I've always assumed that sex-reassignment surgery was first performed in 1952 -- on Christine Jorgensen -- but this little tidbit in the June 8, 1929 New Yorker got me thinking.
Scientists have changed the sex of birds and insects. They have converted female fleas into male fleas, and funny stunts like that; and they are working around toward doing the same thing with people. We predict an avalanche of plays on this theme next season.
The proposed play isn't worth getting too far into (two men love one woman; man tricks other man to change sex, then falls in love with the transgendered woman) but it made me wonder: what was going on in 1929 to prompt The New Yorker to write about this subject?
As far as I can tell, some scientists in 1929 were having a lot of fun scrambling up chicken embryos, transplanting skin and glands to see what would happen. And what happened, according to M. M. Zawadowsky and E. M. Zubina, was that you could change the secondary sex characteristics of the hapless animal...giving a chicken the plumage of a rooster, for example.
Obviously this has very little to do with sex-reassignment surgery as we know it, and it appears that Christine Jorgensen was the first transsexual to be treated with hormones. But in 1931 the FIRST publically-declared sex change was given to Lili Elbe.
Curiously this had nothing to do with the chicken experiments referenced in the New Yorker article; Elbe's transition was entirely surgical. They actually tried to give her overies and a uterus, and it was complications from the uterus transplant that killed her. The wacky doctors actually thought she could be made fertile, rather than dead.
It's difficult, when viewing this advertisement for the General Electric All-Steel Refrigerator, to avoid noticing what the mother and child have yet to see: their youngest daughter is lying dead on the floor. She obviously got trapped inside the fridge over night, and was only released when they removed the tiny red coat from storage.
A gruesome mystery from the June 1, 1929 New Yorker.
Hey kids! Put down your DNA-sampling iPhones and listen up. This is how it used to be.
During the mid-80s, scanner technology was just entering our consumer consciousness. We knew that lucky businessmen had something called "Fax Machines," but those of us at home were totally unable to get photographs of lingerie models into our 8-bit computers (without tracing them on a transparency, sticking the transparency to the television set, and then drawing under it with a joystick-driven "fun with art" program).
But all this changed during April 1985, when Antic Magazine published instructions for..."The Dot Matrix Digitizer."
Here's the basic (and totally ass-backward) idea: you remove the printhead from your dot matrix printer and replace it with a homemade light pen. Instead of putting blank paper in your printer, you roll in the picture you want to digitize...say, this picture of handsome devil Sam Tramiel.
Then you ran a program which fooled your printer into thinking it was actually printing something, meanwhile retrieving the information from the light pen which was now creeping back and forth over the picture in your printer. Sixty minutes later you got this!
That's right! Not only could you cheaply digitize pictures of Sam Tramiel in the comfort of your own home, but you could ALSO make him look like Gene Shalit!
When I first read this article I thought "Wow, what a ridiculous Kludge...I bet nobody ever did it except the staff at Antic Magazine!" Then I learned about the "Thunderscan," a product for the first generation Macintosh which did exactly the same thing.
We truly live in a world full of inventive and crazy people. It's a good thing the inventors of this technique never decided to "Go Galt!"
First "Harriet Said," then "According to Queeny," and now "An Awfully Big Adventure." Beryl Bainbridge has a real facility for troubled, unreliable, inscrutable, dangerous, and somewhat sociopathic pubescent girls.
Since I discovered her writing last year I have been slowly collecting her work...a used book here, a reprint there. Something has kept me from devouring them all in one sitting, as though each one must be read at exactly the right time and long after the previous one. Each of the three novels I've read have left me totally satisfied and a little stuffed; they're delicious dinners, the kind you don't want to eat every night.
"An Awfully Big Adventure" is amazing. Bainbridge has a touch of Vladimir Nabokov to her, an art of setting up a logical sequence of characters and props, and then allowing them to operate quietly behind the main action of the book. The perceptive reader catches glimpses of these background objects and tries to guess their trajectories, and it seems that when everything comes together in a Bainbridge novel it must be a tragedy, but a PERFECT tragedy; something that the victims, two hundred pages ago, should have seen coming.
Let me try to describe this better: these books are beautiful, witty, vicious, and true. They're about the unreliable memories of others and ourselves. They're about the disconnect between what people say and what they actually feel, and the effect this disconnect has on other characters (and the reader).
But on top of all that the stories are GOOD stories, they're well-formed and satisfying. Like, "An Awfully Big Adventure" may be unconventional under the surface, containing layer upon layer of translucent meaning, but on top of it all it's about second-rate actors in a scruffy British reperatory theater, coping with postwar shellshock and unrequited love and...well, I won't say anything more. You should just read it.
