Rare 1952 Film: William Faulkner on His Native Soil in Oxford, Mississippi

in Film, Literature | May 9th, 2013

Ear­ly in his life, William Faulkn­er had an epiphany: “I dis­cov­ered that my own lit­tle postage stamp of native soil was worth writ­ing about, and that I would nev­er live long enough to exhaust it.” And so, as he told The Paris Review in 1956, “by sub­li­mat­ing the actu­al into the apoc­ryphal” Faulkn­er was able to take his home­town of Oxford, Mis­sis­sip­pi, and the sur­round­ing coun­try­side and use it to cre­ate his own imag­i­nary cos­mos. He called it Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty.

In Novem­ber of 1952, the nor­mal­ly reclu­sive Faulkn­er allowed a film crew into his seclud­ed world at Oxford to make a short doc­u­men­tary about his life. The film, shown here in five pieces, was fund­ed by the Ford Foun­da­tion and broad­cast on Decem­ber 28, 1952 on the CBS tele­vi­sion pro­gram Omnibus. The script­ed film re-enacts events from Novem­ber 1950, when Faulkn­er received the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, through the spring of 1951, when he spoke at his daugh­ter Jil­l’s high school grad­u­a­tion.

There are scenes of Faulkn­er at Rowan Oak, his ante­bel­lum house on the edge of Oxford, and at Green­field Farm, 17 miles away, where he is shown dri­ving a trac­tor and talk­ing with work­ers. Faulkn­er is also shown briefly with his wife, Estelle, and with sev­er­al promi­nent Oxford res­i­dents, includ­ing drug­gist Mac Reed, Oxford Eagle edi­tor Phil Mullen, who col­lab­o­rat­ed  with the film­mak­ers on the script, and lawyer Phil Stone, who was an ear­ly lit­er­ary men­tor and cham­pi­on of Faulkn­er. Accord­ing to Joseph Blot­ner in his biog­ra­phy Faulkn­er, the famous writer put aside his usu­al can­tan­ker­ous­ness when the film­mak­ers arrived in Oxford:

To the plea­sure of direc­tor Howard T. Mag­wood and his ten-man crew, Faulkn­er showed him­self to be a con­sid­er­ate host and an inter­est­ed actor. He even offered Mullen some advice on read­ing his lines. He was at ease when he appeared with Mac Reed, but in a scene with Phil Stone he seemed stiff and dis­tant.

The uneasi­ness between Faulkn­er and Stone may have had some­thing to do with Stone’s feel­ing (as Mullen report­ed­ly said lat­er) that Faulkn­er had come down with a bad case of “Nobelitis in the Head.” Actu­al­ly the entire film is stiff and unre­al­is­tic. It’s a bit of a shock to see Faulkn­er, a mas­ter of the nar­ra­tive form, going through the motions as a bad actor in a hor­ri­bly writ­ten sto­ry about his own life. But any lit­er­ary fan should be fas­ci­nat­ed by this rare glimpse of the mas­ter at home on his own lit­tle postage stamp of native soil.

 

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed con­tent:

Drink­ing with William Faulkn­er

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

William Faulkn­er Explains Why Writ­ing is Best Left to Scoundrels

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Five Cultural Tours of Los Angeles

in Travel | May 9th, 2013

As an Open Cul­ture read­er, you sure­ly enjoy a vast range of inter­ests, and what serves as a more robust nexus of inter­ests than the mod­ern city? Each city pro­duces an infini­tude of fas­ci­nat­ing case stud­ies in archi­tec­ture, eco­nom­ics, pol­i­tics, and social psy­chol­o­gy. But even when you exam­ine the less obvi­ous­ly city-rel­e­vant intel­lec­tu­al pur­suits — lan­guage, film, lit­er­a­ture, tech­nol­o­gy, style — count­less more con­nec­tions reveal them­selves. Because I’ve found orga­niz­ing cul­tur­al inter­ests by city so fruit­ful, I offer you here a set of resources to do with Los Ange­les, Cal­i­for­nia. These are just a few of the count­less pos­si­ble per­cep­tions of the cap­i­tal of main­stream cin­e­ma, the ter­mi­nus of mankind’s west­ward push, the cre­ator and destroy­er of new urban forms, and above all the great divider of opin­ion. Archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Reyn­er Ban­ham voic­es his own at the top of Reyn­er Ban­ham Loves Los Ange­les, a 1972 BBC tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary in which the archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an gives a per­son­al tour of the city: “I love the place with a pas­sion that goes beyond sense or rea­son.”

