How did Pablo Picasso do it? Art historians have spent much time and many words answering that question, but in the video above, you can watch the painter in the act of creation — or, rather, you can watch a series of his paintings as they come into being, evolving from spare but evocative collections of marker strokes into complete images, alive with color. We see Picasso’s visual ideas emerge, and then we see him refine and revise them, sometimes toward a surprising result. All of this happens in under two minutes, since filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot shot the artist working with time-lapse photography, compressing each creative process into mere seconds.
This particular sequence became the trailer of Clouzot’s 1956 documentary The Mystery of Picasso. The paintings in it, we read at the end, “cannot be seen anywhere else. They were destroyed upon completion of the film.” Though word on the street has it that one or two of them may actually survive somewhere today, the idea of Picasso paintings existing only on film does capture the imagination, and it moved the French government to officially declare The Mystery of Picasso a national treasure. Picasso had, of course, painted on film before, as you might recall from seeing us feature Paul Haesaerts’ 1950 Visite à Picasso.
Here’s a sad little piece of rock and roll history: the last television interview of Keith Moon, mercurial drummer for The Who. It was broadcast live on the morning of August 7, 1978, exactly one month before Moon’s death from a drug overdose at the age of 32.
Moon and guitarist Pete Townshend had flown into New York the previous day to promote The Who’s eighth studio album, Who Are You. In addition to a couple of radio interviews, Moon and Townshend stopped by the studios of Good Morning America for a TV interview with a stiff and humorless David Hartman. Moon appears bloated and unhealthy. At one point he makes a joke about not being in control of his life.
“Are you in control of your life at all?” Hartman asks.
“On certain days,” says Moon.
“Certain days.”
“Yeah.”
“What are you like the other days?”
“Quite out of control. Amazingly…ah…drunk.”
Moon’s various addictions had caught up with him by 1978. “Musically,” writes Townshend in Who I Am: A Memoir, “his drumming was getting so uneven that recording was almost impossible, so much so that work on the Who Are You album had ground to a halt….[The Who] had just about enough tracks for a record, with very little additional material to spare. ‘Music Must Change’ was completed with footsteps replacing drums.”
On the night of September 6, 1978, Moon and his girlfriend Annette Walter-Lax attended a party in London, hosted by Paul McCartney. During the party, and at the midnight premier of The Buddy Holly Story that followed, Moon took Clomethiazole, a sedative prescribed to help him cope with alcohol withdrawal. When he got home, he took more. Walter-Lax found his lifeless body when she checked on him on the afternoon of September 7. An autopsy showed that Moon had taken 32 tablets of Clomethiazole. His doctor had told him not to exceed three per day.
In a public statement following Moon’s death, Townshend wrote: “We have lost our great comedian, our supreme melodramatist, the man, who apart from being the most unpredictable and spontaneous drummer in rock, would have set himself alight if he thought it would make the audience laugh or jump out of its seats. We have lost our drummer but also our alter-ego. He drove us hard many times but his love of every one of us always ultimately came through…. We loved him and he’s gone.”
For something to help us remember Moon’s contribution to The Who–both his musicianship and his personality–here is a video featuring his isolated drum track from “Who Are You,” the title track on Moon’s final album:
“Skid row is where people are mutilated and almost dead, they’re creeping, crawling, uncared-for creatures.” - Charles Bukowksi
The future does not seem like much of a commodity inChristine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s 1990 documentary, The Best Hotel on Skid Row. The Madison Hotel, with its $8.20 a night rooms and no hot plate policy gives off an unmistakable end-of-the-line vibe, as do many of the residents appearing on camera. It’s doubtful that anyone associated with the film, from the directors and interviewees to narrator Charles Bukowski, would have predicted that, two decades later, flophouses across the country would be finding new life as flashy boutique hotels.
While several of its downtown Los Angeles neighbors have made the transition to high thread counts and sleek technological amenities, the Madison has thus far resisted the trend. Is anyone who was profiled in the film still in residence? Other than an unsubstantiated comment on YouTube alluding to one participant’s demise, their whereabouts are tellingly Google-proof.
The hotel itself has a bigger online footprint, showing up on some of the same travel-oriented websites as the Four Seasons, the Ritz, and Chateau Marmont. Potential visitors can research its standings on the Bedbug Registry, which may explain why Trip Advisor is still waiting for that first consumer-penned review. Meanwhile on Yelp, it’s pulling down five star ratings, thanks to cameos on the Rockford Files and the Replacement Killers, a Chow Yun-Fat vehicle whose director reportedly was aiming to make a Taxi Driver for the 1990s.
“Argh, you’re all amateurs in a professional universe!” roared Allen Ginsberg to a young class of aspiring poets in 1977 at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Their offense? Most of the students had failed to register for meditation instruction. The story comes to us from Steve Silberman, who was then a 19-year-old student in that classroom and a recipient of Ginsberg’s genius that summer.
Only three years earlier, in 1974, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman launched the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), in Boulder, Colorado. The Institute—founded by Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche—was modeled on ancient Buddhist learning centers in India and described by Waldman and poet Andrew Schelling as “part monastery, part college, part convention hall or alchemist’s lab.”
Ginsberg taught at Naropa until his death in 1997. The class in which he had his outburst was called “Literary History of the Beats,” at the start of which he handed his students a list called “Celestial Homework” (first page above, second and third pages here and here). Silberman describes the list thus (quoting from Ginsberg’s description):
This “celestial homework” is the reading list that Ginsberg handed out on the first day of his course as “suggestions for a quick check-out & taste of antient scriveners whose works were reflected in Beat literary style as well as specific beat pages to dig into.”
It’s a particularly Ginsberg-ian list, with a healthy mix of genres and periods, most of it poetry—by Ginsberg’s fellow beats, to be sure, but also by Melville, Dickinson, Yeats, Milton, Shelley, and several more. Sadly, it’s too late to sit at Ginsberg’s feet, but one can still find guidance from his “Celestial Homework,” and you can even listen to audio recordings from the class online too.
Silberman has done us all the great service of compiling as many free online versions of Ginsberg’s recommended texts as he could. You’ll find them all here, with author bios linked to each photo. Unfortunately, some of the links have gone dead, but with a little bit of searching, you can work your way through most of Ginsberg’s list. Silberman reports another Ginsberg epigram from his 1977 class: “Poetry is the realization of the magnificence of the actual.” The works on the “Celestial Homework,” Silberman comments, “are gates to that magnificence.”
The Philosophy section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 90 courses. Enough to give you a soup-to-nuts introduction to a timeless discipline. You can start with one of several introductory courses.
Philosophy for Beginners – iTunes – Web Video – Marianne Talbot, Oxford
The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - Multiple Formats– Peter Adamson, King’s College London
Then, once you’ve found your footing, you can head off in some amazing directions. As we mentioned many moons ago, you can access courses and lectures by modern day legends – Michel Foucault, Bertrand Russell, John Searle, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss, Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Sandel. Then you can sit back and let them introduce you to the thinking of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre and the rest of the gang. The courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web.
Explore our collection of 700 Free Courses to find topics in many other disciplines — History, Literature, Physics, Computer Science and beyond. As we like to say, it’s the most valuable single page on the web.
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In September of 1935 Paramount Pictures released a nine-minute movie remarkable in several ways. Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life is one of the earliest cinematic explorations of African-American culture for a mass audience. It features Duke Ellington and his orchestra performing his first extended composition. And perhaps most notably, it stars Billie Holiday in her first filmed performance.
The one-reel movie, directed by Fred Waller, tells the story of Ellington’s “A Rhapsody of Negro Life,” using pictures to convey the images running through the musician’s mind as he composed and performed the piece. Ellington’s “Rhapsody” has four parts: “The Laborers,” “A Triangle,” “A Hymn of Sorrow” and “Harlem Rhythm.” Holiday appears as a jilted and abused lover in “A Triangle.”
