Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Who Finds a Friend Finds a Treasure (1981) > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY30z7TQ5V4


ROARING OCTOBER TWENTIES EDITION::

Oct 2, 1923: An article titled “Is Utopia Really Possible?” appears in Russian newspaper Izvestia, promoting space travel to expand humanity’s horizons.

In 1923, the Russian newspaper Izvestia published an article titled “Is Utopia Really Possible?” describing the pioneering rocketry efforts of the German Hermann Oberth and American Robert Goddard. Spurred by the ideas, Moscow University students formed the world’s first space advocacy organization. Many citizens became convinced that launches to the moon were just around the corner. Over the next decade, Russian media published nearly 250 articles and more than 30 nonfiction books about spaceflight. (In contrast, only two similar works appeared in the U.S. over this period.) The immensely popular 1924 silent film Aelita, the Queen of Mars saw a Russian engineer traveling to the Red Planet and inciting a proletariat revolution. It was based on Alexei Tolstoy's 1923 novel Aelita also known as The Decline of Mars.



Later in the novel, it is explained that Martians are descendants of both local races and of Atlanteans who came there after the sinking of their home continent (here Tolstoy was inspired by Helena Blavatsky's books). Mars is now ruled by Engineers but all is not well. While speaking before an assembly, their leader, Toscoob, says that the city must be destroyed to ease the fall of Mars. Aelita, Toscoob's beautiful daughter and the princess of Mars, later reveals to Los' that the planet is dying, that the polar ice caps are not melting as they once did and the planet is facing an environmental catastrophe.

In the 19th-century, a thinker named Nikolai Fyodorov developed a strange philosophy known as Cosmism. As a Russian Orthodox Christian, Fyodorov believed in the ultimate importance of Christ’s promise to resurrect the virtuous at the End of Days. Witnessing the accelerating advances of science, Fyodorov figured that we might as well just bypass Christ and do the whole resurrection thing ourselves. He argued that our greatest task was to travel out into the universe and collect the atomic particles of our dead ancestors, which had floated away from Earth following each person’s disillusion. By reassembling these bits, we could bring our forefathers back to life and then settle with them in perfect harmony out among the stars.

Translated to English, you can read/download Aelita.

Good article on the silent film at Silent-ology


Oct 2, 1925: London’s first double-decker bus with a covered top makes its debut. The London General Omnibus Company’s history-making bus No. 100 appears on the Epping Town-Elephant and Castle route. Until now the top decks of buses were unprotected from the elements. Second-class citizens get a roof over their heads. Life was good!




Oct 2, 1925: "La Revue Nègre" ("The Negro Revue"), a musical production by Black American jazz artists, opens at the Champs-Élysées Theater in Paris. Its frenzied music and exotic dancing creates a mania for Black culture and makes a star of 19 yr-old lead performer Josephine Baker. The show was sold out.

African art has been a profound influence on French modern art for a generation, and it’s a French painter, Fernand Léger, who conceives the idea of an all-Black revue for the theater where he designs many of the sets.

A troupe of 25 Americans who worked on a New York revue, "Hotsy Totsy", is invited to stage a variant of the show in Paris. In addition to the 19-year-old Baker the talent includes the clarinet player Sidney Bechet, blues singer Maud de Forest and composer Spencer Williams.


Just four days before opening night the producer decides the show has too slow a pace, fires the director and replaces de Forest with Baker as lead dancer. In the showstopping finale she dances a Charleston wearing nothing but a band of flamingo feathers around her waist.

“La Revue Nègre” creates an immediate sensation. Some foreign spectators are dismissive. “Shrill cries, grunts and moans interrupt the blaring instruments,” writes one reviewer. “The actual dancing is all that civilised ability can make of elemental instincts.” For Paris’ nightlife scene the show’s “savage” African rhythms are an intoxicating discovery, made all the more alluring by Baker. “She was an unforgettable female ebony statue,” wrote The New Yorker’s Janet Flammer.

“Two specific elements had been established and were unforgettable—her magnificent dark body, a new model that to the French proved for the first time that black was beautiful, and the acute response of the white masculine public in the capital of hedonism of all Europe—Paris. "La Revue Nègre" closes in December, after which the troupe goes on tour to sellout crowds across Europe. Baker launches her own show at the Folies Bergère in Paris in September 1926, where she introduces her famous “banana skirt” outfit designed by the artist Jean Cocteau.