“They make movies here,” says CalArts pro­fes­sor Thom Ander­sen in the nar­ra­tion of Los Ange­les Plays Itself. “I live here. Some­times I think that gives me the right to crit­i­cize the way movies depict my city.” But he does much more than crit­i­cize in his video essay’s near­ly three-hour analy­sis of the roles Los Ange­les has played onscreen: as itself, as oth­er cities, and, most often, as no city in par­tic­u­lar. Chap­man Uni­ver­si­ty’s Huell Hows­er Archive col­lects the late Cal­i­for­nia-explor­er’s non­fic­tion­al video jour­neys in places like Venice Beach, the ever-ris­ing down­town, and even in a heli­copter above the city. For a sim­i­lar­ly aer­i­al per­spec­tive, but a his­tor­i­cal one, watch this 1958 footage of Hol­ly­wood from above. And for a point of view more force­ful­ly expressed, look no fur­ther than Ice Cube’s cel­e­bra­tion of Los Ange­les as mid­cen­tu­ry design mec­ca, espe­cial­ly for the work of aes­thet­ic lumi­nar­ies (and Pow­ers of Ten film­mak­ers) Charles and Ray Eames. “A lot of peo­ple think L.A. is just eye­sore after eye­sore, full of mini-malls, palm trees and bill­boards,” he says. “So what? They don’t know the L.A. I know.”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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An Animated Visualization of Every Observed Meteorite That Has Hit Earth Since 861 AD

in Animation, Science | May 9th, 2013

Car­lo Zap­poni, a data visu­al­iza­tion design­er at Nokia, has cre­at­ed a pret­ty splen­did visu­al­iza­tion of the 1,042 mete­orites that humans have wit­nessed hit­ting our plan­et since 861 AD. If you click the image above, you will see the visu­al­iza­tion in full screen mode. And if you then click on var­i­ous points along the time­line, you’ll get essen­tial data (pro­duced by The Mete­orit­i­cal Soci­ety) about each observed mete­or strike. Most are clus­tered in the 19th and 20th cen­turies. The last is the ter­ri­fy­ing rock that blast­ed through Siberia ear­li­er this year.

Note: A total of 34,513 mete­orites have hit our plan­et since 2500 BC. But the vast major­i­ty were nev­er observed. They were only lat­er found.

via The Guardian 

Oth­er Great Visu­al­iza­tions:

Per­pet­u­al Ocean: A Van Gogh-Like Visu­al­iza­tion of Our Ocean Cur­rents

Visu­al­iz­ing WiFi Sig­nals with Light

Watch a Cool and Creepy Visu­al­iza­tion of U.S. Births & Deaths in Real-Time

Stephen Hawking’s Uni­verse: A Visu­al­iza­tion of His Lec­tures with Stars & Sound

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A Theory of Justice, the Musical Imagines Philosopher John Rawls as a Time-Traveling Adventurer

