Yesterday I had a conversation where I was obliged to bring up the name “Kathryn Kuhlman.” Kathryn Kuhlman! I hadn’t thought of her name in years and years and doubt I ever would have again, if it weren’t for this conversation. Kathryn Kuhlman was born in 1907 and became a Pentecostal evangelical preacher at the age of 16. She made a lucrative career for herself as a faith healer running “crusades” for Jesus from the 1940s to the late 1960s across the globe and at her 2000 seat Kuhlman Revival Tabernacle in Pittsburgh. For a while a scandal having to do with her husband sullied her reputation and she had to rebuild her career. Eventually she got her own TV show, which is when I became aware of her as a small child in the 70s. If I woke up early on Sundays, I had to sit through her show before the cartoons came on. I thought she seemed really strange then and looking at video of her today, yep, I was right, she was really strange.
Benny Hinn copped all her moves—he wrote a book about her—even the way he moves his mouth sometimes.
I’m just going to leave this here without much of an explanation. I don’t know if there’s anything I can say to do proper justice to it. In short, a guy freestyles about his near-death experience and what he found on the Other Side. Just watch it, and become enlightened.
Ross Rosenberg at Coilhouse dug up these hilarious waterbed commercials from the 80s featuring Tom LaBrie, a truly suave gentleman. Click the link at the bottom for a full roundup of Mr. LaBrie’s output. Ross says:
Just in time for the upcoming Runaways biopic—directed by Floria Sigismondi and starring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning—the Mattel toy company is unveiling its “Ladies of the ‘80s” collection’s Joan Jett Barbie. The collection also features Debbie Harry and Cyndi Lauper dolls, available in December.
Although I wholeheartedly approve of this, the first thing that came to mind was: What, no Annie Lennox or Siouxsie Sioux dolls? No Pat Benatar? No Lydia Lunch? Give ‘em time; the nostalgia machine will eventually crank ‘em all out.
(Note: There is also a Barbra Streisand Pink Label Barbie, but it’s ‘60s Barbara, not “Yentl”-era Babs.)
Below, Joan Jett and the Runaways perform Cherry Bomb in Tokyo in 1977:
This Saturday night at the Downtown Independent there will be a special anthology screening of the 2009 video and film work by The Masses, a film production collective started by director Matthew Amado, Jon Ramos and the late Heath Ledger. Work featuring artists such as Modest Mouse, Daedalus, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, the Dodos and many others will screened, along with a new short directed by actress-singer Ann Magnuson, who described her film as being about “a time-traveling hooker who meets up with the spirit of Gram Parsons (played by Grant Leuchtner) in Joshua Tree.”
After the screening Magnuson will perform a new spoken word piece backed by Dublab.
Downtown Independent, 251 S. Main St., Los Angeles.
Saturday, Nov. 14, 8 p.m., $10.
I know we’re all making “walk on the ‘mild’ side” cracks right now, but the Velvet Undergrounder’s been snapping photos since the ‘60s, and is an admitted Leica-geek. These two images have been culled from Reed’s new book of photographs (his third), Romanticism, a series of landscapes shot exclusively in black and white.
Finding just the right sequence for the photos, Reed says, was really no different than sequencing an album, “The response is emotional. That’s all I want; they are taken with emotion and put together with emotion, equal emotion.” And while the quality of Reed’s light looks stunning,
Rarely is there a human mark on the scene; for the most part, his photographs are of nature untouched: woods leading down to the edge of the sea, a layer of thick mist covering the earth. The branches of a tree are abundant with fruit, another tree is dead; the trunk splinters as it disintegrates. “I have never seen a tree that is not graceful,” he says.
Only one photograph, towards the end of the book, shows a human form (see above). It is an androgynous gray figure, with short hair, facing away from the camera and outlined with light. Light ripples across the top of the scene, suggesting water, and the rest is a mass of gray. The figure is Reed’s wife, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson.
As spotted in Vice, 8 women from Yemen and a look behind their traditional niqab to see what makes them tick (beyond a pretty much across-the-board appreciation for Dr. Phil).
Andrew Corsello’s The Bitch is Back article from GQ on the boorish subject of Ayn Rand Assholes is probably the best takedown of Ayn Rand’s followers (and Alan Greenspan and Wall Street) I’ve yet seen and certainly the funniest (other than Stephen Colbert’s). It was about time for an article like this to appear and I am glad it was Corsello who wrote it.