Pablo Picasso said of her: "Tall, coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles."



Born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, MO (1906–1975), naturalized as Joséphine Baker, was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in France. She was the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 French silent film Siren of the Tropics.

She renounced her U.S. citizenship after she was falsely accused of being a Communist and became a French national after her 3rd marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. She adopted 12 children which she referred to as the Rainbow Tribe and raised them in France. She was married & divorced 4 times.

She adopted 12 children, partly because she couldn't have any of her own and partly because she believed in equality for all, no matter what nationality, religion or race they were of. They were called "the Rainbow Children" and their names were: Akio (Korea), Luis (Colombia), Janot (Japan), Jari (Finland), Jean-Claude (Canada), Moïse (France), Marianne (France), Noël (France), Brian (Arab), Mara (Venezuela), Koffi (the Ivory-Coast), Stellina (Morocco).

Baker aided the French Resistance during World War II, and also worked with the British Secret Intelligence Service and the US Secret Service, the extent of which was not publicized until 2020 when French documents were declassified.

Baker received a full Catholic funeral (despite being a Freemason) at L'Église de la Madeleine, attracting more than 20,000 mourners. The only American-born woman to receive full French military honors with a 21 gun salute at her funeral. After a family service at Saint-Charles Church in Monte Carlo, Baker was interred at the Cimetière de Monaco.

On November 30, 2021, Baker was inducted into the Panthéon in Paris, the first black woman to receive one of the highest honors in France.

La Revue Nègre

Josephine Baker

Joséphine Baker photographs by Lucien Waléry

Josephine Baker - Getty Images


90 Years Later, the Radical Power of Josephine Baker’s Banana Skirt


Oct 2, 1925: Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the liberal journal The Nation, attacks the nation's press for its unwillingness to challenge the "cult" that surrounds the government. "We have begun to hedge the president with something that almost approaches divinity," he says.




Oct 2, 1925: Louisa Thiers of Kenosha, Wisconsin celebrates her 111th birthday.
Thiers is the first American who is known factually to have reached the age of 110, last year, and she’s still going - with living memory of the 1820s. She died 4 months later on Feb 17, 1926.


Supercentenarians (scroll all the way down to bottom)


Oct 2, 1940: Jokio on Tokio - Censored.
No skywriting plane, but the heavy hand of the Navy censor laid this handiwork across the darkened background of a picture made above Terminal Island, in Los Angeles harbor. Here live some 3000 Japanese..."




Oct 2, 1940: 'Five Little Angels of Death Are We'




Oct 2, 1940: New Job for Mr. X*
Lowell Mellett [1884-1960] American journalist, best known for supervising the series Why We Fight during WWII.



In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Mellett to head the Office of Government Reports, checking newspapers, polling the public and maintaining information officers throughout the country.

In 1942, this became the Office of War Information's Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP). FDR, in appointing Mellet to head the BMP, wrote, "The American motion picture is one of the most effective mediums in informing and entertaining our citizens. The motion picture must remain free in so far as national security will permit. I want no censorship of the motion picture." The BMP's most successful project was Why We Fight.

Why We Fight is a series of seven propaganda films produced by the US Department of War from 1942 to 1945, during World War II. It was originally written for American soldiers to help them understand why the United States was involved in the war, but US President Franklin Roosevelt ordered distribution for public viewing.

Some parts were re-enacted "under War Department supervision" if no relevant footage was available. Animated segments were produced by Walt Disney Productions, and the animated maps followed a convention of depicting Axis-occupied territory in black. In 2000, the US Library of Congress deemed the films "culturally significant" and selected them for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Mellett was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 2013.

Starting from 1940 (before the USA even entered the war) I think the war propaganda era was not much different than today. The difference today is that it is amplified x1000 fold with thermonuclear rhetoric due to the internet (presstitutes & podcast pop-clickers) resulting in 24/7 precision carpet bombing around the globe (based on demographics) in mere milliseconds, epic noise resulting in mass chaos and confusion literally driving a significant percentage of the population (including various leaders) into mass psychosis.


Oct 2, 1958: The Journalist's Creed.
You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone!