Every issue, right about this time, we have a little crisis about which magazine cover to go with. Our latest issue - set to hit stands in about 3 weeks - tackles All the Presidents’ Secrets, from Teddy Roosevelt turning the White House into a karate dojo, to Richard Nixon’s pathetically sweet dating techniques (we’d definitely advise you not to try at home). In any case, I figured I’d place the 3 covers up on the site, and let fans tell us which one they liked. We’ve already picked one, but we’re keeping mum on the subject until it hits stands. In any case, it’s quickly turning into one of my favorite issues, and I thought it’d be fun to give you guys a sneak peek…

Attention legendary auteurs of world cinema: please stop dying! In the past two days, we’ve lost two of the best — Swedish director Ingmar “Gloomy Gus” Bergman and Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni — and if death keeps swinging his cinema scythe at this rate, we’ll be down to the likes of Spielberg in a week or two. While both were highly respected filmmakers in their own right, Bergman was undoubtedly the giant of the two. American filmmaker Paul Schrader (he wrote Taxi Driver) said of his passing, “It’s impossible for anyone of my generation not to have been influenced by Bergman.” High praise indeed, and not far from the mark: you see his trademark all over today’s movies, but perhaps nowhere more clearly, I will argue, than in dream sequences.

Everybody loves a good dream sequence, and Bergman was a master of them, playing with everything sound design to editing and music (or creepy lack thereof) to create something so uncanny, it could only be a dream. He perfected it in his masterpiece, Wild Strawberries, when the elderly professor dreams — what else — of his inevitable death:
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YOU WILL NEED
A way with women
A flexible moral compass

One At a Time
Frank Lloyd Wright, the man who revolutionized American architecture, was equally, uh, revolutionary, when it came to his love life. In 1889, he married Catherine Lee Clark Tobin and set about raising a family of six with her. However, that version of his personal life came to an abrupt end in 1909, when Wright went on an extended vacation to Berlin, Germany—with Margaret Cheney, the wife of a client, in tow. The pair spent more than two years in Europe before returning to Chicago and starting a new life as man and wife (though not legally, as Catherine refused to grant him a divorce). That second coupling would only last until 1914, but, to be fair, its end wasn’t Wright’s fault. That year, a disgruntled member of the family’s hired help set the Wrights’ house on fire after locking all but one door. As the former Mrs. Cheney, her two children, and two other guests fled the fire, the workman axed them to death. The freak incident plunged Wright into depression bad enough to distract him from his work, but not bad enough to keep him from hooking up with another woman less than a year later. He spent seven years with that woman, Miriam Noel, before finally getting his divorce from Catherine in 1922. He married Noel the next year. But, by 1924, Miriam left him, an event from which Wright quickly recovered by falling in love with a Yugoslavian ballerina named Olga Hinzenberg. Amazingly, this relationship managed to last to the end of the architect’s life in 1959.

Simultaneously
While Wright cornered the market on serial sort-of monogamy, fellow architect Louis Kahn kept a slightly busier schedule. Beginning around the early 1950s and until he died in 1974, Kahn kept three different sets of women and children, only one of which he was actually legally wed to. Despite the fact that this was pretty much an open secret in architecture circles, his New York Times obituary famously listed only his wife and her daughter as survivors, leaving out his other two children (and their mothers) entirely.

The caveman movie National Lampoon’s Homo Erectus will hit theaters in September. The sitcom based on the GEICO Caveman ads will premiere in October. But cavemen are nothing new to pop culture. A man (or woman) who resembles us but does not understand or fit in with the confusing modern world is a wonderful device for both comedy and adventure. These 12 cavemen and cavewomen are not ranked; who am I to rank cavemen? They are in chronological order.

1932 Alley Oop

The comic strip Alley Oop has been in news papers for 75 years, outliving two of his three illustrators. Oop is your everyday dinosaur-riding caveman who lives in the kingdom of Moo when he isn’t time-traveling to different eras of history. He was also the subject of a #1 pop hit by The Argyles.

1958 B.C.

B.C. is a comic strip by Johnny Hart, who died this past April. The strip will continue under the production of Hart’s daughter and grandson. B.C. was also the caveman character, playing straight man to all the silliness going on around him. The strip took on a religious theme in 1977, which led to some criticism and editorial rejection from some newspapers.

1960 Fred Flintstone

The Flintstones was the first prime-time animated TV series for adults. Original episodes aired from 1960-1966, and for many years after in reruns. Fred and his wife Wilma, and their neighbors Barney and Betty Rubble were loosely based on the earlier sitcom The Honeymooners. Although the setting was a prehistoric age, the Flintstones had modern conveniences such as record players and telephones, which were powered by animals, or in the case of the automobile, “Fred’s two feet.” (more…)

I’m a Kubrick fan (isn’t everyone?), and I continue to find amazing, sometimes bizarre, Kubrickian content on the web.

The nice folks at Coudal Partners share my interest in Kubrick, but have gone to the trouble of compiling a page linking to tons of fascinating stuff: Stuff About Stanley Kubrick.

Here are some of my favorites (warning: some of this is highly geeky):

Film of SK at the 1968 premiere of 2001: A Space Oddyssey. I believe this is the same night that a sweet printed program was distributed to the audience. jc-01.08.07

David points us to Michael Beirut’s essay “Stanley Kubrick and the Future of Graphic Design”. jc-10.17.05

Two Special Lenses for Barry Lyndon or “How the stringent demands of a purist-perfectionist film-maker led to the development of two valuable new cinematographic tools.” A great first-hand film tech piece.
jc-06.24.07

And there are pages and pages more!

