writer.
posted by spock
on Jan 28, 2008 -
20 comments
