Following Jon Hamm’s slicing comments, another Hollywood heavyweight is weighing in on the Kim Kardashian brand. When Details asked Jason Statham, the reigning king of action films — and boyfriend of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley — if he thought of himself as a brand he said, “F--k no, why should I?” When asked if he believes people see earnings of $30 million a film as a “brand in need of management,” Statham replied, “F--k ’em. Kim Kardashian’s a brand.” Statham went on to talk about his past as a street hustler in South London and how it prepared him for Hollywood. He said, “See, it’s that necessity for a bargain, that relentless thirst for a discount, that let me create the illusion. That’s what we played on, and, you know, that’s all I ever really knew ... So much of this industry is buried in bull----. You’re pretending to be something onscreen, fine. But it’s also the way it plays out here, every day. ‘Yeah, we love you, can’t wait to put you in a movie’. It’s f--king bull----. Not to be entirely negative, mind you, because there’s so much talent here, so many people that are righteous. But believe me, there’s so much that ain’t, and you see that coming in so thick. I did it for a living. I see it before it enters the room. And usually I know just to point my compass elsewhere.” On getting an agent, he added: “F--kin’ useless that was.” And, on drama school: “Not for me.” And he described the surfing analogy he uses for an acting career, “They’re all waiting for that wave, but it may never come, so they take what’s offered, paddle back out.” But he adds, “I’m two, three duds from being back on the street. Of course I’m looking for the perfect vehicle, a more intellectual action film, perhaps.”
People who are visually different have always been subject to attention. In different eras these individuals were labelled as monsters, freaks and human oddities. It is human nature to speculate and obsess about those born ‘different’ and it is also in our nature to feel disquieted by their appearance. Freaks have always been studied, documented and displayed because, as members of the majority, we have a driving need to understand what we fear and do not comprehend.
The freak show was an organized venture, but long before that undertaking was organized bizarre births were recorded on cave walls and whispered around campfires. Clay tablet at the Assyrian city of Noneveh describe in great detail sixty-two congenital deformities along with possible prophetic causes and meanings. As evidence of God’s Wrath or Divine Design, freaks became the subject of great attention and, as a result, sought after. Their procurement, scrutiny and display, therefore, also became inevitable and very lucrative.
Dwarfs were sought after by Roman aristocrats and wandered the courts of Egyptian Pharaohs as symbols of status, fortune and power. In Renaissance Europe, dwarfs were court jesters and the malformed were held in royal menageries. The common folk settled for stories and ballads about monsters and freaks born throughout the land and beyond its borders. Few commoners would ever actually lay eyes on such unusual beings as freaks were quickly whisked away as infants as royal collection acquisitions or starved to death in fear of religious wrath.
This all drove the public speculation and the desire to see human oddities in the flesh.
It was the changing attitudes of the 16th century that truly made the freak show a possibility. During the reign of England’s Elizabeth I enlightened sensibilities prevailed and deformities were no longer regarded strictly as spiritual omens or objects of status. They were regarded as curiosities to behold – gifts to be shared, studied and catalogued. The floodgates where opened and freaks were unleashed upon the world. While many professional freaks came before them, the display of Lazarus and Johannes Baptisa Collerdowere the most well documented of the early organized freak show exhibits. The brothers, born in 1617 in Genoa, both horrified and intrigued the public with their dyadic presence. While Lazarus was handsome and well formed, his parasitic-twin brother was little more than a mass of deformed limbs protruding from the abdomen of Lazarus. Their popularity and financial success ensured that freak shows and human exhibition would be a worthwhile endeavour for managers and freaks alike.
Ambrose Paré wrote in 1530 of a forty year old man with a headless parasitic body hanging ‘like a pendulum’ from his belly.He also wrote of a German man, ‘born the same year that peace was made with the Swiss and King Francis’ who had a parasitic head protruding from his abdomen. These accounts and the illustrations that accompanied them serve as the earliest confirmed documentation of an epigastric parasite.One can hypothesize that many mythologies – like the gods Vishnu (many arms) and Janus (two headed / many faced) resulted from the observation of human marvels born attached to a parasitic twin.
