Uplifting blooms / Infernal cartoons

Closeup of a riotously colorful flower arrangement featuring alstroemeria, pink carnations and tiger lilies
Image courtesy of the author

Today: Diana Moskovitz, investigations editor, writer, and co-owner of Defector; and Harry Siegel, senior editor at THE CITY, co-host of the FAQ NYC podcast, and columnist at the New York Daily News.


Issue No. 64

Buy (And Arrange) Yourself Flowers
Diana Moskovitz

Hell, Yes
Harry Siegel


Buy (And Arrange) Yourself Flowers

by Diana Moskovitz

I took a class in college called “Principles of Floral Art,” because a friend recommended it and I needed the credits. My final semester had arrived, and a class about how to arrange flowers sounded fun. It never occurred to me that it also would become one of the courses to which I refer back the most in my daily life—because buying and arranging your own flowers is one of the nicer small pleasures you can give yourself.

There is a great literature built around the romantic splendor and significance of flowers. Okakura Kakuzo’s 1906 classic The Book of Tea contains a whole rhapsodic chapter on the subject. “The primeval man in offering the first garland to his maiden thereby transcended the brute,” Okakura observes. “He became human in thus rising above the crude necessities of nature. He entered the realm of art when he perceived the subtle use of the useless... In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends. We eat, drink, sing, dance, and flirt with them. We wed and christen with flowers. We dare not die without them.” 

Less poetically, I can tell you that arranging flowers just feels good. I have done it for the holidays. I did it earlier this month, when a great friend sent me flowers for my birthday. I have done it just because I can with tired, end-of-day, chain store flowers after a long and frustrating day at work. You can, too. Here’s how.

Without making things complicated, most of what you need to know is that there are two fundamental tools for floral arrangements: floral foam and vases. Foam, which has been soaked in water, is how you get flowers going at any and all angles. But most of the time, at home, you will be using a vase because it’s easy and you have them around. The great thing about arranging flowers in vases is it’s a bit like finger painting: You can follow the vibes. 

First, some basic stuff. Make sure the vase is clean. Take all the leaves off the stems, or at least most of them, because otherwise they will be in the water and cause rot. Don’t leave the stems too long, or maybe do, but don’t be afraid to cut them down again. I promise you will not run out of flowers. 

For a vase arrangement, there are roughly three types of flowers: focus flower, line flowers, and filler flowers, plus greenery.

The names are fairly self-explanatory. A focus flower is (surprise!) the focus—think giant sunflowers or massive lilies in bloom. Usually these go lowest to the vase opening. Line flowers are taller and thinner—say snapdragons or alstroemeria (Peruvian lilies), and they typically stand taller. But I’ve made plenty of vase arrangements with just line flowers, and they can look quite lovely on their own. Filler flowers are your baby’s breath or Queen Anne’s lace; they take up space. Last is greenery, and this includes everything from literal blades of tall grass to unbloomed flower buds. Think of them like a neutral—they go with everything. (One note: If you have pets, be sure to check and see which ones are safe for them to be around. And never have lilies around cats, as they are toxic to them.)

Fill your vase with lukewarm water, add the flower nutrients if they came with them (yes, they make a difference), then cut the stems at a 45-degree angle with a pair of garden snips or a knife (please do not use scissors) and add them to the vase, maybe one at a time, meditatively, with a view to the rhythm and effects you’re going for. If you don’t like how it turned out, jeuje. Maybe play with the flower lengths and then jeuje some more. Like any personal creation, a floral arrangement is part craft, part art and part luck of the moment. 

A cream ceramic chalice holding vivid orange-crimson roses with their foliage
But not for Valentine's, though

But there is one ironclad rule that I still follow, from Principles of Floral Art: Do not buy roses for Valentine’s Day. Because of high demand for them on the holiday, roses are imported nearly a month in advance, and moved around via refrigerated trucks. You are, to put it mildly, not getting the freshest flower. So, buy anything but a rose on Valentine’s Day. It will almost surely be a better flower.

Look, now you are now a floral arranger. I don’t present this knowledge thinking it will make some grand change in your life or the world—it will not. Arranging flowers will not put more money in your bank account or improve our healthcare system or end violence. But it is a skill that can be useful in being kind to yourself and kind to others, and that is deeply valuable, too.


NEWS FROM THE LAIR

Flaming Hydra Leila Brillson has joined the new executive team at The Onion, which Twilio founder and former CEO Jeff Lawson just bought from G/O Media. Warm congratulations, Leila!!

A Bluesky post from @bencollins.bsky.social reads: Onion Updates:  @leilza.bsky.social Brillson, Flaming Hydra writer and former exec at the communist app TikTok, is our Chief Marketing Officer.  Danielle @strle.bsky.social, Tumblr alum from when Tumblr was the best, is our Chief Product Officer.  The chairman of The Onion is overlord Jeff Lawson.

Hell, Yes

by Harry Siegel

Images via Marxists.org

The only person to return with dispatches from three separate guided tours of hell was also the only cartoonist to be tried, twice, under America’s Espionage Act. That same man was also the only person charged with such crimes during the Great War to have a Liberty Ship named in their honor during the Second World War

Art Young and his journalist colleagues at The Masses, a socialist magazine published from 1911–1917, were tried in 1918 on charges of conspiracy and interfering with enlistment. According to the Liberator's account, “the prosecution's evidence of conspiracy consisted solely of the open publication by these men of their opinions about the war and about the principle of con-scription, and the rights of conscientious objectors, in a magazine which they owned and published without profit for the sake of individual expression.”

After a single holdout hung the jury, they were retried later that year. In that trial, Young was asked to explain a drawing he'd published in the magazine the previous year, months after President Woodrow Wilson—who’d won reelection on the slogan “he kept us out of war”—abandoned neutrality, signed America’s first national security and secrecy laws, and sent American soldiers for the first time to fight in Europe because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” 

Four well-fed men (Editor, Capitalist, Politician, and Minister dance with glee as Satan conducts them with a baton from above. Above them we see banners reading, "All for Democracy," "All for Honor," "All for World Peace," and "All for Jesus"

If war is hell, Young testified, who but Satan would be the conductor?

After that second jury also hung, Young published a sketch to accompany an article about the government’s bid to make criminals of the staff of The Masses, writing in the caption “Art Young On Trial For His Life.”

A sketch of Art Young snoozing on a chair with a frown, captioned, "Art Young on trial for his life ZZZZZ," alongside A TRIBUTE, by Earl B. Barnes, Prosecuting Attorney—From the Court Record: "THESE men are men of extraordinary intelligence. Eastman is one of the brainiest men of our time—A college professor, a writer of remarkable poetry, a brilliant orator, and a keen analyst of social conditions. Rogers is a graduate of Harvard University, and a hustling man of business. Dell, a trained journalist, a writer of exquisite English, keenly ironical, bitingly sarcastic. Young, a cartoonist of national reputation, a friend of Congressmen, and the Washington representative of one of our great magazines... Take Arthur Young. I could cry when I think of the position in which this undoubtedly fine personal character finds himself today. I know your hearts went out to him, and I know my heart went out to him, for the situation that he is in today. But gentlemen, we cannot let those feelings of sympathy, feelings of affection, of love almost, that we might have for a man like Art Young—we cannot let those feelings interfere with our solemn duty at this time to examine the evidence against Mr. Young and to give a verdict on that evidence and on that evidence alone.”

Speaking of Satan, Young, who was born the year after the Civil War ended and died in the midst of the Second World War, was 25 when he published his first illustrated account of that ever-hotspot, Hades Up To Date, in 1892, nearly 30 years before his trials. 

That excursion was credited to a “R. Palasco Durant, special correspondent” who’d supposedly been assigned by his editor to follow up on Dante and “learn if the region of fire was the same as old, or whether it kept pace with the triumphal march of progress. 

“The author found it right in line. Even Hell is now run on the broad, American plan.”

The book—mixing broad political swipes with more general fare about umbrella-snatchers and dentists, tailors who won’t learn their trade and confirmed writers of bad poetry, each getting the torture their kind deserves—was popular enough to be reprinted the following year, with the slightly spicier title of Hell Up to Date.

A demon tortures a man with a pinching staff. In a second drawing, "The Umbrella Borrower," seated on a rock in the middle of a downpour, holding the skeleton of an umbrella.

