In this Aug. 12, 2000 file photo, The Holy Shroud, a 14 foot-long linen revered by some as the burial cloth of Jesus, is shown at the Cathedral of Turin, Italy.

A group of Italian debunkers is claiming it has proved that the Shroud of Turin – revered as the cloth that covered Jesus in the tomb – was man-made. The shroud bears the image of a crucified man. Believers say Christ’s image was recorded on the fibers at the time of his resurrection. The Italian Committee for Checking Claims on the Paranormal said Monday Oct 5, 2009 that scientists have reproduced the shroud using materials and methods that were available in the 14th century. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni, file)

Read the whole article here.

The tobacco enema was used to infuse tobacco smoke into a patient’s rectum for various medical purposes, primarily thte resuscitation of drowning victims. A rectal tube inserted into the anus was connected to a fumigator and bellows that forced the smoke towards the rectum. The warmth of the smoke was thought to promote respiration, but doubts about the credibility of tobacco enemas led to the popular phrase “blow smoke up one’s ass.” To learn more, click here.

via tophattobacco.com, thanks Don

A great prank? As it was 208 years ago, I thought I’d mention it…

I’ve often thought of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public” as a great early satire as prank.

Not dissimilar to the Joey Skaggs dog food restaurant hoax/satire.

I just heard about Daniel Defoe’s “The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church” written on July 31, in 1701. His satire called for the savage elimination of dissenters. When the church found out it was parody, he was (allegedly) pilloried. The crowd threw flowers instead of fruit.

images: astroblogos.wordpress.com & Indiana.edu

Submitted by Jorge Luis Marzo:

From Wikipedia:

“Dark Side of the Moon” is a French mockumentary by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick. It features some surprising guest appearances, most notably by Donald Rumsfeld, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Buzz Aldrin and Stanley Kubrick’s widow, Christiane Kubrick…

Here, as a tease, are three clips about 25 minutes long, cut from the hour and a half documentary.

Celebrity Death Hoaxes Abound

It was a bumpy weekend for the rich and famous, with the entertainment industry mourning the loss of three pop culture icons even as the Internet churned out one hoax after another declaring more celebrities dead.

The hoaxfest was triggered by mid-week announcements confirming that Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson had died. By Thursday afternoon the Internet was rife with false reports claiming that actors Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford had died as well. Death announcements for Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, Louie Anderson, P. Diddy, Natalie Portman, George Clooney, and Rick Astley — all bogus — followed in quick succession.

Pranksters used a variety of tactics to promulgate the rumors, including generating fake news stories on the Web, vandalizing Wikipedia pages, and hacking celebrities’ Twitter accounts. Despite their rapid dissemination, all were debunked in fairly short order.

Convenient as it is to blame the Internet and social media in particular for this tidal wave of bunk (one blogger even recommended, presumably in jest, that Twitter be equipped with a fact-checking application), this isn’t the first time a “rumor panic” has gripped the nation in the wake of a high-profile death. As Museum of Hoaxes curator Alex Boese noted earlier today, the same thing happened after Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. According to the New York Times, “rumors of killings, accidents and deaths involving prominent persons flooded the city” in the days that followed, with callers jamming the switchboards of newspapers, radio stations, and government offices to inquire about the fates of Frank Sinatra, Van Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, and other top celebrities of the time.

The Post-Gazette reported the same phenomenon in Pittsburgh. “The day after the President’s death was announced, scores of people called to report Jack Dempsey dead,” one beleagured switchboard operator was quoted as saying. “On Monday, the rumor-relayers killed off Van Johnson and Jack Oakie; on Wednesday they said Himmler and Hitler were dead; on Thursday, it was Henry Ford and Truman and today we had dozens of calls saying Truman had been assassinated. Today, of all days, too, with us trying to handle all the calls about the baseball game between the Bucs and the Cubs!”

The technology has changed; human nature hasn’t.

More on this topic:

François Caradec, French post-dadaïst writer, died Thursday, November 13, 2008 in Paris. He was 84 and was renowned as one of the best specialists of French marginal and creative literature of the 19th and the early 20th century. He was a connoisseur of Alphonse Allais (one of the first French literary hoaxers), Alfred Jarry, Isidore Ducasse de Lautréamont and Raymond “Crazy” Roussel.

A close friend of many surrealist writers, Caradec was also Regent of the Pataphysic College and part of the “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle” (Oulipo) created by Georges Pérec.

In 1964, he published (with his accomplice Alain Arnaud) one of the most relevant encyclopedias ever written on pranks, pratical jokes and hoaxes called Dictionnaire des farces et attrapes.

I unfortunately never met him but I had the wonderful chance, two years ago, to review a copy of this very rare and marvellous book…

If heaven really exists, its inhabitants will, from now on, have to face Caradec’s pranks for eternity!

Here’s his obituary from Le Monde:

François Caradec, French Writer and Pranks Encyclopedist, Dies at 84
by Patrick Kéchichian
Le Monde
November 19, 2008

François Caradec, écrivain et historien de la littérature, est mort à Paris jeudi 13 novembre des suites d’une longue maladie. Il était âgé de 84 ans. Mémoire érudite de la littérature de la fin du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe, il s’intéressait plus à ses marges et à ses marginaux qu’à ses monuments.

