name	Society
director	Brian Yuzna
writer	Woody KeithRick Fry
starring	Billy WarlockDevin DeVasquezEvan RichardsBen Meyerson
producer	Paul WhiteKeizo KabataTerry OgisuKeith Walley
distributor	Wild Street Pictures
released	May 1989 (Cannes Film Festival), June 11, 1992
music	Mark RyderPhil Davies
cinematography	Rick Fichter
editing	Peter Teshner
runtime	99 min.
language	English
budget	}}

''Society'' is an American horror film. It was finished in 1989, but not released in the US until 1992. It was Brian Yuzna's directorial debut and was written by Rick Fry and Woody Keith. The film stars Billy Warlock as Bill Whitney, Devin DeVasquez as Clarissa Carlyn, Evan Richards as Milo and Ben Meyerson as Ferguson. Screaming Mad George was responsible for the special effects.

''Society'' is considered to be a minor classic in the body horror sub-genre. A sequel, ''Society 2: Body Modification'', was in development, with a script written by Stephan Biro.

Plot

Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock) seems to have it all. His family is wealthy and he lives in a mansion in Beverly Hills, California. He's popular at his high school, looks to be a shoo-in for class president, has a cute cheerleader girlfriend and owns a new Jeep Wrangler to drive around in. Despite this, he feels as though he does not fit in with his family or their high-society friends. When his sister's ex-boyfriend Blanchard (Tim Bartell) gives him a surreptitiously recorded tape of what sounds like his family engaged in a vile, murderous orgy, Bill begins to suspect that his feelings are justified.

Bill gives the tape to his therapist Dr. Cleveland (Ben Slack) to listen to. When he comes back for his appointment, Dr. Cleveland plays the tape back for Bill. The audio has now changed and now merely contains the sounds of his sister Jenny (Patrice Jennings) enjoying her coming out party. Bill insists that what he'd heard before was real and calls Blanchard to get another copy. When he arrives at their meeting place, Bill discovers an ambulance and police officers gathered around Blanchard's crashed van. A body is placed into the back of the ambulance, but Bill is prevented from seeing its face.

At Blanchard's funeral, Bill and his friend Milo (Evan Richards) discover that Blanchard's corpse either needed a lot of reconstructive work for display, or is not real. After the funeral and at the encouragement of his parents, Bill attends a party hosted by his upper-class classmate Ferguson (Ben Meyerson). There, Ferguson lasciviously confirms that the first audio tape Bill listened to—with the sounds of an orgy on it—was the real tape. Angry and confused, he leaves the party with Clarissa (Devin DeVasquez), a beautiful girl he'd been admiring. They have acrobatic sex at her house and Bill meets Clarissa's bizarre, hair-loving mother (Pamela Matheson).

Bill returns home the next day and confronts his parents (Connie Danese and Charles Lucia) and sister, who are all in the master bedroom dressed in lingerie. With Dr. Cleveland's help, they drug Bill. As Milo secretly trails him, Bill is taken to a hospital. Bill awakens in a hospital bed and thinks he hears Blanchard crying out, but discovers that nothing is there. He leaves the hospital and finds his Jeep waiting for him. Milo tried to warn him, but he drives back to his house.

Back home again, Bill finds a large, formal party. He is snared by the neck and Dr. Cleveland reveals all of the secrets he has been searching for. He is not really related to his family after all. In fact, his family and their high-society friends are an actual different species from Bill. To demonstrate, they bring in a still-living Blanchard. The wealthy party guests strip to their underwear and begin "shunting". The rich literally feed on the poor, physically deforming and melding with each other as they suck the nutrients out of Blanchard's body. Their intention is to do to the same to Bill. In a fight with Ferguson, Bill manages to pull the pliable Ferguson inside-out. With Milo and Clarissa's help—who is also of this alternate species, but has fallen in love with Bill—he escapes.