in Philosophy, Theatre | May 9th, 2013

John Rawls’ 1971 book A The­o­ry of Jus­tice—with its famous illus­tra­tion of “the veil of igno­rance”—is a rig­or­ous attempt to make egal­i­tar­i­an prin­ci­ples nor­ma­tive in polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. The work remains a high water­mark for lib­er­al­ism and a mean­ing­ful chal­lenge to right-lib­er­tar­i­ans, mean­ing that it’s gen­er­al­ly tak­en seri­ous­ly by crit­ics and admir­ers alike. Well, almost…. One cadre of admir­ers, the writ­ers and pro­duc­ers of A The­o­ry of Jus­tice, the Musi­cal (trail­er above), decid­ed to have a lit­tle fun with the very pub­lic­i­ty-shy Rawls (who died in 2002), imag­in­ing him on a time-trav­el­ing adven­ture where he meets with Pla­to, Locke, Rousseau, Mill and oth­ers to draw inspi­ra­tion for his mag­num opus. Along the way, Rawls must dodge the “evil designs” of his lib­er­tar­i­an antag­o­nist Robert Noz­ick and “his objec­tivist lover, Ayn Rand” (Rand and Noz­ick were, to my knowl­edge, nev­er so involved, but the idea is amus­ing).

The far­ci­cal pro­duc­tion promis­es “a musi­cal score that cov­ers every­thing from rap bat­tles to pow­er bal­lads.” I would imag­ine that the appeal of Rawls, The Musi­cal might be rather lim­it­ed to a spe­cial sub­set of peo­ple who get the book­ish ref­er­ences and love musi­cal the­ater. But maybe that group is larg­er than I think. Since the Jan­u­ary 30th pre­mier in Oxford this year, A The­o­ry of Jus­tice, the Musi­cal—praised by philoso­pher Nigel War­bur­ton as “bril­liant: hilar­i­ous wit­ty and pro­found”—received sev­er­al five star reviews and the ini­tial the­ater run sold out a week before open­ing. But of course, that was Oxford, not New York. The show’s pro­duc­ers do plan to take the show on the road—to Lon­don, Scot­land, and the U.S. (and they are active­ly fundrais­ing; a com­plete view­ing of an Oxford per­for­mance will cost you $9.99, and oth­er groups wish­ing to per­form the show must pur­chase a license).

The wide­spread appeal of Rawls is under­stand­able giv­en that he best artic­u­lates the idea of equal­i­ty as an inher­ent­ly eth­i­cal val­ue in polit­i­cal life. His is a posi­tion that revis­es so much clas­si­cal polit­i­cal the­o­ry and informs or infu­ri­ates so many cur­rent polit­i­cal com­bat­ants. While oppo­nents of dis­trib­u­tive jus­tice will no doubt find rea­sons to dis­agree with Rawls on prin­ci­ple, care­ful crit­i­cal thinkers will at least con­sid­er the argu­ments before mak­ing objec­tions. But if you don’t have time to read all five-hun­dred plus pages of Rawls’ mas­ter­work, you could cer­tain­ly do worse than watch Harvard’s Michael Sandel explain Rawls’ the­o­ries in his lec­ture above (fea­tur­ing some smart stu­dent crit­ics of Rawls). The lec­ture is eighth in a course called “Jus­tice: What’s the Right Thing To Do,” which was released by edX as a MOOC this past March.

Below you can find the sound­track for the Lon­don pro­duc­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michael Sandel’s Famous Har­vard Course on Jus­tice Launch­es as a MOOC on Tues­day

Alain de Bot­ton Pro­pos­es a Kinder, Gen­tler Phi­los­o­phy of Suc­cess

Mike Wal­lace Inter­views Ayn Rand (1959)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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Tom Waits Sings and Tells Stories in Tom Waits: A Day in Vienna, a 1979 Austrian Film

in Film, Music | May 8th, 2013

The film begins at a derelict gas sta­tion. A paper sign, peel­ing from the wall, warns in Ger­man that open flames and smok­ing are dan­ger­ous and strict­ly for­bid­den. In walks Tom Waits, smok­ing a cig­a­rette.