I notice that the local video store just got the movie adaptation in, starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. I have a feeling I'll hate it, but I'll watch it anyway.
Well Dr. Seuss, I've learned a lot of interesting things by viewing your Flit advertisements, but this one from the June 1, 1929 New Yorker has thrown me for a loop.
Throughout the run of The New Yorker magazine, starting in February 1925, I've been following the transition from silent films to talkies. At first the articles about "talking pictures" highlighted the unsuccessful technological advances, while movie reviewers continued to mention the title cards and orchestras of the still-popular silent films.
Then along came "The Jazz Singer," and The New Yorker started really adjusting to the idea that talking pictures were here to stay. Now, in June 1, 1929, the tone is one of complete resignation. This week's "A Reporter at Large" column, written by "Jean-Jacques," starts this way:
There persists a quaint notion amongst no small number of the populace that the talkies will soon pass. "I've never seen anybody yet who liked them," the expression goes, and with it the vague hope this will confute producers and bring back silent pictures. The hope is futile. That noble animal, the horse, is no more dead than silent pictures. Unspeakable as most of the talkies are, they are able to speak and they are here to stay. There's nothing left to do but make the best of it, no matter how unpalatable the superlative may seem in such connection.
The rest of the column describes the problems inherent with making a talking picture -- the placement of recording equipment, the construction of soundproof stages, the actors who need to actually learn their lines. It ends by suggesting that the people most disturbed by talking pictures were the producers, who suddenly found it VERY difficult to use editing and re-takes to totally change the film in post production; when film married sound it suddenly became much harder to edit it.
I'm loving the way a bunch of right-wing pundits have been threatening lately to "Go Galt." At first I was worried that they were planning to move to the CITY of Galt -- which is just a few kilometers away -- but when I found out they were getting all Rand-happy I could only laugh with glee.
I read "Atlas Shrugged" while I was in University, sometime around 1992. I can't remember every detail of the book but I DO remember that it tried to build simple archetypes around complex human traits.
In Rand's world you were either a creator or a parasite. The creators were brilliant, inventive capitalists who forged their own way through the business world, sort of like Paul Bunyan with a briefcase. The parasites were dim-witted, simpering socialists who used government intervention in order to latch on to the creators, growing fat off the work of others.
When the creators in "Atlas Shrugged" decided to go on strike -- by disappearing to a secret compound -- they removed all the best minds from society and left the parasites to die.
One thousand libertarians reached the last page and ejaculated. The End.
One of the problems with Rand's outlook is that she equates self-interest with both brilliance and social health, as though the wealthiest capitalists were somehow both intelligent AND unreservedly good-for-all-of-us. She seemed to think that successful businesspeople must automatically be super-intelligent AND have an automatic benefit to society as a whole (and be gosh-darn handsome to boot).
Another of her oversights is the hilarious idea that businesspeople and industry tycoons are both "inventors" and "capable of existing all on their own."
Now, imagine all the corporate CEO's of all the banks decide to withdraw all their money and then start their own society. In Rand's world, these CEO's would suddenly be inventing amazing new gadgets and curing some REALLY cool tobacco, meanwhile magically providing each other with electricity and plumbing and food.
What's amusing about the rightwing bloggers threatening to "Go Galt" is that they actually seem to think that THEY are innovators TOO, and they don't seem to be aware of where their word processors, clothing, and panini bread actually comes from, let alone who carries their clubs at the automatically landscaped golf course.
So it's laughable enough to think that the richest people on earth could actually survive (let alone thrive) in total isolation, but it's downright HYSTERICAL to imagine these armchair pundits doing so.
I can't help wondering what these people will do when they reach Galt's Gulch, particularly until a brilliant investment banker invents the "static electricity motor." Who's going to cut Michelle Malkin's hair? What services can she offer to their little society, and what happens if Ann Coulter proves herself BETTER at offering those services? Who's going to build their church? Will we REALLY get to imagine Instapundit doing his weekly stint purifying sewage, and...hey, doesn't it all sound a bit like communism anyway?
Oh please! PLEASE go to Galt so we'll all realize how much we miss you while you're gone! Search engines will weep when they run out of "Islamofascist" hits, and CNN anchors will have to talk to blank video feeds. Would society fall apart? Would you bring about hell on earth? Perhaps heaven.
Twenty guests arrive at a posh dinner party, from which the servants have mysteriously vacated. After eating, they retire to the music room, and they remain there long after they have outstayed their welcome. Instead of leaving, they lie down around the room and spend the night, and it doesn't take long for them to realize that they're trapped; they cannot leave the room.