D’Alphonse Allais, dont il était le fin connaisseur, le biographe (Belfond, 1994, et Fayard, 1997) et l’éditeur (Laffont “Bouquins”, “Poésie-Gallimard”…), il avait hérité l’esprit de facétie associé à la plus grande rigueur. Ombrageux parfois, mais toujours impatient de faire partager l’objet de ses recherches, il était avare de confidences sur lui-même. Il y a sept ans, il donna cependant entretien détaillé et savoureux à la revue Histoires littéraires (n°8, octobre-décembre 2001).

Né à Quimper en 1924 – son père médecin lui apprendra quelques chansons de salle de garde… -, le jeune Caradec nourrit une passion enfantine pour l’épigraphie latine et rêve d’entrer à l’Ecole des chartes. La guerre l’en empêche. Evacué de Lorient bombardé par les Anglais, il se fait engager comme typographe à L’Echo breton de Quimperlé. “Composer un texte lettre par lettre, mot par mot, placer les virgules où les a voulues l’auteur, confia-t-il à la revue Histoires littéraires, c’est un travail critique du texte qu’aucune autre méthode ne peut égaler.”

Durant l’Occupation, il se retrouve à Paris, fréquente assidûment la librairie La Maison des Amis des livres, rue de l’Odéon, et fait la connaissance de sa fondatrice, Adrienne Monnier, et de l’écrivain Maurice Saillet. Le magasin est alors le lieu de rendez-vous de l’édition et de la littérature. “En fait de vie littéraire, c’était plutôt la vie de quartier”, expliquait Caradec. Il croise là Michel Cournot, Pierre Dumayet, les poètes Henri Pichette, Yves Bonnefoy, Henri Michaux – “le plus important pour moi à cette époque” -, Pascal Pia, Maurice Nadeau… Et puis aussi Michel Leiris et Raymond Queneau.

Les cafés parisiens sont alors un autre lieu important pour Caradec. Dans les années d’après-guerre, ce furent notamment le tabac Saint-Sulpice, jadis fréquenté par Verlaine, ou chez Moineau, rue du Four… “Aujourd’hui, l’un de ces cafés vend des sacs à main et l’autre des fringues pour Japonaises“, disait-il. En 1986, il établissait une géographie intime, presque autobiographique, des bistrots dans La Compagnie des zincs (Ramsay, et Seghers, 1991). Des bistrots aux cafés-concerts, il n’y a qu’un pas chronologique à franchir. Outre un grand livre sur le sujet qu’il signa avec Alain Weill (Hachette, 1980, et Fayard, 2007), Caradec est aussi l’auteur d’une biographie de Jane Avril (Fayard, 2001) et d’un livre sur le Pétomane (Le Pétomane au Moulin-Rouge avec Jean Nohain, Pauvert, 1965, Mazarine, 2000).

Dans l’édition, François Caradec fit à peu près tous les métiers : “L’essentiel pour moi était de toucher les livres, de toute façon ce n’était pas ceux-là que je lisais. J’aimais faire les paquets, et dans les réserves monter les piles.” Il passa de chez Dunod à Hachette, fit quelques travaux mercenaires, tint des stands à Francfort, et lança une collection de classiques de la bande dessinée chez Pierre Horay : “La première édition de Little Nemo, des inédits de Christophe en même temps que sa biographie, Vie privée et Vie publique de Monsieur Réac de Nadar, tout Töpffer en un volume…” A partir des années 1970, il participa aux travaux du Syndicat des écrivains de langue française (SELF), puis à ceux de la Société des gens de lettres (SGDL).

Régent du Collège de “pataphysique” – “une science qui était nôtre et que n’avait pas encore phagocytée l’université” -, François Caradec, qui entra à l’Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo) en 1983, est l’auteur d’une oeuvre critique considérable. Mais le mot “oeuvre” est un peu trop solennel… Ses livres forment plutôt un édifice, construit au gré de l’humeur et de la curiosité, des rencontres et des affinités. Un Dictionnaire des farces et attrapes (avec Alain Arnaud) l’inaugura en 1964. Première collaboration avec Jean-Jacques Pauvert. Elle sera suivie de réalisations communes, notamment autour de la revue Bizarre et de Raymond Roussel. Sur l’auteur d’Impressions d’Afrique, il publia une biographie en 1972 – reprise et augmentée en 1997 chez Fayard, son éditeur le plus fidèle – et dirigea, toujours chez Pauvert, une première édition des Œuvres complètes.