Cast

Billy Warlock as Bill Whitney

Connie Danese as Nan

Ben Slack as Dr. Cleveland

Evan Richards as Milo

Patrice Jennings as Jenny

Tim Bartell as Blanchard

Charles Lucia as Jim

Heidi Kozak as Shauna

Brian Bremer as Petrie

Ben Meyerson as Ferguson

Devin DeVasquez as Clarissa Carlyn

Maria Claire as Sally

Conan Yuzna as Jason

Jason Williams as Jason's Friend

Pamela Matheson as Mrs. Carlyn

Reception

''Society'' was a success in Europe, but was shelved for three years before getting a release in the U.S. Said director Yuzna in an interview: "I think Europeans are more willing to accept the ideas that are in a movie. That's why for example ''Society'' did really well in Europe and in the US did nothing, where it was a big joke. And I think it's because they responded to the ideas in there. I was totally having fun with them, but they are there nonetheless."

In 1990, ''Society'' won the Silver Raven award for "Best Make-Up" at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film.

See also

Social class

References

External links

Category:1992 films Category:1990s horror films Category:American films Category:English-language films Category:Mystery films Category:Independent films Category:American comedy horror films Category:Directorial debut films

de:Society (Film) fr:Society it:Society - The Horror nl:Society (film) pt:Society (filme de 1989) ru:Общество (фильм)

is a Japanese artist whose paintings, collages, soft sculptures, performance art and environmental installations all share an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation. (She has described herself as an "obsessive artist".)

Kusama's work is based in Conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. She has long struggled with mental illness.

On November 12, 2008 Christies New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist.

Life and work

Born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Kusama has experienced hallucinations and severe obsessive thoughts since childhood, often of a suicidal nature. She claims that as a small child she suffered severe physical abuse by her mother.

By 1950, Kusama was depicting abstracted natural forms in watercolor, gouache and oil, primarily on paper. She began covering surfaces (walls, floors, canvases, and later, household objects and naked assistants) with the polka dots that would become a trademark of her work. The vast fields of polka dots, or "infinity nets," as she called them, were taken directly from her hallucinations. She studied Nihonga painting, a rigorous formal style developed during the Meiji period. Her first series of large-scale canvas paintings, ''Infinity Nets'', were covered in a sequence of nets and dots that alluded to hallucinatory visions.

After living in Tokyo and France, Kusama left Japan at the age of 27 for New York City, following correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe in which she became interested in joining the limelight in the city. During her time in the U.S., she quickly established her reputation as a leader in the avant-garde movement. She organized outlandish happenings in conspicuous spots like Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, often involving nudity and designed to protest the Vietnam War. She was enormously productive, and counted Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd among her friends and supporters, but did not profit financially from her work.

In the 1973 Kusama returned to Japan in ill health, where she began writing shockingly visceral and surrealistic novels, short stories, and poetry. Today she lives, by choice, in a mental hospital in Tokyo, where she has continued to produce work since the mid-1970s. Her studio is a short distance from the hospital. Kusama is often quoted as saying: "If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago,"

Yayoi Kusama said about her 1954 painting titled ''Flower (D.S.P.S)'', :''One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle.''

Another quote of hers: :''"...a polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement... Polka dots are a way to infinity."''

Her organically abstract paintings of one or two colors (the ''Infinity Nets'' series), which she began upon arriving in New York, garnered comparisons to the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.

Exhibitions

To date, Kusama has completed several major outdoor sculptural commissions, mostly in the form of brightly hued monstrous plants and flowers, for public and private institutions including the Fukuoka Municipal Museum of Art and Matsumoto City Museum of Art in Japan; Eurolille in Lille, France; and the Beverly Hills City Council in Los Angeles. She has exhibited work with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. Kusama represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and in 1998-1999 a major retrospective exhibition of her work toured the U.S. and Japan. In August 2010, Kusama exhibited at the Aichi Triennale 2010 , Nagoya. Her works are exhibited inside the Aichi Arts Center, out of the center and Toyota car polka dot project. As of July 2011, several of Kusama's most intimate works are on display at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain.

Recognition

In October 2006, Yayoi Kusama became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan’s most prestigious prizes for internationally recognized artists.

In popular culture

Superchunk, an American indie band, included a song called "Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama)" on its ''Here's to Shutting Up'' album.

Yoko Ono cites Kusama as an influence.

The recently built Matsumoto Performing Art Center in her hometown Matsumoto, designed by Toyo Ito, has an entirely dotted façade, likely influenced by her works.

She is mentioned in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song Hot Topic.

Bibliography

Jo Applin, "Resisting Infinity", ''Yayoi Kusama'', exch. cat., Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 2008

Izumi Nakajima, "Yayoi Kusama between Abstraction and Pathology". In: Griselda Pollock (ed.), ''Psychoanalysis and the Image''. London: Routledge, 2006.

"Collection of Print Works: Yayoi Kusama, 1974-2004", Japanese/English, Abe Corporation, Tokyo Japan.

"Eternity-Modernity: Yayoi Kusama", 2005, English/Japanese, Bijutsu Shuppan-sha Ltd, Tokyo, Japan.

"Manhattan Suicide Addict: Yayoi Kusama", 2005, French, Les Presses du Reel, Dijon, France.

"Kusamatrix", 2004, English/Japanese, Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo.

"Yayoi Kusama Furniture by graf: decorative mode no.3", 2003, Seigensha Art Publishing, Inc, Kyoto, Japan.

"Yayoi Kusama", 2003, German, Kunsthalle wien, Vienna, Austria.

"Infinity Nets", 2002, Japanese, Sakuhinsha, Tokyo, Japan.

"Yayoi Kusama", 2001, French, Les Press du Reel Janvier, Dijon, France.

"Yayoi Kusama", 2000, English, Phaidon Press Ltd, London, UK.

"Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968", Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1998, Lynn Zelevansky, Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama

"Violet Obsession", 1998, English, Wandering Mind Books, Berkeley, California, U.S.A.

Hustlers Grotto", 1998, English, Wandering Mind Books, Berkeley, California, U.S.A.

J. F. Rodenbeck, "Yayoi Kusama: Surface, Stitch, Skin". In: Catherine de Zegher (ed.), ''Inside the Visible''. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston & MIT Press, 1996.

"Yayoi Kusama Print Works", 1992, Abe Corporation, Tokyo, Japan.

"Yayoi Kusama: Driving Image", 1986, Parco shuppan, Tokyo, Japan.

"A Book of Poems and Paintings", 1977, Japan Edition Art, Tokyo, Japan.

References

External links

Official Site

Gallerist

Yayoi Kusama Painting|Biography, and Historical Information

Yayoi Kusama @ USA, 2007

Yayoi Kusama @ New York 2007

Kusama Documentary

Video promoting Walking In My Mind at the Hayward Gallery

Yayoi Kusama - Mirrored Years MCA Sydney, Australia

Portrait of Yayoi Kusama

Phoenix Art Museum online

2007 Interview at ArtReview.com

Category:1929 births Category:Living people Category:Japanese sculptors Category:Modern artists Category:Feminist artists Category:Pop artists Category:Japanese women artists Category:Installation artists Category:Kyoto City University of Arts alumni

de:Yayoi Kusama et:Yayoi Kusama es:Yayoi Kusama fr:Yayoi Kusama ko:구사마 야요이 it:Yayoi Kusama nl:Yayoi Kusama ja:草間彌生 pt:Yayoi Kusama ru:Кусама, Яёи fi:Yayoi Kusama sv:Yayoi Kusama zh:草間彌生

Name	Kurt Vonnegut
Birth name	Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Birth date	November 11, 1922
Birth place	Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Death date	April 11, 2007
Death place	New York City, United States
Occupation	Novelist, essayist
Nationality	American
Period	1949–2007
Genre	SatireGallows humorScience fiction
Influences	''Subtreasury of American Humor'', Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Joseph Heller, William March, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Eugene V. Debs, Powers Hapgood, George Bernard Shaw, James Thurber, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley
Influenced	Douglas Adams, Bill Bryson, Paul Auster, Mitch Berman, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Jhonen Vasquez, Louis Sachar, George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, Carlton Mellick III, Kula Shaker, Chris Bachelder, James Rivera, John Irving, Aka Morchiladze, Jon Stewart
website	http://vonnegut.com/ }}

