April 12

A member of The Blackboard pointed out that today was the anniversary of the suicide of the Norwegian black metal vocalist Dead (although Wikipedia says that he took his life on April 8, 1991). I replied:

"Those Norwegian black metal guys are seriously deranged dudes. My 'favorite' is Varg Vikernes [PMD, February 11], who, like Dead, was associated with the band Mayhem. Over its history, the band completely lived up to its name. After Dead's death, the Satanist neo-Nazi Vikernes joined the group and a year later murdered the guitarist Euronymous, who he claimed had planned to torture and murder him, but whatever. Vikernes served 16 years for the murder and for various church arsons, which are popular in the black metal crowd since they want to return Norway to its 'pagan' roots. Vikernes never got to carry out his plan for blowing up a 'punk anti-fascist' hangout in Oslo, although he had assembled the necessary explosives. But hey, he's out of prison now! Cancel your trips to Norway."

Euronymous, who once said "I honestly think Dead is mentally insane. Which other way can you describe a guy who does not eat, in order to get starving wounds?", is rumored to have "made a stew with pieces of Dead's brain, and made necklaces with fragments of Dead's skull." Ordinarily I would believe those were just urban legends, but with this crew, you never know.

Although I don't like B.R. Myers's literary criticism, he is worth attending to on the subject of North Korea:

If we have to posit it anywhere on the ideological spectrum, we have to say that it's more of a far-right country. This is a country with a race-based way of looking at the world. It does have a command economy, but the far-right national defense states of the 1930s and 1940s, namely imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, also had a command economy. It was perhaps not quite as extreme as the one you see in North Korea, but a command economy is by no means incompatible with a far-right state.

But we have to keep in mind that this left-right scale should really be envisioned more as a kind of circle. In other words, the further you get to the extreme left, the closer you get to the extreme right. I would see North Korea as being right there where the extreme right and the extreme left meet.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/immersion-in-propaganda-racebased-nationalism-and-the-unfigureoutable-vortex-of-juche-thought-colin-.html

Here is an interesting piece on the expanding periodic table of elements:

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/enjoy-this-beauty-it-will-not-last.html

David Denby is enthusiastic about the Argentine film The Secret in Their Eyes, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film against better-known competition:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/19/100419crci_cinema_denby

The Nation has published a lengthy, fascinating essay by Nathaniel Popper on the complex relationship between the work and personalities of Jewish Holocaust scholars Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt. It is worth printing this piece out, as it may be tiring to read on a screen:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100419/popper/single 

A blog new to me, Strange Maps, looks at Dell Books' delightful "Map Backs":

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/456-maps-of-murder-dell-books-and-hard-boiled-cartography/

The Neglected Books Page enumerates some lesser-known titles that H.L. Mencken championed during his editorship of The American Mercury from 1924 to 1933:

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=334

It is fascinating to learn at Wikipedia that the Mercury in its later years changed hands several times and moved so far right that it became an actual neo-Nazi publication which Varg Vikernes might have enjoyed, albeit probably a little light on the Odinism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mercury

I'll bet you did not know that there was a sub-group of Op artists specific to Ohio:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37379

http://www.dwigmore.com/exhibitions/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Anuszkiewicz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Stanczak

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonima_group

Bring on the performing geese!

http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2010/04/art-of-big-top-29.html

Among notables born on this date are statesman Henry Clay, playwrights Alan Ayckbourn and Alexander Ostrovsky, novelist Scott Turow, children's writer Beverly Cleary, journalist Jon Krakauer, sopranos Lily Pons and Montserrat Caballe, jazz singer Helen Forrest, country singer Vince Gill, novelty singer Tiny Tim, jazz pianist/composer Herbie Hancock, talk show host David Letterman, and actors Robert Harron, Ann Miller, Hardy Kruger, David Cassidy, Ed O'Neill, Andy Garcia, and Claire Danes. There is a hilarious moment in Harry Stein's now-rare 1976 biography of Tiny Tim in which Tiny, discussing his attraction/repulsion to pornography, says that he has stopped seeking it because he does not want to go to H-E-L-L -- also, it is so hard to find a good supplier.

Here is a Tiny Tim appearance from the great New Jersey-based Uncle Floyd Show, which I am surprised that I have not written about here at PMD -- believe me, it is only a matter of time. Two sublime eccentrics in a moment of mutual admiration: