Jong, Joan, Jive, &c.

Sebastian Strangio Reviews Adam Johnson's "The Orphan Master's Son"

When Kim Jong-Il died last year, many observers in the West were puzzled by the displays of public mourning that took place in Pyongyang. For days, apparently ordinary men and women wept and flagellated themselves in the snow-filled squares of the capital, like aggrieved relatives ready to heave themselves into the grave of a departed loved one. Surely these tears had to be fake, coerced by peer pressure, like the crowd of Soviet officials afraid to be the first to stop applauding. Surely these people could not possibly accept the absurd lies about this withered tyrant, whose death, according to North Korean state media, caused frozen lakes to crack and the hallowed Mount Paektu to glow red.

Much of the mourning was undoubtedly exaggerated, but few stopped to consider that the show of affection may also have also been partly genuine. One young North Korean woman I met in Seoul said she once viewed Kim Jong-Il and his father Kim Il-Sung “as gods”; it was only when she got out to the south that she saw the awful extent of the lies about the Dear Leader and the desperate situation in her homeland.

In The Orphan Master’s Son, Johnson has provided a striking sketch of this horrific psychological landscape; he shows that the people of North Korea are victims of a sort of national Stockholm syndrome, by which affection for the trinity of Kims is coerced, yet also strangely heartfelt. To love one’s oppressor: many nations and political systems have attracted the epithet “Orwellian,” but Johnson’s novel is a timely reminder that none have deserved it to such a chilling extent.



10 Most Influential Silent Films

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) - Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

It was this film from Danish pioneer Carl Theodor Dreyer that played the largest role in convincing critics the cinema was an art form. Dreyer threw out the elaborate script his French producers had prepared, instead basing his film almost entirely on transcripts of Joan of Arc's trial. Then he made the amazing choice to cast a popular stage comedienne, Falconetti, to star. Though he had only seen her in a light comedy on the Parisian stage, he could tell even then that she had a spiritual side he could exploit, which is exactly what he did. To get just the right facial expressions, Dreyer forbade Falconetti and the other actors to wear makeup and moved his camera in as close as possible, using newly developed panchromatic film to capture even minute variations in skin tones. At times he forced his cast to work under extreme duress. Falconetti had to kneel for hours on bare stones, forbidden to show any expression on her face as Dreyer shot repeated takes to capture every nuance of her inner pain. And just to make things more grueling, he shot the entire film in sequence. Her suffering, captured in a film shot entirely in close ups and medium shots, makes the film a profoundly spiritual experience and has been hailed by many as the greatest piece of acting in film history.


Vout-O-Reenee Dictionary of Slim Gaillard's Jive Language


3) Kia Soul

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5 Most Beautiful Cars of All Time

The Dusenberg Model J is the most beautiful American car ever.

It is "astonishingly gorgeous, a massive car that set a standard for design and engineering in the early part of the 20th century," Oldham said.

According to Edmunds, "It has a grille that could be a temple, a hood punctured by gracefully curved louvers, and fenders that look like a wave cresting over the tires and an exquisite aluminum roof."

While the chassis was purchased from Duesenberg, the body had to be purchased separately: Edmunds prefers a model built by a coachbuilder called Murphy. "All are beautiful, but the Murphy model J coupe is astonishingly gorgeous," Oldham said.

The Model J debuted at the New York Car Show of 1928. In retrospect, given that a Depression was in the immediate future, the timing was perhaps not the best. Wikipedia said the chassis cost $8,500 and the completed base model cost between $13,000 and $19,000, at a time when the average U.S. physician earned less than $3,000 a year.

We should add that the car contributed to the language the expression, "It's a Duesy," which today is often written as "It's a doozy."


Photos from Chimpanzee


Award-winning sea creature photos



John Lanchester: James Cameron under Water

On 16 August 1960, a US air force captain called Joseph Kittinger stepped out of a balloon. The balloon was 102,800 feet above the Earth. It would be an exaggeration to say that Kittinger jumped out of a balloon in space, as he’s sometimes said to have done, but there’s no denying that his jump was, in layman’s terms, seriously freaking high. There is some footage of the jump, taken by cameras on Kittinger’s chair-like parachute and on the balloon, and I find that its vertigo-inducing properties are so great I have to make a conscious effort to compose myself before watching it.

Kittinger set several records. One of them was for speed. Although gravity exerts an equal force on all objects, different bodies experience different degrees of air resistance depending on their shape, so in practice things stop accelerating at different speeds. That maximum falling speed is known as ‘terminal velocity’. A feather has a different terminal velocity from a mouse, which in turn has a different one from a cannonball. For a human being falling with arms and legs extended, like a starfish, that top speed is around 120 miles per hour; for someone falling with arms and legs tucked in, like a spear, the top speed is 200 mph.

At least, that’s the top speed at sea level. Go further up, and the air resistance is lower, and therefore the top speed higher. Go high enough up, where the air is unbreathably thin, and the air resistance becomes so negligible that a person can fall seriously fast. Kittinger was so far up that he set a number of records which still stand, including the highest ever balloon jump, longest ever free-fall and greatest velocity ever attained by a falling human: 614 mph.

Kittinger’s feat was brought to mind recently by James Cameron, the movie director, who has just done something almost as astonishing: in a newly designed submarine, he has gone to the deepest place on Earth, the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific Ocean close to the Philippines. The trench is 36,000 feet deep and the difficult thing about getting there is the opposite of what made Kittinger’s jump such a feat: it’s the pressure exerted by the force of water.


Charles Chaplin (left), Linus Pauling and Hewlett Johnson (right). 1940s.

Ferdinand Mount reviews ‘The Red Dean of Canterbury’ by John Butler

In his prime, Dr Hewlett Johnson was one of the most famous men in the world. Almost from the moment he was made dean of Canterbury in 1931, he became instantly recognisable everywhere as the Red Dean. His faith in the Communist Party, and in Stalin in particular, was unshakeable. Purges and famines, executions and persecutions passed him by. Though he never saw the need actually to join the Party, he remained a tankie to the last, until he was finally winkled out of the deanery in 1963, when he was pushing ninety.

Katrina Forrester reviews ‘After ‘The Open Society’’ by Karl Popper, edited by Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner

In October 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that George Soros had violated insider trading laws more than two decades ago in dealings with the French bank Société Générale. Soros has given billions of his personal wealth to fund liberal political organisations, notably his own Open Society Foundations, which operate on a global scale and have supported anti-totalitarian movements from Poland’s Solidarity to Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change, as well as countless other organisations that promote human rights. He has promised to give $100 million to Human Rights Watch over the next ten years. The decision of the European Court, however, brings Soros to book for the nastier things he does when he’s not being a philanthropist. His teacher and mentor, Karl Popper, might have seen this as an example of the paradox of unintended consequences. Soros’s actions also illustrate one of the central puzzles of Popper’s liberalism. Like Soros, Popper wanted to have it both ways: he wanted to unify the humanitarian left while celebrating the openness of the free market, with all its imbalances. Did he succeed?