Nearly a decade later, having established himself as one of his generation’s most successful cartoonists, Young published the lengthier Through Hell with Hiprah Hunt in 1901. The update, with 70 new illustrations along with reprints and reworkings of images and gags from the earlier book, replaced his stand-in journalist with a preacher who “continually and earnestly advocates the justice of future punishment.” 

Hunt, Young wrote of his made-up stand-in in a brief introduction under his own name, “meant to convey the hope he feels for all sinners like himself, that some relief of a slightly humorous nature may be found even in Hell.” 

The first two tours have a cheerfully sour sensibility that at some points feel dated and corny but at others feel right on time a century and change later—a hell of a thing, for a dedicated practitioner of a popular and fundamentally disposable form. 

"Having Fun With a Brutal Policeman." Cartoon of a burly, bearded man pinned down by three devils, striking him with batons

These hells anticipate but don’t quite express the anti-capitalist politics Young would come to embrace in his work beginning in the nineteen-teens, when he was in his 40s—inverting the line later attributed to Churchill, about how any man who’s not a socialist at 20 has no heart, but any man who remains one at 40 has no brain. 

Early on there’s a glimpse of Hell as an up-to-date place where the “guests” sign themselves in.

"The Register. 'Where they wrote their names and addresses in a large book.'" Satan looms over a long queue of scrawny, mostly-naked men waiting to sign their names in a massive guestbook about seven feet in height. One is writing his name with a quill pen, another is reading the bottom left page of the book as he covers his bum with a hat. A vessel to one side bears a sign: "If You Must Weep, Weep in the Cuspidor."

Later, there’s Satan talking down strikers at Satan's Mammoth Sulphur Factory: “Throw grenades of reason on your smoldering discontent. Let your motto be: ‘Well enough is Hell enough!’”

"Satan addressing the strikers. ‘Why this seething dissatisfaction?’” A mass of men and demon guards crowded round for a speech at a factory labeled Satan’s Mammoth Sulphur Factory. Satan stands at a podium, one arm outstretched, deep in oratory.

Art Young’s Inferno, published in 1934, is something else. This is the work of a popular artist in his late 60s who’d been through trials, figuratively and literally, over a quarter century, and drawing everywhere from The Masses to The New Yorker, the Liberator to Cosmopolitan, the Saturday Evening Post and Life (where a handful of the book’s illustrations were first published), to his own short-lived magazine, Good Morning

A huge crowd of frightened suit-clad men and women in hats and dark dresses crawl balefully on the ground in a very dreary landscape. The dark clouds above read: FEAR

He’s sure now of his craft and his sense of the world and how it tracks the underworld he kept revisiting, as he weighs in under his own name on this final descent. 

“The once proud Lucifer,” Young relates, has been edged out by the modern moneymen, and is “now a mere figurehead in his own realm,” as the entrance to hell has been updated from “‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter’” to “You Are Now Entering Hell: Welcome.” Another sign declares “No Parking.”

A large gate seemingly built out of mountain has a banner that reads: You are now entering hell WELCOME. A small crowd is about to enter with vans and an aeroplane. A sign next to the entrance reads: NO PARKING.

What follows feels remarkably of the moment in 2024, nearly a century of vast technological and social changes later, right up to and including the “NO PARKING” sign.

A line of people climb up the stairs to enter huge building built into a valley. Satan is at the end of the line, seemingly guiding them in.

There are killer cars, and jam-packed trains.

a number of muscular looking naked figures are flying all over the road, their heads falling off and their innards running loose, as cars speed by. in another illustration, a mass of figures tries to rush onto a train, knocking over a number of others in the mad rush

In spite of “Hell’s boasted progress,” there, as in Manhattan, it’s miles to the nearest bathroom if you can’t pay to use one. 

A city landscape. A man sweats as he heads towards a sign that reads TOILET: two miles

In hell, as in Manhattan, “​​Under the strain of speed and worry, sinners are always blaming one another for wrongdoing.” 