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer of the 20th century. He wrote such works as ''Cat's Cradle'' (1963), ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' (1969), and ''Breakfast of Champions'' (1973) blending satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

Life

Early years

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., and Edith Lieber. Both his father and his grandfather Bernard Vonnegut attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut, Sr. was the founder of the Vonnegut Hardware Company, an Indianapolis institution. Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and matriculated to Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of ''The Cornell Daily Sun''. He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering. On Mothers' Day in 1944, his mother committed suicide with sleeping pills.

World War II

Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944, after the 106th was cut off from the rest of Courtney Hodges's First Army. "The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks..." Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some German. After telling the German guards "...just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came..." he was beaten and had his position as leader taken away. While a prisoner, he witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945 which destroyed most of the city.

Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility. The Germans called the building ''Schlachthof Fünf'' (Slaughterhouse Five) which the Allied POWs adopted as the name for their prison. Vonnegut said the aftermath of the attack was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." This experience was the inspiration for his famous novel, ''Slaughterhouse-Five'', and is a central theme in at least six of his other books. In ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' he recalls that the remains of the city resembled the surface of the moon, and that the Germans put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them. Vonnegut eventually remarked, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."

Vonnegut was repatriated by Red Army troops in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound," later writing in ''Timequake'' that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite".

Post-war career

After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He described his work there in the late 1940s in terms that could have been used by almost any other City Press reporter of any era: "Well, the Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they’d send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they’d run our stories. So that’s what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time." Vonnegut admitted that he was a poor anthropology student, with one professor remarking that some of the students were going to be professional anthropologists and he was not one of them. According to Vonnegut in ''Bagombo Snuff Box'', the university rejected his first thesis on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painters and the leaders of late 19th Century Native American uprisings, saying it was "unprofessional." He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York, in public relations for General Electric, where his brother Bernard worked in the research department. Vonnegut was a technical writer, but was also known for writing well past his typical hours while working. While in Schenectady, Vonnegut lived in the tiny hamlet of Alplaus, located within the town of Glenville, just across the Mohawk River from the city of Schenectady. Vonnegut rented an upstairs apartment located along Alplaus Creek across the street from the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department, where he was an active Volunteer Fire-Fighter for a few years. To this day, the apartment where Vonnegut lived for a brief time still has a desk at which he wrote many of his short stories; Vonnegut carved his name on its underside. The University of Chicago later accepted his novel ''Cat's Cradle'' as his thesis, citing its anthropological content, and awarded him the M.A. degree in 1971.

In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for ''Sports Illustrated'' magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and left. On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there, ''Cat's Cradle'' became a best-seller, and he began ''Slaughterhouse-Five'', now considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100 best lists of ''Time'' magazine and the Modern Library.

Early in his adult life he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod, where he managed the first Saab dealership established in the U.S.

Personal life

The author's name appears in print as "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." throughout the first half of his published writing career; beginning with the 1976 publication of ''Slapstick'', he dropped the "Jr." and was simply billed as Kurt Vonnegut. His older brother, Bernard Vonnegut, was an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, SUNY, who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating precipitation.

After returning from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, writing about their courtship in several of his short stories. In the 1960s they lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where for a while Vonnegut worked at a Saab dealership. The couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz. Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized.

He raised seven children: three from his first marriage; his sister Alice's three children, adopted by Vonnegut after her death from cancer; and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz. His only biological son, Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, wrote the book ''The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity'' (Seven Stories Press, 2010), about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint.

His daughter Edith ("Edie"), an artist, was named after Kurt Vonnegut's mother, Edith Lieber. She has had her work published in a book titled ''Domestic Goddesses'' and was once married to Geraldo Rivera. His youngest biological daughter, Nanette ("Nanny"), was named after Nanette Schnull, Vonnegut's paternal grandmother. She is married to realist painter Scott Prior and is the subject of several of his paintings, notably "Nanny and Rose".

Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven, and Kurt Adams; the fourth is Lily, a girl he adopted as an infant in 1982. James, Steven, and Kurt were adopted after a traumatic week in 1958, in which their father James Carmalt Adams was killed on September 15 in the Newark Bay rail crash when his commuter train went off the open Newark Bay bridge in New Jersey, and their mother—Kurt's sister Alice—died of cancer. In ''Slapstick'', Vonnegut recounts that Alice's husband died two days before Alice herself, and her family tried to hide the knowledge from her, but she found out when an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the ''New York Daily News'' a day before she herself died. The fourth and youngest of the boys, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama, as an infant. Lily is a singer and actress.

Jane Marie Cox later married Adam Yarmolinsky and wrote an account of the Vonneguts' life with the Adams children. It was published after her death as the book ''Angels Without Wings: A Courageous Family's Triumph Over Tragedy''.

On November 11, 1999, the asteroid 25399 Vonnegut was named in Vonnegut's honor.

On January 31, 2001, a fire destroyed the top story of his home. Vonnegut suffered smoke inhalation and was hospitalized in critical condition for four days. He survived, but his personal archives were destroyed. After leaving the hospital, he recuperated in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, a habit he referred to as a "classy way to commit suicide".

Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries following a fall at his home and died in Manhattan on April 11, 2007.

Writing career

Vonnegut's first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" appeared in the February 11, 1950 edition of ''Collier's'' (it has since been reprinted in his short story collection, ''Welcome to the Monkey House''). His first novel was the dystopian novel ''Player Piano'' (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write short stories before his second novel, ''The Sirens of Titan'', was published in 1959. Through the 1960s, the form of his work changed, from the relatively orthodox structure of ''Cat's Cradle'' (which in 1971 earned him a Master's Degree) to the acclaimed, semi-autobiographical ''Slaughterhouse-Five'', given a more experimental structure by using time travel as a plot device.

These structural experiments were continued in ''Breakfast of Champions'' (1973), which includes many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs and an appearance by the author himself, as a ''deus ex machina''.

:"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself. : :"I know," I said. : :"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said. : :"I know," I said.

''Deadeye Dick'', although mostly set in the mid-twentieth century, foreshadows the turbulent times of contemporary America; it ends prophetically with the lines "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven't ended yet." The novel explores themes of social isolation and alienation that are particularly relevant in the postmodern world. Society is seen as openly hostile or indifferent at best, and popular culture as superficial and excessively materialistic.

Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984 and later wrote about this in several essays.

''Breakfast of Champions'' became one of his best-selling novels. It includes, in addition to the author himself, several of Vonnegut's recurring characters. One of them, science fiction author Kilgore Trout, plays a major role and interacts with the author's character.

In 1974, ''Venus on the Half-Shell'', a book by Philip José Farmer in a style similar to that of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout, was published. This caused some confusion among readers, as for some time many assumed that Vonnegut wrote it; when the truth of its authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being "not amused". In an issue of the semi-prozine ''The Alien Critic''/''Science Fiction Review'', published by Richard E. Geis, Farmer claimed to have received an angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it.

In addition to recurring characters, there are also recurring themes and ideas. One of them is ice-nine (a central wampeter in his novel ''Cat's Cradle'').

Although many of his novels involved science fiction themes, they were widely read and reviewed outside the field, not least due to their anti-authoritarianism. For example, in his seminal short story "Harrison Bergeron" egalitarianism is rigidly enforced by overbearing state authority, engendering horrific repression.