Parmi ses essais biographiques, il faut citer aussi Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont (La Table ronde, 1970, Gallimard, 1975), A la recherche d’Alfred Jarry (Seghers, 1974), Willy, le père des Claudine (Fayard, 2004)… Il y a quelques jours paraissait, chez Fayard, un premier roman, policier de surcroît, Le Doigt coupé de la rue du Bison, qui recèle des indications cryptées sur sa vie et ses passions… Dans l’entretien d’Histoires littéraires, il avait fait cet aveu : “Je n’ai fait qu’une seule chose dans la vie, c’est lire : il n’y a pour moi qu’une réalité dans la vie, elle est dans les livres. J’ai réussi la seule chose qui me plaisait dans la vie.

photo: chamontin.nom.fr

The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale is the unusual story of the rise and fall of a major talent, along with Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat, from the 1980s art world. Though he was extremely talented with a profitable collection of work, Chuck Connelly ended up alienating every collector and gallery owner he worked with. This 63-minute documentary (currently airing on HBO) follows the life of this brilliant yet enigmatic painter, who had great success as a young artist but who now sees his career fading.

Driven by desperation, and left by his wife during the course of this documentary, Connelly hires an actor to pose as a young, upcoming artist to sell Chuck’s work to galleries and art dealers.

For more information, check out:

Film credits: Produced and Directed by Jeff Stimmel; Executive Producer for Films Transit International: Diana Holtzberg; Edited by Paula Heredia; Associate Producer: Joanna K. Stimmel: Co-Producer: Marjorie Connelly; Original Songs by Paul A. Anderson; Produced in association with BBC Storyville, ZDF/Arte and Films Transit International, Inc.

The Hollywood sign was our Everest once – artists and men of vision hoofed it up Mount Lee and (depending on one’s receptivity to change and general placement on the deference to authority scale) defaced it, vandalized it, or created monumental public art from it … because it was there. Before the locked gates, the motion sensors, and the security cameras, you could turn Los Angeles’s most famous landmark – “our Eiffel Tower” according to Tom LaBonge – into any screed, any message, as long as it was nine letters or less. From 1976 to 1996, a small and diverse group of people did exactly that to our most famous landmark – the one that marked our land, in fact, as a city of the world: In those 20 years our Hollywood sign was edited at least 13 times.

Rarely was the message a proper jeremiad. Rarely would it change the lives of those who beheld it. Rarely did it instruct us how to live, or offer the answers to life, the universe and everything. (Forty-two.) Most of the time, in fact, it was utterly banal – rock bands or frat boys seeking some pub.

A few times (due mostly to the efforts of one artist), the sign made the leap to beautiful pith, more distilled and concise than the sparest haiku, the most soulful wit. But even the rest of the time, when it was just some joes looking for promotion, a maneuver on that scale must be considered art too.

Decades ago, the sign had its first run-in with change, albeit unintentionally. One night in the early 1940s, when it read HOLLYWOODLAND (the name of the 1923 real estate development the sign was intended to promote), its caretaker, Albert Kothe got smashed (since it was the ’40s, doubtless on rye) and drove his car through the H, destroying the letter outright and leaving it to spell OLLYWOODLAND. In 1949, the sign was refurbished by the Los Angeles parks department and the LAND was taken out, rendering the sign a statewide landmark rather than a promotional tool for development.

The late Daniel Finegood was the first to climb the mountain and change the sign since Kothe’s wild ride. It was Jan. 1, 1976, when California relaxed its marijuana laws; the furniture maker and artist altered the sign to read HOLLYWeeD. He would do it three more times: HOLYWOOD on an Easter Sunday, OLLYWOOD for Oliver North and the Iran-Contra hearings, and OIL WAR during our first Iraq War. “He always had a fascination with physical art,” said his daughter Natalie. “Different signs express different signage, and he used what was already there as a medium.” (Apparently the children of artists talk that way too.)

Natalie remembers nights she and her mom would drop Daniel and his buddies off at the base of the hill after mass gatherings at the Finegood home: neon signs all over the place, friends working, sewing together enormous canvas sheets. Above all things, Finegood the artist used humor to examine signs – literal signs – and their meaning. By changing them, usually deleting or altering no more than one or two letters, the meaning would change completely. Once, Finegood rented a room in the now-gone Hotel Rector in Hollywood, specifically requesting a room next to the first R in RECTOR. Natalie says that the next day the sign read ERECTOR.

Good public art is a rarity, and most of the hooligans looking to change the sign weren’t after art, but a billboard. In 1984, in a promise befitting a rock star’s sense of narcissism and grandeur, the Raffeys – a self-described “white pop jive band” from New Orleans – told their fans they would move to Hollywood and put their own name across the epic sign. The Raffeys’ aims were as world-changing as Angelyne’s (who was herself knocking off the artistic vision of the late great Judy Holliday). But despite their intent, and possibly without their knowledge, they created art anyway. After all, there were harnesses involved.

While Raff Raffey (singer and guitarist) and Max Chain (singer and keyboards) waited for the rest of their band to follow them across the country, they slept on the sand in Venice Beach and made friends with a beach bum named Ted before moving into a cramped one-bedroom in Venice. (Is there any other kind?) Not long after, the Raffeys decided to take the first steps in getting their names on the Hollywood sign, hiking up Mount Lee to see their canvas up close. No one in the band had any idea the sign was as huge as it turned out to be: Each letter is 45 feet, or about four stories, tall. Raff was ready to throw in the towel, the task too daunting. Moreover, the Raffeys were poor, since they were musicians and presumably sans either girlfriend or day job. The operation would have only a virtual budget.

They drew the schematics for their night op on graph paper; they would need around 160 bed sheets to cover the sign. With no money, they first tried begging: “We went door to door telling people we were a frat, and we needed sheets for a rush,” Raff said. “We only got one or two sheets.” Then, as so often happens, thievery saved the day: Max found an unlocked Holiday Inn linen closet, took all the sheets, and ran. They set up shop in an abandoned Venice dairy, borrowed a sewing machine, and got to work. By now it was December, and they had less than a month to put up the sign; following Finegood’s blueprint, they would execute the operation on New Year’s Eve: “There are only two nights you could go up there and the helicopters won’t fly: the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve,” said Raff. “The crazies get drunk, get guns, and start shooting into the air.”

When you’re talking about modifying the Hollywood sign, all planning is done on a monstrous scale. Finegood always had a crew of old friends to help out. His methods were almost the same as the Raffeys used: large black and white sheets of material to cover up the letters. The HOLLYWeeD sign – a college art project that earned him an A – was easier than most because it only involved changing two letters. His most labor-intensive piece was the OIL WAR sign, which required six letters to be either changed or covered completely.

All of these projects are collaborative, as anything on this scale must be, but nobody remembers the names of the dirt movers who physically created Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, or any of the seamstresses who sewed the grand shrouds for Wrapped Reichstag; they remember only Christo and his chick. Some of the most notorious undertakings were done by groups of scheming college students, often fraternities. The first school to successfully get its name on the sign was the U.S. Naval Academy (the sign read GO NAVY) in 1983 during a football game against the Army. Similarly, USC (USCWOOD) and UCLA (GO UCLA) students put their schools’ names on the signs in 1987 and 1993, respectively. It was rumored that up to 40 Caltech students participated in their 1987 operation (the simple and elegant CALTECH). The Raffeys had a grand total of six: the four band members and two accomplices, their friend Andrew Rupert and Ted the beach bum.

Raff had to work that night – see what happens when you assume musicians don’t work? He arrived at the sign around 1:30 a.m., but the work had barely begun. He was running material up the hill when Ted, who was running with him and was also a smoker advancing in age, stopped suddenly: “He says ‘Raff, slow down. My heart’s palpitating. I think something’s gonna happen.’” In the calmest voice he could muster, Raff told his friend that if he died, he would leave him.

As morning loomed, the Raffeys stepped up their effort. A hastily tied-down rope sent Raff flying from 45 feet – he was saved by a $75 climber’s vest.

The sun rose, and all that remained to put up were four exclamation marks to cover the extra letters. If they left without the punctuation, their original vision for the sign would be incomplete, but the plan was to play an unauthorized show in public that coming day. “We wanted to get arrested,” Raff said, “but not there.”

That day, the band set up and performed in front of a friend’s shop on Venice’s Ocean Front Walk. They had a lot of experience doing guerilla shows, setting up in a middle school, mall, etc., in around 10 minutes, complete with a fake contract to buy time in case an authority came by. This time, though, they wanted the law there – they wanted everybody there. Most importantly, they wanted to get arrested, because they knew that would make news, too. As they hoped, the police came. But instead of arresting or even fining them, they shook each band member’s hand and left.

That’s right. The Raffeys couldn’t get arrested in this town.

In order to be charged with vandalism, you pretty much need to be caught in the act; the same rationale extends to taggers and why they stay mostly (save Buket) outside the law’s reach. Daniel Finegood researched this thoroughly before he performed the HOLLYWeeD operation and never received anything more than a few angry phone calls from city officials.

Save for a few mentions on Jeopardy!, it was all for naught. The band broke up not long after. Members splintered off: Some went solo and others got jobs. Raff got into recording and engineering, which is his career today. In 1986, Max Chain attempted to modify the sign a second time, in an effort to promote his new solo record. This time the sign was to say MAX CHAIN. He used all the same methods as the Raffeys, the sheets, the sewing, the dye. All preparations went smoothly, and on the second attempt (they’d forgotten the X the first time), they’d changed the sign. But morning dawned tragically foggy: Almost no one saw the Max Chain sign. Thanks to what Chain claims was a media blackout effort by then Hollywood Chamber of Commerce President Bill Welsh, the incident received virtually no news coverage whatsoever. The Man had got him down.

There is only one other reported incident in which a musician used the sign for self-promotion, and it ended just as badly. Jizzy Pearl sang lead vocals for a local hair metal band called Love/Hate, set to release Wasted in America in 1992. The band took an enormous cross and attached it to the sign’s Y. Around 4 p.m., news helicopters noticed that Pearl – with a hair farmer’s humility – had strapped himself to the cross. Pearl, it seemed, could be arrested. The band’s label, Columbia, was displeased.