A naked person crawls desperately on the floor. The test reads: KEEP MOVING: Traveling in the Inferno by escalator, train, automobile, or airplane, you become a part of the pounding fretfulness of machinery. The tempo of the region is to keep going. To pause for thought or contemplation is to be out of key. No one has time to look for the cause of things, but only to glance at the effect. Under the strain of speed and worry, sinners are always blaming one another for wrongdoing. A collision of motor cars—and the occupants of each immediately begin a raucous chatter of accusation, insisting that they were not to blame. Sinners rush from one place to another, not knowing why. If you are riding, accuse those who walk of stupidity and carelessness. If you are walking, accuse those who ride of stupidity and carelessness. A taxi driver is promised a big tip if he gets a Hellion to his train on time. He drive as one with brain panic. Many risk crossing streets while the traffic moves because they are late for work. All Hellions leap, scream, dodge and curse while the devils of fear and worry are at their heels.

There’s much more that still hits home, most all of it available in a new edition of Art Young’s Hell published by Fantagraphics in 2020. Young's fellow cartooning Art, Spiegelman, wrote a really nice appreciation of it at the time for The New Yorker, as well as an earlier essay about Young’s enduring relevance for Harper’s—and all three trips to hell are online at the treasure trove of cartoons and other imagery at Marxists.org.

A naked man with a mustache backs up to the edge of a cliff. A dagger lies at his feet. Caption: Trying to End it all

There’s a special place in hell for editors. In Hiprah Hunt’s excursion, those specifically include

Editors who never credited stolen articles.
Editors who threatened public men with abuse if they refused to do as they dictated.

and

Editors who were very careful not to publish disagreeable information about people of wealth, and so-called “social station,” but never hesitated to print anything about people outside this select circle. 
Baskets on a mountainous landscape hold jumbles of bespectacled men. A number of demons stand guard. caption: THE EDITORS. "No wonder these baskets of human-kind heave and toss."

“Huge red-hot waste baskets hold them, the worst offenders being at the bottom.” 

That was published a couple years after Ambrose Bierce, compiler of The Devil’s Dictionary, had defined Editor, n., in part as “a severely virtuous censor, but so charitable withal that he tolerates the virtues of others and the vices of himself.”

Near the end of his Inferno, Art Young printed what he called The Hell Dictionary:

THE HELL DICTIONARY: Unofficial and privately printed. For rich people to laugh at—for poor people to respect. That’s LAW... About money and the way to acquire it—That's CONVERSATION. The joy of mating made miserable by fear of its money consequences—That's LOVE. A fortune made in a single fight by a prize-ring champion while a family of four—father, mother, and children—struggle all year round for a bare existence. That's THAT. Sitting with all the power of government behind him, he sentences sinners to confinement, debt, or annihilation, who may be no more sinful than he.—That's a JUDGE.. One who works at something he likes, but can’t make money at it. That’s A POOR SIMP... A man who gains some leisure, although too late to appreciate it—He's a LUCKY DEVIL. When the employed want higher wages, it's GREED—when the employer wants more profits, that's a JUST RETURN ON THE INVESTMENT. Muddle the people’s minds. Iterate and emphasize things of no importance until they become big issues. That’s STATESMANSHIP.
Spending millions annually to make people buy things they cannot afford or do not need, with competition between hundreds of brands, almost alike, but made to appear almost different by the skill of writers, artists and radio coaxers, paid to work up enthusiasm over things that do not interest them—That's ADVERTISING. Those who are the most greedy, the most cunning and have the thickest hide, whose natures embody the characteristics of pig, fox and rhinoceros to the exclusion of humane qualities—That's the SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. Romantic emphasis on the lowest instincts in human nature: fighting, revenge, luxurious ease, and narrow notions of honor and duty—That’s a MOVING PICTURE. Ten per cent fo the poor and ninety per cent for the overhead—That's CHARITY. If a woman sells her body—That’s DISGRACEFUL. If a man sells his mind—That’s ALL RIGHT.

Same as it ever was, ALL RIGHT.


FLAMING HYDRA: IRL

On June 5, Flaming Hydra Dessane Lopez Cassell will host a panel featuring Tom Scocca (Flaming Hydra, Indignity), Adlan Jackson (Hell Gate), and Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media). The conversation will take place at DEMO 2024, a festival hosted by the New Museum that highlights innovative projects at the edge of art and tech. Sign up for the next ticket release.

June 5, 4:15pm-5pm at WSA 161 Water Street in NYC