One of the most well documented cases of early parasitic twining is the case of Lazarus-Joannes Baptista Colloredo (pictured). The 17th century anatomist Bartholinus detailed the history of Lazarus-Joannes Baptista Colloredo quite diligently and personally observed the man for the purpose of documentation. Born in Genoa in 1617, Colloredo exhibited himself all over Europe because from his belly hung a parasitic twin that had one thigh, hands, body, arms, and even a well-formed head covered with hair. Lazarus was the name the complete twin was known by and his underdeveloped sibling was Joannes.It is highly unlikely that these were their giving names as Joannes Baptista translates to ‘John the Baptist’ in English. However, interestingly enough, it was the practice of the day to baptize both twins in a parasite or conjoined twin situation. They were allegedly some faint signs that Joannes had some independent existence as movements of respiration were evident as were occasional rapid eye fluttering movements.The mouth of Joannes was said to be in a state of near constant salivation and Bartholinus himself wrote that he had seen the arms of Joannes move in response to stimuli. The genitals of Joannes were said to be ‘imperfect’ and it is unclear if any regular eliminations occurred. Bartholinus first examined Colloredo when the twins were aged at twenty-two however he later amending his report when he was able to examine the twins in Scotland in 1642 just before they were to visit Charles I.Most accounts of the time described Lazarus as courteous and handsome man even with Joannes in tow and that must have been true because Bartholinus reported that Lazarus was married and the father of several children who were fully and admirably developed.
In these early days, freak shows were presented to royalty only after well-received appearances as fairgrounds, tavern and store fronts. A single individual would be put on display, answer inquisitive questions proposed by spectators and perform displays of talent. The limbless Matthias Buchinger, for example, amazed royal and commoners alike with his displays of magic, music and rifle marksmanship in Dublin in 1720.
However, it wasn’t until the mid 19th century that freak shows truly became what we all know and equate with the greatest shows on earth. It was in the 1840′s when the freak show became a truly successful and monetized business, when people with physical abnormalities became incredibly wealthy and the viewing public lined up to pay for the opportunity to witness human marvels, oddities and freaks.
Sculptor Kittiwat Unarrom in Ratchaburi, Thailand has been diligently crafting bread into human body parts with astonishing veracity. The level of yeast-enabled versimilitude at this family-run bakery has drawn patrons from miles away to gawk, to buy, perhaps even to toast with a little cream and jam. Nose-scone, anyone?
When people see the bread, they don’t want to eat it. But when they taste it, it’s just normal bread. The lesson is, don’t judge by appearances.—Unarrom
Members of the generational cohort born from 1914-23 were in their teens and 20s during the Thirties (1934-43, not to be confused with the the 1930s), and in their 20s and 30s during the Forties (1944-53). Though this cohort is easily distinguished from their immediate elders, the Partisan Generation (born 1904-13), the influential generational periodizers William Strauss and Neil Howe lumped the two together and named the resulting construct the “G.I. Generation” (1901-24). I’ve already theorized, in a previous post, that Strauss and Howe, acting on behalf of Middlebrow, lopped off the last few years of the Hardboiled Generation and added them to the G.I.s because they wanted to ensure that middlebrow impresario Walt Disney (b. 1901) was included in the pseudo-generation that Tom Brokaw would later name the “Greatest.” In their 1991 book,Generations, Strauss and Howe struggle in vain to be convincing about their Frankenstein’s monster of a demographic conceit; in their introduction to the chapter on the so-called G.I. Generation, they have little to say about anyone born before 1914-ish besides Walt Disney, Charles Lindbergh (born 1902; a Hardboiled), and Ronald Reagan (1911; a Partisan). Tellingly, the introduction focuses on the “G.I. second wave” (a weaselly phrase justifying a divided pseudo-generation; only a movement, e.g., an aesthetic movement, can span generations in successive “waves”), about whom Strauss and Howe gush:
Throughout their lives, [late-born members of the GI Generation] have been America’s confident and rational problem-solvers: victorious soldiers and Rosie the Riveters; Nobel laureates; makers of Minuteman missiles, interstate highways, Apollo rockets, battleships, and miracle vaccines; the creator’s of Disney’s Tomorrowland; “men’s men” who have known how to get things done…. No other generation this century has felt (or been) so Promethean, so godlike in its collective, world-bending power.
Godlike! In 1998, Tom Brokaw would insist that “this is the greatest generation any society has produced” — but it seems even that superlative is insufficient to describe the likes of Jack Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, and Jack LaLanne. So I’ve borrowed a moniker for the Partisan’s immediate juniors from a short-lived comic book series by one of my favorite Jacks from this cohort: Jack Kirby. The generational cohort born from 1914-23 may superficially resemble merehomo sapiens, but they are stronger, faster, and smarter than the rest of us; they possess superior technology; and they may even exist in a dimension outside of normal time and space. Let’s call them: the New Gods.
The 1914-23 generation came of age during the Depression, during which time they were kept busy by the Civilian Conservation Corps “getting things done, building things that worked, things that have lasted to this day,” as Strauss and Howe admiringly put it. The Tennessee Valley Authority was the handiwork of youthful New Gods. As adults, the 1914-23 generation fought World War II. After the war, they saved American industry, tamed the business cycle, built the suburbs and moved into them. Or so we hear, again and again, in middlebrow paeans to the cohort that shored up the gains of older (Hardboiled) middlebrows. How did Middlebrow inspire a generation to to say in harness so long, and accomplish so much? What persuasive ideology helped prevent the New Gods from kicking against the pricks?
Jack LaLanne, real-life strongman
One such ideology, it seems to me, was machismo. The New Gods venerated the macho man, and some deluded anti-middlebrows even hailed him as an antiheroic savior of sorts. This generation produced only one president, but it was the macho JFK, who brought the “best and the brightest” into the White House, faced down the Soviet Union, and put a man on the moon. Astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn are members of this generation; so is faster-than-sound test pilot Chuck Yeager. Other New Gods who were macho men, actors who played macho men, and novelists who wrote about macho men: Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, William Holden, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Jack Palance, Anthony Quinn, Jack Lord, Ernest Borgnine, Telly Savalas, Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Charles Bronson, Woody Strode, Montgomery Clift, Charlton Heston, Edmond O’Brien, Norman Mailer, James Jones, James Dickey, James Arness, Jake LaMotta, and honorary NGs Marlon Brando, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Rocky Marciano, Audie Murphy, and Jesse Owens. Wow! Think of all the violent buddy/caper movies the New Gods made, in the Fifties (1954-63) and Sixties (1964-73): Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957: Lancaster, Douglas); The Young Lions(1958: Bando, Clift, Martin); Ocean’s Eleven (1960: Sinatra, Martin); The Magnificent Seven (1960: Brynner, Wallach, Bronson); The Guns of Navarone (1961: Peck, Quinn); The Great Escape (1963: Bronson); The Professionals (1966: Marvin, Lancaster, Ryan, Strode, Palance); The Dirty Dozen(1967: Marvin, Borgnine, Bronson, Ryan, Savalas; and The Wild Bunch (1969: Holden, Borgnine, Ryan, O’Brien). The musk of testosterone shrouded the New Gods, making it difficult for them to see — or think — straight. Even the women of the New Gods generation were macho: films and posters featuring “Rosie the Riveter” encouraged women to go to work in support of the war effort. Behold arch-middlebrow Norman Rockwell’s vision of Rosie:
Speaking of Mailer and JFK, in 1960 the former wrote an overheated Esquire essay about the latter titled “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” America, Mailer claimed, was the land where people still believed in heroes — and it needed a macho hero to rescue it from the triumph of Middlebrow during the Fifties (1954-63).
The film studios threw up their searchlights as the frontier was finally sealed, and the romantic possibilities of the old conquest of land turned into a vertical myth, trapped within the skull, of a new kind of heroic life, each choosing his own archetype of a neo-renaissance man, be it Barrymore, Cagney, Flynn, Bogart, Brando or Sinatra, but it was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun. And this myth, that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter how the nation’s regulators — politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, idèologues, psychoanalysts, builders, executives and endless communicators — would brick-in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would not die.