Three years after the Jizzy Pearl incident (and a few months after the UCLA prank) the security system was upgraded, making it more and more difficult for the sign to be altered. The Hollywood Sign Trust spent $94,000 to install closed circuit cameras focused on the sign, but with a flaw that makes one wonder if the planning was perpetrated by Donald Rumsfeld: All of the vandalism incidents happened at night, and the cameras had no night vision. Two years after the cameras arrived, the sign was changed to PEROTWOOD. It was the last time the sign was ever rejiggered; just this year, the Trust installed motion detectors, more cameras, and 24 hour surveillance monitored from a room in Los Angeles City Hall.

Modifying the sign is virtually impossible now, though maybe someone will climb the mountain again. Today the only real threat to the sign’s image is a proposed luxury home development, northwest of Mount Lee. City officials have been scrambling to raise the $22 million necessary to buy the land. But even if the development goes through, it wouldn’t block the view of the sign – it would just blemish nearby Cahuenga Peak’s pristine landscape.

Some, like Daniel Finegood, considered the night ops acts of art, some called them pranks, and others called it outright vandalism. Finegood exchanged words with the Los Angeles Times over perceptions of his art: In 1983 he responded to the Times’s characterization of a sign-altering as “vandalism” in a letter. He wrote, “An artist’s role throughout history has been to create representations of the culture he exists in. By hanging four relatively small pieces of fabric on the landmark, we were able to change people’s perception of the Hollywood sign.”

He was on the right track. If Hollywood stands unceasingly for anything, it’s both change and perception. The two are always vital here – never aging or weakening, always fresh and new. They are eternal in our city’s soul, as gleaming as a starlet’s teeth. It’s possible L.A. stands for self-promotion, too – and, just maybe, hair bands.

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the Manhattan gallery that represents Mr. Rauschenberg.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged, during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture.

Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated.

“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a St. Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians.

A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky, small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations.

Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, off southwest Florida, these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on one that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he felt, and risk sometimes meant failure.

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”

He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Mr. Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.”

A Wry, Respectful Departure

That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.

But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 1950s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings.

At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension.

Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.

There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” (1955) was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric akin to bandages, from which paint dripped like blood. “Interview” (1955), which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photos of bullfighters, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message.

There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected sites; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation.

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” (1955-59) and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

“So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Growing Up With Scraps

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where “it was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting,” he said. (In adulthood he renamed himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who emigrated from Germany, had settled in Texas and married a Cherokee. His father, Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother was buried in. She didn’t want the material to go to waste.

For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-made shirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A decade or so later he made history with his own assemblages of scraps and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and paintings like “Yoicks,” sewn from fabric strips. He loved making something out of nothing.

Mr. Rauschenberg studied pharmacology briefly at the University of Texas at Austin before he was drafted during World War II. He saw his first paintings at the Huntington Art Gallery in California while he was stationed in San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps. It occurred to him that it was possible to become a painter.

He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the G.I. Bill, traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil, a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers, then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved enough money to join her.

Mr. Albers was a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg. He was, on the other hand, recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.”

“He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it,” Mr. Rauschenberg added. “Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me.”

Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward materials and new mediums, which Mr. Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool.

For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black Mountain. During the spring of 1950 he and Ms. Weil married. The marriage lasted two years, during which they had a son, Christopher, who survives him, along with Mr. Rauschenberg’s companion, Darryl Pottorf.

Being John Cage’s Guest

Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery.

“Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, since Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.

“We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events, like passing shadows.

“I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well — hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”

Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly for a few months after that, Mr. Rauschenberg began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title “scatole contemplative,” or thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic suggested that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. He thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. “‘I took your advice,” he wrote to the critic.

Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage for bigger, more elaborate assemblages, like ‘“Monogram.” Back in New York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings, then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase, a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art world.

Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown, who had a studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had a loft. The intimacy of their relationship over the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art.

In Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous words, they gave each other “permission to do what we wanted.” Living together in a series of lofts in Lower Manhattan until the 1960s, they exchanged ideas and supported themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones.

Along with the combines like “Monogram” and “Canyon” (1959), Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process, used for works like “34 Drawings for Dante’s Inferno,” created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secret. Perhaps there was an autobiographical and sensual aspect to this. It let him blend images on a surface to a kind of surreal effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas.

Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he made prints at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles, producing lithographs like the 1970 “Stoned Moon” series, with its references to the moon landing.

His association with theater and dance had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and costumes for Mr. Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In 1963 he choreographed “Pelican,” in which he performed on roller skates while wearing a parachute and helmet of his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This fascination with collaboration and with mixing art and technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and others, he started Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster joint projects by artists and scientists.

A World of Praise

In 1964 he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennale as the United States representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as “the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.” He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an institution.

Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997 and yet another at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.

When he wasn’t traveling in later years, he was on Captiva, living at first in a modest beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became that Gulf Coast island’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village in New York. He acquired the land in Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors whom he let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, including a 17,000-square-foot two-story studio overlooking a swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on the island.

After a stroke in 2002 that left his right side paralyzed, Mr. Rauschenberg learned to work more with his left hand and, with a troupe of assistants, remained prolific for several years in his giant studio.

“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview there. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.”