Holiday’s only previous screen appearance was as an uncredited extra in a nightclub scene in the 1933 Paul Robeson film, The Emper0r Jones. Symphony in Black was produced over a ten-month period. Holiday was only 19 when her scenes were shot. She sings Ellington’s “Saddest Tale,” a song carefully selected by the composer to fit the young singer’s style. “Saddest tale on land or sea,” begin the lyrics, “Was when my man walked out on me.” In the book Billie Holiday: A Biography, author Meg Greene calls the performance “mesmerizing”:
Symphony in Black marked an important milestone in the development of Billie Holiday, the woman and the singer. Ellington’s deft handling enabled Billie to distinguish herself from other torch singers. She did not wear her emotions on her sleeve; instead, she revealed herself gradually as the song unfolded. Hers was a carefully crafted and sophisticated performance, especially for a woman only 19 years old. This carefully woven tapestry of life and music was the origin of the persona that audiences came to identify with Billie. Other singers such as Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland may have more successfully established and cultivated an image, but Billie Holiday did it first.
Every great novel—or at least every finished novel—needs a plan. I remember well a James Joyce course I took in college, taught by a belligerent Irishman who began the first class meeting by slamming his decades-old copy of Ulysses on the table, sending clouds of dust and Post-It notes around his ears and shouting, “This is my Bible!” He proceeded over the next few months to unravel the dark mysteries of Joyce’s design, with chart after chart of floral symbology, musical motifs, Dante allusions, mythic and Catholic rewritings, and Dublin city maps. Needless to say I was intimidated.
But not every author requires the god-like foresight of Joyce. Witness, for instance, J.K. Rowling’s spreadsheet for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (top), hand-drawn on lined notebook paper. Fine, Rowling’s no Joyce, but no one can say her method didn’t yield impressive results. For a more canonically literary example, see William Faulkner’s plan for A Fable (above). Faulkner famously outlined his fiction on the walls of his Rowan Oaks study, in-between bottles of bourbon.
In sixth grade, my friend Amy Osborn’s parents took us to a screening of Annie Hall. The bedroom scenes with Carol Kane, Janet Margolin and Diane Keaton were chaste by today’s standards. The repartee was so beyond my frame of reference, it caused but little discomfort. What did me in was the two-line exchange between a cartoon Woody Allen and Snow White’s Wicked Queen concerning her period (or lack thereof). Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was our sacred text, but its most sensational subject matter—menstruation—was deeply taboo outside of my 1970′s Indiana tribe. I could have died, knowing Mr. Osborn was sitting right there. The one consolation was that my own parents weren’t.
These awkward encounters can be defining, which explains why the Tribeca Film Festival sought to ferret them out as part of its One Question series. It’s impressive that the four directors and one producer featured above decided to pursue careers in film after inadvertently sharing with their parents such tender moments as a masturbating Philip Seymour Hoffman in Todd Solondz’s seminal (pardon the pun) Happiness or the relentless defloration scene at the top of Larry Clark’s Kids.
Perhaps you can relate. If so, please spill the gory details below. Provided you’re strong enough to revisit the trauma, what was your most cringe-inducing moment at the movies with your mom or dad, or—let’s not be ageist here—your kids?
Making a movie? Need to shoot some large-scale desert scenes? You might consider taking your production to North Africa, where you’ll find not only a great many acres of sand, but will follow in the footsteps of some of the twentieth century’s highest-profile filmmakers. Just above, you see a picture of one of the many Star Wars sets still standing in Tozeur, Tunisia, 36 years after the shoot. New York photographer Rä di Martino has taken it upon herself to determine the locations and collect images of these cinematic ruins in the projects “No More Stars” and “Every World’s a Stage.” Given the surprisingly sound condition of some of these sets — that dry air must have something to do with it — I foresee an entrepreneurial opportunity in the vein of all those New Zealand Lord of the Rings fan tours.