Mailer correctly diagnosed the triumph of Middlebrow, but he failed to recognize that machismo is no solution. In fact, whenever Highbrow or Lowbrow is coded “masculine,” then Anti-Highbrow or Anti-Lowbrow is coded “not-feminine”; Middlebrow’s synthesis of these cultural constructs is: “real man” or “macho.” (When Highbrow or Lowbrow is coded “feminine,” then Anti-Highbrow or Anti-Lowbrow is coded “not-masculine”; Middlebrow’s synthesis of these cultural constructs is: “ultra-feminine” or “vamp,” another New God paradigm.) Nobrow, to continue for a moment, is neither masculine nor feminine (“angelic”), while HiLobrow is androgynous or hermaphroditic. Mailer, whose own machismo was a performance piece, didn’t quite grasp all this — not then.
During the Thirties and Forties, superman really did come to the supermarket, as the New Gods ushered in what we’ve been encouraged to regard as the Golden Age of superhero comics. Beginning in 1938 with the debut of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman in DC’s Action Comics # 1, the comic book made its debut as a mainstream art form. Comic-book authors, artists, and editors born between 1914 and 1923 include the likes of Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Julius Schwartz, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Carl Burgos, Sheldon Mayer, and honorary New God Joe Simon — who invented and refined comic-book superheroes as we know them: Superman and Batman, Captain America, The Spirit, Namor the Sub-Mariner, Daredevil, The Human Torch, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Justice Society of America. Enjoyable stuff! But with the exception of Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, it’s middlebrow.
Click on image for larger version. Click on that image to zoom in.
Of course, there were New God cartoonists who weren’t middlebrow. Will Elder, John Severin, Dave Berg, Al Jaffee, and former EC Comics publisher William Gaines, for example, brought usMad Magazine (whose successful formula, I think, is due to the fact that half of its staff were New Gods and half were Postmodernists; more on that some other time). Charles M. Schulz wasn’t a middlebrow, exactly, though Middlebrow would enthusiastically embrace and champion his work. In the late Fifties (beginning in ’61, to be precise), New Gods Stan Lee and Jack “King” Kirby would give us the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Thor, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, the Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom, Galactus, The Watcher, Magneto, the Inhumans, and many more comic-book superheroes who were neither macho nor middlebrow — at least, they weren’t in their earliest incarnations. Middlebrow triumphed in the newspapers: Bil Keane, Hank Ketcham, Dik Browne, Fred Lasswell, Mort Walker, Brant Parker, and Reg Smythe gave us the middlebrow strips Family Circus, Dennis the Menace, Hi and Lois, Hagar the Horrible, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Beetle Bailey,Wizard of Id, and Andy Capp. Ever wonder why some newspaper strips end, while others go on and on? The answer is: Middlebrow. Many of these strips, whose authors are now retired or dead, are still going — i.e., they’re immortal.
I’ve noted elsewhere that, in the era before the Partisans pioneered the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, and the New Gods pioneered the so-called Golden Age of superhero comics,homo superior and supermen were considered… creepy. Olaf Stapledon, Philip Wylie, George Bernard Shaw, and other Radium Age SF authors tended to agree that the superman (whose values and worldview we mere mortals can’t share, or even comprehend) wouldn’t seem friendly but cold, inhuman, alien. Even, or especially when, he is trying to help us — because he’d surely understand himself as a shepherd responsible for the wellbeing of dumb animals, and treat us accordingly. Wylie’s 1930 SF novel, Gladiator, features a superman who is nearly invulnerable (“He was like a being of steel”), runs faster than a train, leaps higher than trees, and hurls boulders like baseballs. He creates a fortress of solitude (in Colorado), fights the Germans in WWI, then adopts a secret identity, moves to Manhattan, and vows to become “an invisible agent of right — right as best I can see it.” It’s that last line