I myself became an unabashed Ayn Rand fanatic when I was in 7th or 8th grade. I’d been reading the works of Victor Hugo and so I was totally primed for discovering another “Romantic” (note capital “r”) writer like Ayn Rand next, but it wasn’t via her well-known fiction that I discovered the Russian-born novelist and philosopher, but rather a more obscure volume called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which I read extremely slowly so I could take in the complexity of the thought. It’s a very dry, technical book, but made a huge impression on me (more on this below, it merits special mention).
The next thing I read was Anthem, which is interesting enough, but slight compared to her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged which I read after that. Eventually I would go through nearly ever word of hers in print up to about 1979. I mean everything. Via mail order I collected single issues of The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter until I had them all and I kept them in bound cases like holy relics. This is what can happen when bright kids read Ayn Rand, they get obsessed, but hopefully, like me, they will grow out of it. Discovering Lenny Bruce, Marx, Marcuse, Crowley, Burroughs and the Firesign Theatre deprogrammed my teenage ass but good and by the time I was 14 and I soon stopped caring about Ayn Rand altogether. (In my case I was young enough not to have had any shameful, reactionary moments to cringe about and regret, not like young Marty Beckerman)
By the time I was in my twenties and living in the Wall Street area of Manhattan, I’d see young, obviously Republican, stock broker types reading Atlas Shrugged on the subway and I’d feel silent contempt for them. Discovering Ayn Rand after high school is bad enough, but to discover her post-college is true pathetica. Her strident greed is good moralizing about the ‘virtues of selfishness’ (one of her best known non-fiction titles) would have an appeal to would be Gordon Gekkos, of course, but… yuck. Talk about an impoverished intellectual diet.
Many people who loathe Ayn Rand tend to go on about what a cack-handed writer she was, but this is not strictly true because her books, even the 75,000 page Atlas Shrugged are real page turners. I can absolutely see why Atlas Shrugged is still one of the all time best selling books in history—I was captivated by it myself, of course. The characters are vivid. The book’s plotting—which has tons of relentless momentum despite the novel’s legendary heft—is a tour de force. It’s Rand’s dialogue that seals her reputation as an author you just can’t take seriously. To be fair, she was writing in her second language, but the problem with her books is that no one actually speaks to one another, they just make speeches at each other. Hectoring, long-winded speeches. It’s fine to read stuff like that as a teenager, but when I crack open one of her books today, I shake my head in disbelief at how bombastic and horrible her writing is. It’s Dan Brown level tripe.
If you don’t believe me, try this one for size, the trailer for King Vidor’s screen version of The Fountainhead with a script by Rand herself. Can you imagine how difficult it was for the actors to get their lines out and try to sound convincing saying them?!?! (It’s one or the other!)
Here’s a clip of Ayn Rand on Phil Donohue’s talkshow that I recall seeing at the time it originally aired. She got really peevish with both Phil and the audience at points. Check her out. Who talks like that?
*One quick thing I wanted to say about Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is that it is an unfairly ignored and misunderstood work on how concepts are formed, shunned by academia simply because it was written by Ayn Rand. Had it been written by Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead or Wittgenstein, it would be (rightfully) celebrated as an important philosophical treatise.I may think Ayn Rand sucks as a novelist, but I highly recommend this book.
As the editor for the site After These Messages from 2007-08, I waded through and curated the world’s advertising looking for the best, most creative, most socially responsible ad campaigns to hit the mediawebs every day. Out of those two years, the absolute best commercial I saw was the Discovery Channel’s I Love the Whole World spot. It’s one of those rare instances that you can say that advertising has actually raised itself above the morass of lies and hucksterism to become something like actual, uh, corporate folk art. And, lo and behold, the Discovery Channel and agency 72andSunny just released the followup.
Eighteen months ago, the Discovery Channel made people very happy with its “I Love the World” commercial, in which the network’s talent sang about their passion for life, the universe and everything. The promo did so well (4.5 million views on this YouTube version alone) that they’ve gotten the agency, 72andSunny, to do a sequel. Same song, different visuals. Still catchy. The tagline remains, “The world is just awesome.”