Even if Star Wars doesn’t get you excited enough to book a trip to Tunisia, a visit to Morocco may still interest you. Di Martino’s short Petite histoire des plateaux abandonnès (Short History of Abandoned Sets) seeks out more such long-silent fake towns, fortresses, and gas stations around Ouarzazate, originally used for everything from cheap horror movies to Lawrence of Arabia. There, a group of kids recites, deadpan, scenes from the various productions that swung through town well before they were born. These surviving chunks of artifice, meant only for the camera, have found the camera again — or, rather, the camera has found them — with results that now look more interesting than many of the major films that commissioned them.
Almost every year since 1901, the Swedish Academy has apportioned one fifth of the interest from the fortune bequeathed by dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel to honor, as Nobel said in his will, “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”
Many of the greatest writers of the past 112 years have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, but there have been some glaring omissions right from the start. When Leo Tolstoy was passed over in 1901 (the prize went to the French poet Sully Prudhomme) he was so offended he refused later nominations. The list of great writers who were alive after 1901 but never received the prize is jaw-dropping. In addition to Tolstoy, it includes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.
But the Nobel committee has honored many worthy writers, and today we’ve gathered together seven speeches by seven laureates. Our choice was restricted by the limitations of what is available online in English. We have focused on the short speeches traditionally given on December 10 of every year at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm. With the exception of short excerpts from Bertrand Russell’s lecture, we have passed over the longer Nobel lectures (which typically run about 40 minutes) presented to the Swedish Academy on a different day than the banquet.
We begin above with one of the most often-quoted Nobel speeches: William Faulkner’s eloquent acceptance of the 1949 prize. There was actually no prize in literature given in 1949, but the committee decided to award that year’s medal 12 months later to Faulkner, citing his “powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” Faulkner gave his speech on December 10, 1950, in the same ceremony with Bertrand Russell. Unfortunately the audio cuts off just before the finish. To follow along and read the missing ending, click here to open the full text in a new window. Faulkner stumbles a few times during his delivery. You can listen to his smoother 1954 reading of a polished version of the speech here.
Bertrand Russell, 1950:
The British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was one of several prize-winners in literature who were primarily known for their work in other fields. (The short list includes statesman Winston Churchill and philosopher Henri Bergson.) In addition to his ground-breaking contributions to mathematics and analytic philosophy, Russell wrote many books for the general reader. In 1950 the Nobel committee cited his “varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” Above are two short audio clips from Russell’s December 11, 1950 Nobel lecture, “What Desires are Politically Important?” You can click here to open the full text in a new window.
Ernest Hemingway, 1954:
The American writer Ernest Hemingway was awarded the 1954 prize “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” Hemingway was not feeling well enough in December of 1954 to travel to Stockholm, so he asked John C. Cabot, United States Ambassador to Sweden, to deliver the speech for him. Fortunately we do have this recording from sometime that month of Hemingway reading his speech at a radio station in Havana, Cuba. You can click here to open the full text in a new window.
John Steinbeck, 1962:
The American writer John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, was awarded the Nobel in 1962 “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” To read along as you watch Steinbeck give his speech, click here to open the text in a new window.
V.S. Naipaul, 2001:
Jumping ahead from 1962 all the way to 2001, we have video of the speech given by the Trinidadian-British writer V.S. Naipaul, author of such books as In a Free State and A Bend in the River. Naipaul was cited by the Nobel committee “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” You can click here to open a text of Naipaul’s banquet speech in a new window.
Orhan Pamuk, 2006:
The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, author of such books as The Museum of Innocence and Snow, received the prize in 2006. The Nobel committee praised the Istanbul-based writer, “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” To read Pamuk’s banquet speech, click here to open the text in a new window.
Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010:
The prolific Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa, author of such novels as Conversation in the Cathedral and Death in the Andes, was cited by the Nobel committee in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” To read along with Vargas Llosa as he speaks, click here to open the text in a new window.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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