In much of his work, Vonnegut's own voice is apparent, often filtered through the character of science fiction author Kilgore Trout (whose name is based on that of real-life science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon). It is characterized by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism, tempered by humanism. In the foreword to ''Breakfast of Champions'', Vonnegut wrote that as a child, he saw men with locomotor ataxia, and it struck him that these men walked like broken machines; it followed that healthy people were working machines, suggesting that humans are helpless prisoners of determinism. Vonnegut also explored this theme in ''Slaughterhouse-Five'', in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim "has come unstuck in time" and has so little control over his own life that he cannot even predict which part of it he will be living through from minute to minute. Vonnegut's well-known phrase "So it goes", used ironically in reference to death, also originated in ''Slaughterhouse-Five.'' "Its combination of simplicity, irony, and rue is very much in the Vonnegut vein."

With the publication of his novel ''Timequake'' in 1997, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing fiction. He continued to write for the magazine ''In These Times'', where he was a senior editor, until his death in 2007, focusing on subjects ranging from contemporary U. S. politics to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office. In 2005, many of his essays were collected in a new bestselling book titled ''A Man Without a Country'', which he insisted would be his last contribution to letters.

An August 2006 article reported:

:He has stalled finishing his highly anticipated novel ''If God Were Alive Today'' — or so he claims. "I've given up on it... It won't happen... The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?"

The April 2008 issue of ''Playboy'' featured the first published excerpt from ''Armageddon in Retrospect'', the first posthumous collection of Vonnegut's work. The book itself was published in the same month. It included never before published short stories by the writer and a letter that was written to his family during World War II when Vonnegut was captured as a prisoner of war. The book also contains drawings by Vonnegut and a speech he wrote shortly before his death. The introduction was written by his son, Mark Vonnegut.

Vonnegut also taught at Harvard University, where he was a lecturer in English, and the City College of New York, where he was a Distinguished Professor.

Art career

Vonnegut's work as a graphic artist began with his illustrations for ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' and developed with ''Breakfast of Champions'', which included numerous felt-tip pen illustrations. Later in his career, he became more interested in artwork, particularly silk-screen prints, which he pursued in collaboration with Joe Petro III.

In 2004, Vonnegut participated in the project ''The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were'', for which he created an album cover for Phish called ''Hook, Line and Sinker'', which has been included in a traveling exhibition for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Politics

Vonnegut was deeply influenced by early Socialist labor leaders, especially Indiana natives Powers Hapgood and Eugene V. Debs, and he frequently quoted them in his work. He named characters after both Debs (Eugene Debs Hartke in ''Hocus Pocus'' and Eugene Debs Metzger in ''Deadeye Dick'') and Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky (Leon Trotsky Trout in ''Galápagos''). He was a lifetime member of the American Civil Liberties Union and was featured in a print advertisement for them.

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Vonnegut frequently addressed moral and political issues but rarely dealt with specific political figures until after his retirement from fiction. Though the downfall of Walter Starbuck, a minor Nixon administration bureaucrat who is the narrator and main character in ''Jailbird'' (1979), would not have occurred but for the Watergate scandal, the focus is not on the administration. His collection ''God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian'' referenced controversial assisted suicide proponent Jack Kevorkian.

With his columns for ''In These Times'', he began an attack on the Bush administration and the Iraq war. "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas." ''In These Times'' quoted him as saying "The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected." In a 2003 interview Vonnegut said, "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities,or 'PPs.'" When asked how he was doing at the start of a 2003 interview, he replied: "I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK."

He did not regard the 2004 election with much optimism; speaking of Bush and John Kerry, he said that "no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."

In 2005, Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for ''The Australian''. During the course of the interview Vonnegut was asked his opinion of modern terrorists, to which he replied, "I regard them as very brave people." When pressed further Vonnegut also said that "They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your Race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble—sweet and honourable I guess it is—to die for what you believe in." (This last statement is a reference to the line "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" ["it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"] from Horace's ''Odes'', or possibly to Wilfred Owen's ironic use of the line in his ''Dulce Et Decorum Est''.) Nason took offense at Vonnegut's comments and characterized him as an old man who "doesn't want to live any more ... and because he can't find anything worthwhile to keep him alive, he finds defending terrorists somehow amusing." Vonnegut's son, Mark, responded to the article by writing an editorial to the ''Boston Globe'' in which he explained the reasons behind his father's "provocative posturing" and stated that "If these commentators can so badly misunderstand and underestimate an utterly unguarded English-speaking 83-year-old man with an extensive public record of saying exactly what he thinks, maybe we should worry about how well they understand an enemy they can't figure out what to call."