that distinguishes Wylie’s man of steel from Siegel and Shuster’s; in the end, Wylie’s superman despairs of flawed mortals and abandons them, The paradigm shift from Radium Age science fiction and comic-book superhero is a telling one, isn’t it? Small wonder, perhaps, that Middlebrow — which sees itself as a shepherd responsible for the wellbeing of dumb animals, but would never be so foolish as to admit to this fact — admires the Partisans and New Gods (collectively: the G.I. or Greatest Generation) so much, and insists that they ushered in a Golden Age in SF and superhero comics! What Asimov and other historians of SF mean by “Golden Age” is that SF “grew up” beginning in the mid-1930s; at midcentury, Middlebrow was eager to have ’30s-era utopianists grow up. Does this mean that all Golden-Age SF and comic-book authors are middlebrow — witting or unwitting dupes of proto-neocon middlebrows? No, it doesn’t. But it does mean that we should skeptically revisit the so-called Golden Age of SF and comic books. Golden-Age SF authors born from 1914-23 include: James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Bradley Sheldon, stories), Isaac Asimov (The Foundation Trilogy; I, Robot), James Blish (Earthman Come Home, Star Trek novelizations), Leigh Brackett (The Long Tomorrow), Lester del Rey (editor; known for Young Adult SF), Pohl (Gateway, The Space Merchants), Gordon R. Dickson (Childe Cycle and Dragon Knight series), Philip José Farmer (Riverworld series), Frank Herbert (Dune saga), Cyril M. Kornbluth (The Space Merchants, with Pohl), Walter M. Miller, Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz), and Theodore Sturgeon (More Than Human, famous Star Trek episodes. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry is also a New God. Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) and Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) are not middlebrow, if you ask me; neither are honorary New Gods Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester. (Kurt Vonnegut is an honorary Postmodernist.) However, Jack Vance, who cranked out 60 novels and innumerable pulp stories, might be considered a lowbrow were it not for the fact that a recent New York Times Magazine profile described him as “one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices” — which makes me suspicious.
***
Meet the New Gods.
Jesse Owens, 1936 Olympics
Honorary New Gods: Jesse Owens, Joe Simon (comics editor), Gerald Ford, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison (all born 1913).
1914: William S. Burroughs (SF author), Sun Ra, Jack Cole, John Berryman, Jonas Salk, Tove Jansson, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Woody Strode, Ida Lupino, Alec Guinness, Saul Steinberg, Joe DiMaggio, George Reeves (played Superman on TV), Danny Thomas, Ward Kimball, William Westmoreland, Bernard Malamud, Vance Packard, E.G. Marshall, Ernest Tubb, Paul Rand, Bill Finger, Joe Lewis, Jackie Coogan, Kenny Clarke, Clayton Moore, Allen Funt, Jack LaLanne, Billy Eckstine, John Hersey, Billy Graham, Arthur Kennedy, Dorothy Lamour, Richard Widmark, Floyd Tillman, Donald A. Wollheim, Hammond Innes, Thor Heyerdahl, Patrick O’Brian. HONORARY PARTISANS: Daniel J. Boorstin, Howard Fast, Marguerite Duras, Julio Cortazar, Dylan Thomas.
Roland Barthes
1915: Roland Barthes, Robert Motherwell, Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Bradley Sheldon, SF author), Muddy Waters, Billie Holiday, Saul Bellow, Ingrid Bergman, Julius Schwartz, Arthur Miller, Alan Lomax, Thomas Merton, Edmond O’Brien, Zero Mostel, Herman Wouk, Les Paul, Leigh Brackett, David Rockefeller, Bob Kane, Sargent Shriver, Eli Wallach, Herbert Huncke, Lester del Rey (SF author, editor), Lorne Greene, Ross Macdonald, Barbara Billingsley, Anthony Quinn, Moshe Dayan, Edith Piaf.
1916: Roald Dahl, Walker Percy, Jackie Gleason, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walter Cronkite, Dinah Shore, Jay McShann, Irving Wallace, Eugene McCarthy, John Ciardi, Herb Caen, Gregory Peck, Betty Furness, Glenn Ford, Harold Robbins, Carl Burgos, Charlie Christian, Robert McNamara, Fred Lasswell, Martha Raye, Jack Vance (SF author), Walter Cronkite, Sherwood Schwartz, Kirk Douglas, Shirley Jackson, Betty Grable, Olivia de Havilland, James Herriot, Francois Mitterrand, Perez Prado, Mary Stewart, Francis Crick.
Thelonious Monk
1917: DAVID GOODIS, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Manny Farber (anti-middlebrow film critic), Jack Kirby, Robert Lowell, Leslie Fiedler (anti-middlebrow critic), Dean Martin, Eric Hobsbawm, David Goodis (Noir author), John F. Kennedy, Will Eisner, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald, Arthur C. Clarke (SF author), Roger W. Straus, Jr., Jane Bowles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Wyman, Jerry Wexler, John Raitt, Robert Mitchum, Ernest Borgnine, Sidney Sheldon, Carson McCullers, Bill Everett, Tex Williams, Rufus Thomas, Robert Bloch, Irving Penn, Sheldon Mayer, Katharine Graham, Lena Horne, Phyllis Diller, Dik Browne, Caspar Weinberger, John Lee Hooker, Mel Ferrer, Red Auerbach, Louis Auchincloss, June Allyson, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, James Harry Lacey, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Anthony Burgess, Desi Arnaz, Vera Lynn, Raymond Burr, Ferdinand Marcos, Joan Fontaine, Heinrich Boll, Reg Smythe.
1918: Juan Garcia Esquivel, Louis Althusser, Elaine de Kooning, Mike Wallace, Rita Hayworth, Ingmar Bergman, Nelson Mandela, Art Carney, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Elmore James, Howard Cosell, Robert Aldrich, Philip José Farmer (SF author), Madeleine L’Engle, Theodore Sturgeon (SF author), Stirling Silliphant, John Forsythe, Joey Bishop, Mickey Spillane, Mercedes McCambridge, Sam Walton, William Holden, Betty Ford, Jack Paar, Richard Feynman, Julius Rosenberg, Eddy Arnold, Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, Leonard Bernstein, Ted Williams, E. Howard Hunt, Bob Feller, Spiro Agnew, Jerome Beatty, Jr., Joe Williams, Gamal Abdal Nasser, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Muriel Spark, Ida Lupino, Richard Hoggart, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anwar Sadat.
Jackie Robinson
1919: Jackie Robinson, Paul de Man, Merce Cunningham, Eva Gabor, Eva Peron, Pete Seeger, Iris Murdoch, Art Blakey, J. D. Salinger, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ernie Kovacs, Frederik Pohl (SF author), Robert Stack, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jack Palance, Jennifer Jones, Lawrence Tierney, Nat King Cole, John Cullen Murphy, Bernard Krigstein, Liberace, Richard Scarry, Pauline Kael, Anita O’Day, Sir Edmund Hillary, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Doris Lessing, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (Shah of Iran), Mikhail Kalashnikov, Dino De Laurentiis .
1920: Charles Bukowski, Charlie Parker, Ray Bradbury (SF author), Frank Herbert (SF author), Isaac Asimov (SF author), Eric Rohmer, Richard Adams (Watership Down), Sid Fleischman (terrific children’s author) Sun Myung Moon, Paul Celan, Federico Fellini, Hank Ketcham, Timothy Leary, Saul Bass, Dave Berg, Norman Lear, DeForest Kelley, Walter Matthau, Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, Mario Puzo, Howard Nemerov, Jack Webb, Arthur Hailey, Montgomery Clift, Carmen McRae, Peter O’Donnell, Denver Pyle, Peggy Lee, Brant Parker, Ray Harryhausen, Leona Helmsley, Bella Abzug, Shelley Winters, Mickey Rooney, Jayne Meadows, Dave Brubeck, Jack Lord, Rex Allen, An Wang, James Doohan, Ronald Searle, Alfred Peet, Boris Vian, Werner Klemperer, Ravi Shankar, Thomas Szasz, Pope John Paul II, Yul Brynner, Maureen O’Hara, Ricardo Montalban.
Will Elder cartoon — click on image for larger version
1921: Will Elder, Raymond Williams, Stanislaw Lem (SF author), Joseph Beuys, Murray Bookchin, John Glenn, Carol Channing, James Blish (SF author), Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, John Severin, Patricia Highsmith, Donna Reed, Vampira, Mario Lanza, Betty Friedan, Wayne Booth, Abe Vigoda, Art Clokey (created Gumby), Betty Hutton, Richard Wilbur, Cyd Charisse, Alan Hale, Jr., Al Jaffee, Harry Carey, Jr., Nelson Riddle, Jake LaMotta, Erroll Garner, Bill Mauldin, Nancy Reagan, Harvey Ball, Gene Roddenberry, Charles Bronson, James Jones, Rodney Dangerfield, Steve Allen, Simone Signoret, Dirk Bogarde, Peter Ustinov, Satyajit Ray, Andrei Sakharov, Leon Garfield, Monty Hall, Deborah Kerr.