He added: “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

The New Right is organised throughout Europe and beyond. We are strongly opposed to liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism and fight to restore the eternal values and principles that have become submerged beneath the corrosive tsunami of the modern world. The New Right has an interest in the various strands of thought connected with the Traditionalists, the Revolutionary Conservatives; the Nouvelle Droit; and the Eurasianists.

Humour as a Weapon
by Andreas Gaust
New Right Australia / New Zealand
May 8, 2008

This article has been researched and compiled for the purposes of educating New Right and N-A activists in the use of humour as a political weapon. There is a paranoid feeling amongst many on the New Right that the mass media is our greatest enemy. Not so. This article looks at the ways in which activists can use and manipulate the media, rather than the other way around.

As an example: mention the 1932 opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to any older Australian, and the first image that will spring to their mind is a man on horseback, galloping forward to slash the ribbon with his sword, before the ‘official’ representative could get to it. The swordsman was a member of a political group called the New Guard. And while this stunt was not especially humorous, it was certainly eye-catching – it remains in the mass mind to this day. In that same city in 2007, the crew of television show The Chaser made world headlines when they infiltrated the APEC forum (one of them dressed as Osama bin Laden), making a complete mockery of the forum’s expensive security measures.

In general, the media doesn’t give coverage to alternative politics (the recent 9/11 Truth Forum in Sydney was completely ignored, even though one of the speakers was a prominent Japanese MP). But ‘fringe’ views can get past the editors if they are presented by means of some humorous prank or stunt. Humour equals saleability…it’s as simple as that. People like to laugh, and the editors know it. For the mass media, the dollar is the bottom line…and the skilled prankster can actually make this work in his or her favour. A prankster called Mark Pauline claimed that “the media can never deny coverage to a good spectacle. No matter how ridiculous, absurd, insane or illogical something is, if it achieves a certain identity as a spectacle, the media has to deal with it.” In other words, instead of letting the mainstream media pigeonhole and stereotype them, activists using humour and spectacle can turn this around and actually use the media.

This was confirmed by a spokesman for the environmental group EarthFirst!: “The media need stories – they want to run them, especially the television media. What they don’t want is some meeting or run-of-the-mill visual situation they’ve seen a million times before. You give them something different and they actually get excited about working on the story.” Perhaps (shock horror!) it might even lead to greater accuracy in their reporting.

Humour also wins favour with the common man in the street. Stridency and self-righteousness turn people off – but humour can get them on side. It’s considered ‘cute’, and could even help you attract the opposite sex. As punk singer Jello Biafra said, “historically the ‘Merry Prankster’ has had a lot more to look forward to than the humourless politico who sits around moaning about ‘the struggle’.” And trickster characters have a rich history in mythology and literature.

Targets for political pranks are rife – for instance, the legions of pseudo-left academics who condemn ‘privilege’ and praise ‘globalism’ whilst making over $100,000 a year. The obnoxious billboards of Benettons are just begging to be creatively altered, as are posters for phoney humanitarians such as the rock group U2. I remember seeing footage of U2 on the news a few years ago when they were touring Australia. Bono, the singer, was here to lecture people about giving more money to Africa. Then the cameras showed the band members leaving the airport – in four separate limousines! One limo just wasn’t enough. For the cost of a stretch limo you could probably feed an African village for twenty years. The band are currently engaged in trying to build a skyscraper in Dublin – an act of cultural vandalism if there ever was one.

U2 have already been the target of an amusing prank in the past. A band called Negativeland put out a CD entitled ‘U2′, with the name prominently featured on the cover so people would think it was a U2 album. When people took it home and put it on, they found it was a recording of someone insulting and attacking U2! The bloated multi-millionaires failed to see the funny side and (predictably) sued Negativeland.

A punk band called CRASS (posing as Creative Recording and Sound Services) managed to get some tacky music (with subversive lyrics) inserted as a flexidisc into a bestselling teenage bride magazine. CRASS also leaked a faked conversation between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan discussing the possibilities of launching a nuclear war. The conversation was spliced together from radio and TV statements, but was taken seriously by the media and caused an uproar.

When the US Forestry Service (responsible for a lot of old growth logging) put on a ‘Smokey the Bear’ birthday party for 300 children, an EarthFirst! activist hired a Smokey the Bear costume and walked through the crowd handing out anti-logging flyers. The kids were treated to the bizarre spectacle of the rangers trying to arrest Smokey at his own birthday! This made front page headlines the next day.

A media prankster called Joey Skaggs tricked a room full of journalists and news readers (including some famous ones) into getting down on their hands and knees and roaring like lions. He simply issued fake press releases, pretending to be a trendy new therapist called ‘Baba Wa Simba’ (the Lion King), and the journalists fell for it hook, line and sinker. The journalists were induced to take part in ‘roaring sessions’, which many reported on positively afterwards. People can be fooled into believing almost anything if it’s seen to emanate from some ‘official’ quarter. There are no end to the ways in which consensus reality can be manipulated.

Websites are also fair game. A musician from a band called Feederz once set up a site parodying CNN. To add authenticity, when someone clicked on the masthead they would be taken back to the real CNN site. As a result, some of his fake stories actually found their way into mainstream papers. It was seriously reported that Saddam Hussein was training suicide camels, and that he had plans to blow up Pearl Harbour!