What makes "The Exterminating Angel" so chilling is that the barrier PREVENTING them from leaving is not a physical one; it's an extremely human PSYCHOLOGICAL barrier composed of rationalization, convention, and lack of initiative. When somebody tries to enter or leave the music room, they do not bump up against some sort of invisible force field. They simply come up with reasons to NOT cross the barrier, or with reasons to prevent others from doing so, even though they realize on various levels that none of it makes any sense.
We've all seen variations of "The Lord of the Flies," wherein a small band of people tries to survive -- physically and psychologically -- in an inhospitable environment. In "The Exterminating Angel" you get rich women in expensive gowns forgetting how to comb their hair, and rational people falling back on religion and masonry. As the days go by the situation becomes increasingly hopeless, desperate, and -- since this is a Luis Buñuel picture -- surreal.
I'd previously watched "The Exterminating Angel" about ten years ago on a grainy multi-generation video cassette. The fact that I could barely see what was going on added to the movie's terror. But now that it's been lovingly restored on a Criterion Collection DVD I can safely say that it's even MORE disturbing when you can see every aspect of their deteriorating room, and every blemish on their wasted faces...
...and then the camera pulls back to show you that they're simply standing on the other side of an open doorway, and you get an even bigger chill up your spine.
"Tubular Bells" was an album that I literally grew up with, one of those records that my mother played over and over again from my infanthood into childhood (at which time I was capable of playing it myself). My parents only had the first three "classic" Mike Oldfield records, but I listened to them endlessly (especially "Ommadawn," with a bit less emphasis on "Hergest Ridge").
In highschool I discovered that Oldfield had released a lot of OTHER albums as well, and I was surprised by his subsequent pop direction.
Urban myth has it that a very young Oldfield signed a terrible record contract with Virgin Records, requiring him to release twenty albums in twenty years. This may not be strictly true -- I'm too lazy to look it up right now -- but there is no doubt that Virgin controlled and directed Oldfield's career in a counterproductive way that he really hated.
They allowed him to release his "single song" concept albums for a few years, but when they began to decline in popularity they insisted on a pop song compromise: one traditional "long" composition on the first side, and five or six top 40 singles on the other.
Mike Oldfield cannot write a typical pop song, and any "exceptional" singles he produced during this period owe more to instrumentation and the performance of Maggie Reilly than his own songwriting ability. One of the best was 1984's "To France." This is a shamelessly lip-synced performance but it's actually more interesting than the real video clip. You can imagine that Oldfield is simultaneously saying "I HATE THIS!" and "I HATE VIRGIN" in his angry little head.
It's true, Oldfield DID hate Virgin, and he also grew into a real son of a bitch. Perhaps thanks to the primal therapy he underwent in the early '80s, Oldfield changed from a shy hippie into a sarcastic, bitter pop icon seemingly overnight. Accompanying this change was an increasing embrace of keyboards and sequencers (an Atari ST!) as opposed to virtuoso performance, making his music sound generic and dated.
After "Tubular Bells III" -- his "house music" album -- I stopped my knee-jerk buying of Oldfield's records. This was partly because I got annoyed by him recycling old themes and successes, but also because subsequent albums looked REALLY wanky and unpromising.
But even so, his LIVE productions continue to thrill me like nothing else, because no matter how uninspired the studio versions are it is still amazing to see two dozen brilliant performers reinterpreting (and often improving on) his songs.
Here's an example from the premiere of "Tubular Bells III" in 1999. It's the concluding two tracks off the album ("Secrets/Far Above the Clouds") and demonstrates his multiple-orgasm style of composing. As an added bonus, the brilliant "tribal drumming" section near the end (which was not part of the original song) is a nod to the iconic drumming segment I described last month in regards to "Ommadawn."
Oldfield's albums are a mixed bag and I can't vouch for the later ones, but if you want to hear his "classic" sound you need to get "Tubular Bells" (the ORIGINAL version, not the sequels or the remakes or the remasters or the orchestral one), "Hergest Ridge," and "Ommadawn." If you can find it you also need "Amarok," a sixty-minute "back to roots" song that Oldfield released as an unsubtle f*ck you to Virgin.
If you want some Oldfield pop, I recommend "Five Miles Out" and "Discovery."
Albums to avoid: the piss-poor stabs at chart success ("Heavens Open," "Islands," and "Earth Moving") and you should also stay away from "Songs of Distant Earth," which is Oldfield at his plinky-keyboard, new age worst.
For fans only: "Boxed," a boxed 4-album (vinyl) set full of quadraphonic mixes and rarities, including the infamous original ending to "Tubular Bells": Viv Stanshall lurching drunkenly around Oldfield's house, improvising a slurred monologue, with "The Sailor's Hornpipe" played in the background. Wow.