It’s time for another Tuesday Turnip wherein I type a random phrase and we see what kind of interesting factoids “turn-up.”

Today I typed in “longest book ever written” unearthing the following from a few different sites:

• Henry Darger: The Story of the Vivian Girls. Illustrated fantasy novel manuscript typed single-spaced with 15,145 pages in 10 volumes. Discovered after Darger’s death, the manuscript has never been published. The total number of words has been estimated; some believe this might be the longest novel ever written. [1] The most conservative guess will put this in the million-word realm, possibly into tens of millions.
• The longest roman fleuve ever written is Jules Romains’s Les Hommes de bonne volonté (Men of Good Will), produced in 27 volumes, each with a separate title, and published from 1932-46. If taken as a single piece of fiction, it would be a strong contender for the longest novel ever written.
• Popular fiction series about a single protagonist, with multiple authors, can dwarf such records: Perry Rhodan, a German series of novels about the eponymous space hero, can claim over 150 million words in over 2300 parts.
• The longest book ever written - Yongle Dadian- During the Ming Dynasty at least 3,000 scholars spent 4 years, beginning in 1403, to work on the Yongle Dadian, an encyclopedia with 11,095 volumes and 22,877 chapters. There are an estimated 370 million Chinese characters used.

Some other, well-known books that made Wiki’s list:

• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged 565,223 words.[14] 1274 pages.
• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace Original text has some 460,000 Russian and French words. English translation contains over 560,000 words and over 3.1 million characters; typically over 1400 pages as a paperback.
• Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock 532,030 words.
• Victor Hugo, Les Misérables Nearly 513,000 French words.

And as a side note, something tangentially interesting that turned up in this week’s search: Mark Twain was the first writer ever to submit a typewritten manuscript to a publisher. The name of the book: Tom Sawyer.

July 30–another full moon (and Blue, in some places of the world)–and another happy birthday for Jason. Because I’m a bit Procrustean, and because I have gypsy blood on my mother’s side, I have to say I abide by the adage that full moons summon something in people. Crime increases, it’s said, but more than that I think people just find themselves out on the streets, blackout-style, drawn like bits of industrial metal to some invisible lodestone. For instance, I’ve attended the Little Joy Reading Series for almost two years, and I’ve always found a full moon to wrangle in more people; predictably, a waning moon seems to distribute agoraphobia more evenly. I haven’t kept official stats (have to convince the ‘Joy to lend me their abacus), but maybe I will whenever it’s grant season again. Anyone else have attendance-related conjectures about full moons?

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the genitalia of an animal which astounds us with its size in so many other respects — it grows up to 60 feet in length and can weigh 150 metric tons — is also pretty sizable. (Indeed, bull sperm whale penises can reach nine feet.) What is remarkable, though, is the powerful mystique that this particular piece of a particularly large animal seems to have held, and continues to hold, over us. Three examples are mentioned in Eric Dolin’s magnificent history of whaling in America, Leviathan:

1) The 1598 stranding of a sperm whale on a Dutch shore was a rare and newsmaking event. Of special interest to onlookers — and to engraver Jacob Maltham, who depicted the event above — was the animal’s prodigious sexual organ. As Dolin points out, “One of the men leans toward the whale and uses his staff, apparently to measure the organ’s size. The other man’s left arm is draped around the woman’s back, drawing her near, while his other arm is outstretched, palm upward toward it, as if to say ‘behold!’ Yet another man, finding the protruding penis less interesting than useful, uses it as a ladder to get on top of the whale.”

2) Some 400 years later, as previously mentioned here, an unfortunate explosion involving a decomposing whale being trucked through a Taiwanese city attracted considerable attention worldwide. (Gruesome pictures helped.) When the whale finally reached its destination — a nature preserve outside the city where it was to be dissected and studied — it continued to attract attention, mostly from local men. According to the Taipei Times, they flocked “to see the corpse and ‘experience’ the size of its penis.”
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In the past, we’ve talked about history’s best-selling books, top rated TV shows, most popular video games, best-selling albums, and the albums that topped the charts the longest.

After reading that The Simpsons notched the seventeenth-best opening day of all time, I was curious about the top sixteen (and subsequent three). Here’s the list, courtesy of Box Office Mojo:

1 Spider-Man 3, $59,841,919
2 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, $55,830,600
3 Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, $50,013,859
4 X-Men: The Last Stand, $45,102,265
5 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, $44,232,338
6 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, $42,910,392
7 Spider-Man 2, $40,442,604
8 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, $40,118,363
9 Spider-Man, $39,406,872
10 Shrek the Third, $38,426,991
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I have fond memories of Mr. Yuk from my childhood. My parents placed the green-yucky-face stickers on various items under the kitchen sink, and sure enough, I never drank drain cleaner. But where did Mr. Yuk come from?

According to Wikipedia, Mr. Yuk is from Pittsburgh, and was introduced in 1971. Prior to 1971, poison symbols were commonly of the skull-and-crossbones variety, but there was concern that children might associate that “jolly roger” symbol with pirates. This article further explains that in the early 70’s, the skull-and-crossbones was also the logo for the Pittsburgh Pirates, so I can see how kids might not associate it with something they should NOT touch. The poison center at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh designed the Mr. Yuk logo and distributed the stickers (which also typically contain a phone number to reach a local or national poison control hotline — for the record, the national number is 1-800-222-1222), and at least in my experience, these stickers were widespread as late as the mid-1980’s.

Much more — including freaky 70’s videos — after the jump.

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