A group called the Yes Men set up a fake website for Dow Chemical. On the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster (where thousands were killed by chemical contamination in Bhopal, India) they were contacted by the BBC (who thought they were genuine representatives of Dow), and proceeded to give a statement saying that Dow claimed responsibility for the disaster and were now going to do something about it. Because of this the real Dow was embarrassed into cleaning up the mess.

A group called the Cacophony Society once held a fake welcoming party for a new Starbucks, which seemed to praise Starbucks while actually ridiculing everything they stood for. A member of the group spoke of the successful nature of this strategy “where you pretend to side with the thing you really hate. It makes it hard for the subject of the protest to get rid of you.” Similarly, the aforementioned Yes Men have done speaking tours claiming to represent the World Trade Organisation. Taking WTO logic to its ultimate conclusion, they delivered lectures with messages like ’sweatshops are great’. The same tactic could easily be employed by nationalists or National-Anarchists. For instance, a nationalist posing as a pro-multiculturalist could get invited onto a public forum, and then give a speech saying that “multiculturalism is great, because it causes social alienation and helps advance our ideal of a rootless global population, more easily herded into line…”

Obnoxious advertising billboards are excellent targets for humorous or creative political statements. A group called the Billboard Liberation Front, established in 1977, have published a handy guide for billboard alteration at: billboardliberation.com/guidebook When doing a prank like this in an area with surveillance cameras, it might be an idea for the prankster to wear some kind of ridiculous disguise.

Pranks can also be played on establishment politicians. Once when Richard Nixon was giving a speech from a stationary train, someone put on a conductor’s cap and waved the train out of the station with Nixon still in mid-speech. A Texas politician called Tim Moore highlighted the way in which representatives often pass bills without even understanding the content, by convincing his fellow pollies to pass a motion commending one Albert de Salvo (actually the Boston Strangler).

Pranksters can even run for office. Local elections are easy to run in, and candidates with a humorous platform often attract a protest vote from those who are sick of the lies of the mainstream candidates. When Jello Biafra ran for mayor of San Francisco, one of his policies required all corporate businessmen to wear clown suits between the hours of nine and five. He finished fourth out of ten candidates – quite a respectable result.

The contemporary art world is also ripe for satire. Australia has a well-known history of literary pranks, including the Ern Malley hoax, where two writers created a fictitious modernist ‘poet’ to expose what they saw (rightly or wrongly) as the shallow nature of literary modernism. Another one was the Wanda Koolmatrie hoax, where a writer called Leon Carmen posed as an aboriginal woman in order to get his book published, thereby illustrating the biases inherent in the publishing industry.

In Austria, a group of artists who wanted to expose the pretensions of the art world created a non-existent writer called Georg Paul Thomann, and it actually worked. Newspaper articles were written about him because he was perceived to be a ’somebody’…even though he was fictional and his work was non-existent! This fake ‘artist’ was even chosen to represent Austria at a world art fair.

An artist called Jeffrey Vallance couldn’t get a major gallery to show his work, so he bought a number of power point wall sockets from the hardware shop, and covered them with his art. Then he went around the art gallery in a tradesman’s outfit and replaced all the wall sockets with his own ones. Next he printed up programs, and invited his friends to view his work on the art gallery wall sockets. He sent a program to the art gallery itself – and they were so shocked they didn’t do anything about it. The employees hushed it up, in case they got in trouble! The wall sockets weren’t removed, and it was only two years later that they were finally painted over.

Schwaller de Lubicz defined magic as “the science of the right gesture, the right word, at the right moment.” That is what a successful prank is – an act of magic. I hope this short article has provided suggestive ideas for anti-global activists of all stripes, whether National-Anarchist or otherwise.

Hail to the clowns.

Andreas Faust is a Tasmanian writer affiliated with the New Right.

A popular choice for ladies’ book clubs in the early 1940s was a slim volume of poetry by a 10-year-old girl named Fern Gravel. Fern had written the poems about her Iowa hometown in 1900 and passed them along to someone who had preserved them. In 1940, Fern Gravel decided to publish her nostalgic rhymes under the title, “Oh Millersville!”

Two snippets: “My Sunday-school teacher/Is Miss Minnie King./She is not of any use as a teacher/But I love to hear her sing.” “The soap they use in the Commercial hotel/Is awful; it has a horrible smell./Sometimes we have our Sunday dinner there/And the smell of their soap I can hardly bear.”

Critics were enchanted. The Des Moines Register praised the poems’ “warm feeling of validity.” Time magazine called the author a “precocity in pigtails.” The St. Paul Dispatch said “Oh Millersville!” was marked “for immortality.” And the book became the profit center for its small Iowa publisher, Prairie Press.

Six years later, Fern Gravel confessed: She was really James Norman Hall, co-author of the “Bounty” trilogy. In a 1946 article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, Mr. Hall described himself as “shame-faced and apologetic,” but claimed that Fern had come to him in a dream and dictated her poems to him.