A 2006 interview with ''Rolling Stone'' stated, " ... it's not surprising that he disdains everything about the Iraq War. The very notion that more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in what he sees as an unnecessary conflict makes him groan. 'Honestly, I wish Nixon were president,' Vonnegut laments. 'Bush is so ignorant.' "

Though he was a dissident to the end, Vonnegut held a bleak view on the power of artists to effect change. "During the Vietnam War," he told an interviewer in 2003, "every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high."

Religion

Vonnegut was descended from a family of German freethinkers, who were skeptical of "conventional religious beliefs." His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut had authored a freethought book titled ''Instruction in Morals'', as well as an address for his own funeral in which he denied the existence of God, an afterlife, and Christian doctrines about sin and salvation. Kurt Vonnegut reproduced his great-grandfather's funeral address in his book ''Palm Sunday'', and identified these freethought views as his "ancestral religion," declaring it a mystery as to how it was passed on to him.

Vonnegut described himself variously as a skeptic, freethinker, humanist, Unitarian Universalist, agnostic, and atheist. He disbelieved in the supernatural, considered religious doctrine to be "so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash," and believed people were motivated by loneliness to join religions.

Vonnegut considered humanism to be a modern-day form of freethought, and advocated it in various writings, speeches and interviews. His ties to organized humanism included membership as a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism's International Academy of Humanism. In 1992, the American Humanist Association named him the Humanist of the Year. Vonnegut went on to serve as honorary president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), having taken over the position from his late colleague Isaac Asimov, and serving until his own death in 2007. In a letter to AHA members, Vonnegut wrote: "I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead."

Vonnegut was at one time a member of a Unitarian congregation. ''Palm Sunday'' reproduces a sermon he delivered to the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, concerning William Ellery Channing, who was a principal founder of Unitarianism in the United States. In 1986, Vonnegut spoke to a gathering of Unitarian Universalists in Rochester, New York, and the text of his speech is reprinted in his book ''Fates Worse Than Death''. Also reprinted in that book was a "mass" by Vonnegut, which was performed by a Unitarian Universalist choir in Buffalo, New York. Vonnegut identified Unitarianism as the religion that many in his freethinking family turned to when freethought and other German "enthusiasms" became unpopular in the United States during the World Wars. Vonnegut's parents were married by a Unitarian minister, and his son had at one time aspired to become a Unitarian minister.

Vonnegut's views on religion were unconventional and nuanced. While rejecting the divinity of Jesus, he was nevertheless an ardent admirer, and believed that Jesus's Beatitudes informed his own humanist outlook. While he often identified himself as an agnostic or atheist, he also frequently spoke of God. Despite describing freethought, humanism and agnosticism as his "ancestral religion," and despite being a Unitarian, he also spoke of himself as being irreligious. A press release by the American Humanist Association described him as "completely secular."

Self-assessment

In his book ''Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction'', Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

#Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. #Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. #Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. #Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. #Start as close to the end as possible. #Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of. #Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. #Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O'Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that. He wrote an earlier version of writing tips that was even more straightforward and contained only seven rules (though it advised using ''Elements of Style'' for more indepth advice).

In "The Sexual Revolution", Chapter 18 of his book ''Palm Sunday'', Vonnegut grades his own works. He states that the grades "do not place me in literary history" and that he is comparing "myself with myself." The grades are as follows:

''Player Piano'': B

''The Sirens of Titan'': A

''Mother Night'': A

''Cat's Cradle'': A-plus

''God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'': A

''Slaughterhouse-Five'': A-plus

''Welcome to the Monkey House'': B-minus

''Happy Birthday, Wanda June'': D

''Breakfast of Champions'': C

''Slapstick'': D

''Jailbird'': A

''Palm Sunday'': C

Appearances

Vonnegut played himself in a cameo in 1986's ''Back to School'', in which he is hired by Rodney Dangerfield's Thornton Melon to write a paper on the topic of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Recognizing the work as not Melon's own, Professor Turner tells him, "Whoever ''did'' write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."