1922: Jack Kerouac, Stan Lee, William Gaines, Charles M. Schulz, Richard Hamilton, William Gaddis, Charles Mingus, Les Baxter, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, Howard Zinn, Bea Arthur, Ray Goulding, Hal Clement, Dorothy Dandridge, Betty White, Quinn Martin, Telly Savalas, Arthur Penn, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Kathryn Grayson, Helen Gurley Brown, Carl Reiner, Russ Meyer, Thomas Kuhn, Bil Keane, Sid Caesar, Jackie Cooper, Barbara Bel Geddes, Veronica Lake, Samuel Youd (John Christopher, SF author), Paul Scofield, Patrick Macnee, Yitzhak Rabin, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christopher Lee, Denholm Elliott, Yma Sumac, José Saramago.HONORARY POSTMODERNS?: Loathe as I am to make exceptions, let’s do it for postmodern authors William Gaddis (JR) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (postmodern and SF, Slaughterhouse Five), who were almost born in ’23: December 29, 1922; and November 11, 1922, respectively. 1923: Norman Mailer, Hugh Kenner, Joseph Heller, Tuli Kupferberg (American counterculture poet, author, cartoonist, pacifist anarchist, publisher and co-founder of the band The Fugs), Hank Williams, Alan Shepard, Chuck Yeager, Brendan Behan, Franco Zeffirelli, Marcel Marceau, Henry Kissinger, Sam Phillips, Charlton Heston, Philly Joe Jones, Fats Navarro, Cyril M. Kornbluth (SF author), James Schuyler, Walter M. Miller, Jr. (SF author), Jim Reeves, Philip Whalen, Bob Elliott, Jean Stapleton, Anthony Hecht, Paddy Chayefsky, James Dickey, Dexter Gordon, Ed McMahon, Don Adams, Bettie Page, Aaron Spelling, Albert King, Al Lewis, Anne Baxter, James Arness, Bob Dole, Mort Walker, Bob Barker, Sumner Redstone, Denise Levertov, Nadine Gordimer, Gordon R. Dickson (SF author), Freeman Dyson. HONORARY POSTMODERNS:Italo Calvino (Italian author,Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler), Roy Lichtenstein (all born 1923).
George H.W. Bush
HONORARY NEW GODS: George H.W. Bush, Lee Marvin, Max Roach, Marlon Brando, Rocky Marciano, Audie Murphy (all born 1924). Following the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941, at the age of 18, Bush postponed going to college and became the youngest naval aviator in the US Navy at the time; that’s so New Gods.
This conventional novel deals with George Bowling, an insurance-company employee, fat and 45, who lives in one of London's depressing suburbs with his nagging wife and irritating children. He dreams of his past in the English countryside before World War I. A windfall gives him the opportunity to return to Lower Binfield and he is thoroughly disillusioned. The countryside has given way to housing estates, and his favorite secret fishing pond has been drained and is a dump for tin cans. The novel received respectable reviews. Orwell later said the novel which appeared in June 1939 just weeks before the outbreak of World War II had been "blitzed out of existence," but it was published in an edition of 2,109 copies, with a second printing of 1,050 (with overs). The second printing was "ordered six weeks after publication of the first printing." But for the outbreak of the war Coming Up For Air might have done better commercially.
The story is set in 1938, the War is approaching.
[I]t wasn't that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to get my nerve back before the bad times begin. Because does anyone who isn't dead from the neck up doubt that there's a bad time coming ? We don't even know what it'll be, and yet we know it's coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps a slump--no knowing, except that it'll be something bad. Wherever we're going, we're going downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool--no knowing. And you can't face that kind of thing unless you've got the right feeling inside you. There's something that's gone out of us in these twenty years since the war. It's a kind of vital juice that we've squirted away until there's nothing left. All this rushing to and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses, bombs, radios, telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the marrow out to be.
I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air!