Literary hoaxes are almost as old as literature. Some have been inspired by poverty, others are simply pranks. Clifford Irving, who tried to publish a largely fabricated “autobiography” of Howard Hughes in 1971, received a six-figure advance for his book. He was one of the few hoaxers who went to jail for fraud. Last month, a young woman, Margaret Seltzer, who claimed in a new memoir to have been a foster child in the underworld of Los Angeles gangs, was exposed as an affluent, suburban graduate of an Episcopal private high school.

To many of their perpetrators, a literary hoax is just a high-class practical joke, a way of bringing the literary world down a peg. “I wrote the book in a few weeks as a joke,” said Magdalen King-Hall, author of “The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765,” published in 1926. “If I had realized that so many distinguished persons would take it seriously, I would have spent more time and pains on it.”

Miss King-Hall’s imaginary diarist, Cleone Knox, supposedly had traveled around 18th-century Europe, meeting and recording her impressions of Voltaire and King Louis XV of France, among others. Critics declared the diary authentic partly because it contained obsolete expressions and spelling and lots of capital letters.

“Her diary must take its place beside that of Mr. Pepys,” one critic wrote. Another opined, “No modern girl will ever write a diary like this. Cleone Knox breathes the very spirit of the witty, robust, patriotic, wicked, hard-drinking, hard-swearing 18th century.” The diary went through several printings on both sides of the Atlantic.

Six months after its publication, 19-year-old Miss King-Hall admitted that she had written the diary because she was bored. And she did have a lively imagination. About her visit with Voltaire, she wrote, “The great man received us in a chintz dressing gown. … Sometimes affable, more often peevish. To tell the truth, he reminded me of nothing so much as a chattering old magpie. We listened, silent, with the Respect which is due to Genius, however Wearisome it may be.”

The degree of outlandishness of a hoax seems to have little correlation with its commercial success. In early 1929, a young woman, Joan Lowell, published a nonfiction account of her first 17 years, almost all of which had been spent aboard her father’s four-masted schooner. Once, the ship, sailing for Australia with a cargo, had burned and sunk, and she had to swim more than a mile in high seas carrying a kitten on each shoulder.

“The Cradle of the Deep” was chosen as a main selection by the Book of the Month Club and became a nonfiction bestseller. “It’s a jolly yarn, mates,” said the New York Times, “told with dash and ardor.”

Joan Lowell was really Helen Joan Wagner, an actress, and the ship that her father had captained — for one year — was anchored off San Francisco. The book moved to the fiction bestseller lists, and Miss Wagner earned more than $40,000 from it.

“The Cradle of the Deep” touched off a controversy, which was argued in the pages of Bookman magazine under the title “Are Literary Hoaxes Harmful?” Lincoln Colcord, an author of nonfiction books, argued, “if today we have reached the point of progress where a literary hoax is condoned as good business … then we have fallen on evil times in American literature.”

Heywood Broun, a newspaper columnist, took the opposite side.

“When kings and vassals clustered in some ancient castle to hear the minstrel’s tale it never was his custom to begin by saying, ‘None of this I am about to relate is true,’ ” he argued.

Frequently, someone would interrupt the tale to say, “It never happened,” Mr. Broun continued. “But then it was the custom to take that man and drop him in the moat; for ancient man was not disposed to let any factualist spoil a good story.”

poem: University of Iowa Libraries

Many, many thanks to all the supporters, contributors, readers, and friends who have made it such a great success!

images: party balloons, zombies

From the Tate Modern Web site:

Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia were at the cutting edge of art in the first half of the twentieth century, and made a lasting impression on modern and contemporary art. Duchamp invented the concept of the ‘readymade’: presenting an everyday object as an artwork, Man Ray pioneered avant-garde photographic and film techniques and Picabia’s use of kitsch, popular or low-brow imagery in his paintings undermined artistic conventions.

Their shared outlook on life and art, with a taste for jokes, irony and the erotic, forged a friendship that provided support and inspiration. At the heart of the Dada movement and moving in the same artistic circles, they discussed ideas and collaborated, echoing and responding to each other’s works. Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia explores their affinities and parallels, uncovering a shared approach to questioning the nature of art.

via artdaily.org

You can also view it on Google or on Best Free Documentaries.

Tricksters and Pranks with R.U. Sirius – February 11 – March 23, 2008

Pranks and Pranksters, Tricksters & Tricks — the brilliant ones open up a space in the world for magic(k), ambiguity, and novelty. They encourage us to Question Authority and better still, they cause us to Question Reality.

In this course, we will discuss the history of pranks and pranksterism in the contemporary world. We will examine mythical and world historic tricksters like Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Crowley, Puck, Heyoka, Papa Legba, Lucifer, and more. And we’ll explore and discuss the role pranksters and tricksters play in cultures. I will also discuss some of my own pranks and tricks and legendary pranksters Mark Hosler of Negativland and Joey Skaggs will be dropping in on the course to answer questions.

Finally, we will plan pranks, make pranks, and maybe even leave the course with a dedicated prankster cabal. No fooling.

For more information visit the Maybe Logic Institute. If that link doesn’t work, go here.

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