“This reminds me of a place I used to work in Nation­al City, Cal­i­for­nia, called Spot­co Self Ser­vice,” Waits says as he leans against a pump. “I worked for a gen­tle­man named Charles Spot­co. I was always late for work. I used to stay out at night. I’d come drag­ging to work, used to get there about ten-thir­ty in the morn­ing. He’d chew me out and scream at me for being late. He always said I’d nev­er amount to noth­ing. I nev­er thought I’d be stand­ing in a gas sta­tion in Vien­na Aus­tria. If I’d of told him that one day, Spot­co, I’ll be lean­ing on a gas pump at a gas sta­tion in Vien­na Aus­tria, he would have said you got­ta be out of your mind.”

The scene is from Tom Waits: A Day in Vien­na, a half-hour Aus­tri­an TV film shot on April 19, 1979, and shown above in its entire­ty. Film­mak­ers Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossach­er approached Waits when he arrived in Vien­na on a short Euro­pean tour, accord­ing to Bar­ney Hoskyns in Low­side of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits. “He came in from Ams­ter­dam say­ing he had­n’t slept all night, but he agreed on the spot to let us film him,” Rossach­er told Hoskyns. “He did­n’t want to do a prop­er inter­view but instead he want­ed to tell sto­ries.”

Dolezal and Rossach­er drove Waits to the old gas sta­tion and lat­er to a Greek cafe, where he told a com­ic sto­ry about a sax­o­phone play­er. At the Konz­erthaus that night they filmed Waits and his band per­form­ing “Sweet Lit­tle Bul­let From a Pret­ty Blue Gun,” “Shake, Rat­tle and Roll” and “Christ­mas Card from a Hook­er in Min­neapo­lis.” Back­stage before the encore, Waits is shown pac­ing back and forth, singing “When the Saints Go March­ing In.” After­ward, in a lounge, he sits down at a piano and plays a few bars of “I Can’t Wait to Get Off Work” before danc­ing with a bar girl and retir­ing for the night.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Tom Waits and Kei­th Richards Sing Sea Song “Shenan­doah” for New Pirate-Themed CD: Lis­ten Online

Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

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David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech “This is Water” Visualized in a Short Film

in Graduation Speech, Life, Literature | May 8th, 2013

David Fos­ter Wal­lace was a hyper-anx­ious chron­i­cler of the minute details of a cer­tain kind of upper-mid­dle-class Amer­i­can life. In his hands, it took on some­times lumi­nous, some­times jaun­diced qual­i­ties. Wal­lace was also some­thing of a meta­physi­cian: reflec­tive teacher, wise-beyond-his-years thinker, and (trag­i­cal­ly in hind­sight) quite self-dep­re­cat­ing lit­er­ary super­star. In the lat­ter capac­i­ty, he was often called on to per­form the duties of a docent, admin­is­ter­ing com­mence­ment speech­es, for exam­ple, which he did for the grad­u­at­ing class of Keny­on in 2005.

He began with a sto­ry: two young fish meet an old­er fish, who asks them “How’s the water?” The younger fish look at each oth­er and say, “What the hell is water?” Fos­ter Wal­lace explains the sto­ry this way:

The point of the fish sto­ry is mere­ly that the most obvi­ous, impor­tant real­i­ties are often the ones that are hard­est to see and talk about. Stat­ed as an Eng­lish sen­tence, of course, this is just a banal plat­i­tude, but the fact is that in the day to day trench­es of adult exis­tence, banal plat­i­tudes can have a life or death impor­tance, or so I wish to sug­gest to you on this dry and love­ly morn­ing.

Fos­ter Wal­lace acknowl­edges that the anec­dote is a cliché of the genre of com­mence­ment speech­es. He fol­lows it up by chal­leng­ing, then re-affirm­ing, anoth­er cliché: that the pur­pose of a lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion is to “teach you how to think.” The whole speech is well worth hear­ing.

In the video above, “This is Water,” The Glos­sary—“fine pur­vey­ors of stim­u­lat­ing videograms”—take an abridged ver­sion of the orig­i­nal audio record­ing and set it to a series of provoca­tive images. In their inter­pre­ta­tion, Fos­ter Wallace’s speech takes on the kind of mid­dle-class neu­ro­sis of David Fincher’s real­iza­tion of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.