Vonnegut also made brief cameos in the film adaptations of his novels ''Mother Night'' and ''Breakfast of Champions''. ''Mother Night'' was directed by Keith Gordon, who starred as Dangerfield's son in ''Back to School''.

Vonnegut appeared as part of the Enron "Why" advertising campaign.

He made a guest appearance on the 2002 DVD released by 1 Giant Leap, leading the producers of the film to say, "Probably the most unbelievable result in our whole production was getting Kurt Vonnegut to agree to an interview". In the film, Vonnegut states, "Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference".

Vonnegut narrates and wrote the narrative of two oratorios with composer Dave Soldier recorded by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, ''A Soldier's Story'' based on the execution of Private Eddie Slovik and ''Ice-9 Ballads'', adapted from ''Cat's Cradle''.

Vonnegut recorded a number of first-person voice-overs for Ken Burns's documentary ''The Civil War'' and included one of a young soldier reflecting on a visit with a prostitute.

Vonnegut appears briefly in the 2005 dramatic documentary ''The American Ruling Class'' playing himself.

Vonnegut appears briefly in the 2005 Dutch release of the three part BBC documentary ''D-Day to Berlin. The allies journey to victory'', telling about his memories of the bombing of Dresden

In August 2006, Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed on the national, weekly public radio program, The Infinite Mind, from inside the 3-D virtual on-line community Second Life. The program made broadcast history as the first to be taped inside a virtual world, and it was the author's last face-to-face sit-down interview. The host was The Infinite Mind's John Hockenberry, who was with Vonnegut in the studio as the program was taped. Vonnegut's virtual interview was taped in front of a virtual audience of 100 people from around the world at the virtual broadcast center created by producer Bill Lichtenstein and Lichtenstein Creative Media which produces The Infinite Mind.

In 2007 Vonnegut is featured in the film ''Never Down'' as Robert and appears in several scenes.

Tributes

The 2009 Hollywood adaptation of Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron", a film entitled ''2081'' is dedicated "To Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."

At the annual Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library McFadden Memorial Lecture at Butler University in Indianapolis, on April 27, 2007, where Vonnegut was being honored posthumously, his son Mark delivered a speech that the author wrote for the event, and which was reported as the last thing he wrote. It ends with this: "I thank you for your attention, and I'm outta here."

Filmmaker Michael Moore included Vonnegut in the dedications for his 2007 film ''Sicko''; at the end of the film, the words "Thank You Kurt Vonnegut for Everything" appear on the screen.

The satirical newspaper ''The Onion'' contained a tribute to Vonnegut soon after he died, with a reference to his work ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' stating that he shouldn't be referred to as dead "without checking Dresden for his younger self first." On November 11, 2007, Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver, reintroduced Kurt's Mile High Malt to celebrate the late author's birthday. The beer was originally created by Vonnegut's grandfather, Albert Lieber, of the Indianapolis Brewery, using coffee as the secret ingredient. Kurt's Mile High Malt was first brewed in 1996 thanks to Wynkoop Founder and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a friend of Vonnegut's. At Vonnegut's request, coffee was added to the Mile High Malt, making it a close recreation of his grandfather's original.

When Vonnegut died, members of the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department in New York lowered the American flag to half mast, hung the funeral shroud, and rang a fire bell in accordance with the traditional 5-5-5 alarm used to honor fallen brothers. Vonnegut's name still appears on an old active fire-fighters roster, located next to a screen-print that he donated to the department.

In August 2011, the metalcore band Bury Your Dead released their sixth studio album, Mosh N' Roll. All of the songs on the album are named after Kurt Vonnegut's works.

Bibliography

References

Further reading

External links

Vonnegut.com Kurt Vonnegut's official website

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library

The Kurt Vonnegut Society

Writing Kurt Vonnegut His biographer

Kurt Vonnegut papers at the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington

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