It’s a dystopi­an vision of post-grad life that brings vivid clar­i­ty to one of my men­tors’ pieces of advice: “There are two worst things: One, you don’t get a job. Two, you get a job.” Or one could always quote Mor­ris­sey: “I was look­ing for a job, and then I found a job. And heav­en knows I’m mis­er­able now.” I still haven’t fig­ured out what’s worse. I hope some of those Keny­on grads have.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

David Fos­ter Wal­lace: The Big, Uncut Inter­view (2003)

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in Eng­lish

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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Celebrate Saul Bass’ 93rd Birthday with an Animated Google Doodle

in Design, Google | May 8th, 2013

When it comes to title design, no one did it bet­ter than Saul Bass (1920–1996). Dur­ing his long career in Hol­ly­wood, Bass designed sequences for Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Gold­en Arm, Scorsese’s Good­fel­las and Cape Fear, Kubrick’s Spar­ta­cus, and sev­er­al clas­sic films by Alfred Hitch­cock. And that’s just begin­ning to scratch the sur­face. (You can delve into Bass’ oth­er cre­ative work via the links below.)

Today, Google is cel­e­brat­ing what would have been Bass’ 93rd birth­day with an ani­mat­ed doo­dle (above). Accord­ing to Metafil­ter, the doo­dle “pays homage to Bass’ visu­al work on Psy­cho, The Man With The Gold­en Arm, Spar­ta­cus, West Side Sto­ry,Ver­ti­go, North by North­west, Anato­my of a Mur­der, and Around the World in 80 Days.” It’s also set to Dave Brubeck­’s 1961 tune, “Unsquare Dance.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Saul Bass’ Advice for Design­ers: Learn to Draw, and Cre­ate Beau­ty Even If Nobody Else Cares

Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short Pon­ders Why Man Cre­ates

Saul Bass Gives Ma Bell a Com­plete Makeover, 1969

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Steven Soderbergh Writes Twitter Novella After His Retirement From Filmmaking

in Film, Literature, Twitter | May 8th, 2013

How does one read Twit­ter lit­er­a­ture? Your thoughts are as good as mine. I sup­pose I’ll have to learn or end up in the ash heap of old-timey turn­ers of pages. Because Twit Lit is upon us, man­i­fest­ed by Jen­nifer Egan and now, under the twit­ter han­dle “Bitchu­a­tion,” by mer­cu­r­ial film­mak­er Steven Soder­bergh. Hav­ing announced his retire­ment from film­mak­ing in 2011, Soder­bergh made anoth­er announce­ment at the San Fran­cis­co Film Fes­ti­val on the State of Cin­e­ma (video above, tran­script here). The fol­low­ing day, Soderbergh’s Twit­ter novel­la Glue began with the lacon­ic April 28 tweet “I will now attempt to tweet a novel­la called GLUE.”

twitlit

Some unique fea­tures of Twit Lit: Soder­bergh can twit­pic an estab­lish­ing shot—which he does, of Ams­ter­dam—along with pics of oth­er loca­tions (or just vague­ly sug­ges­tive images). The indi­vid­ual tweets often read like Horse ebooks absur­di­ties. He’s up to Chap­ter Four­teen now. The lat­er tweets repli­cate screen­play dia­logue, with copi­ous inser­tions of BEAT to sig­ni­fy dra­mat­ic paus­es. Tak­en togeth­er, I sup­pose there’s coher­ence, though as I admit­ted above, I have not mas­tered the abil­i­ty to pull tweets togeth­er into longer text in my mind, Twit­ter being where I go when my atten­tion span is spent.

I leave it to savvi­er, more patient read­ers to judge the suc­cess of Soderbergh’s attempt. It may suf­fice to say that his pes­simism about the state of film does not apply to Twit­ter Lit. Or maybe he’s just pass­ing time before he makes movies again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read, Hear, and See Tweet­ed Four Sto­ries by Jen­nifer Egan, Author of A Vis­it from the Goon Squad

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness 

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