Patti Smith Sings “You Light Up My Life” with Composer Joe Brooks on 1979 Show Kids Are People Too

in Music, Television | October 17th, 2013

Maybe the Yo Gab­ba Gab­ba of its day, the Sun­day morn­ing kids’ show Kids are Peo­ple Too ran from 1978 to 1982, dur­ing which time it attract­ed such guests as Cheap Trick and KISS to its stu­dio. KISS was vir­tu­al­ly a car­toon already, and Cheap Trick def­i­nite­ly had its kid-friend­ly ele­ments, but one of the show’s musi­cal guests prob­a­bly did­n’t reach into a lot kids’ bed­rooms with her blas­phe­mous take on Van Morrison’s “Glo­ria,” her “Hey Joe / Piss Fac­to­ry,” or her spo­ken word open let­ter to Pat­ty Hearst. But the lengthy Q&A with Pat­ti Smith before she sings, with host Michael Young prompt­ing ques­tions from excit­ed audi­ence mem­bers, leaves me with the impres­sion that she was more pop­u­lar with Amer­i­ca’s youth than I thought.

Maybe it was her 1978 hit “Because the Night,” writ­ten by Bruce Spring­steen, that tempt­ed Kids are Peo­ple Too’s pro­duc­ers to invite Smith on the show to sing anoth­er cov­er, “You Light Up My Life,” with com­pos­er Joe Brooks. It’s a pret­ty weird moment in pop cul­ture his­to­ry, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the strange turns both musi­cians’ lives took. Smith went on to win a Nation­al Book Award and remains vital and cre­ative. Brooks went on to a very sor­did, igno­min­ious end. But here, they cross paths after Brooks won an Oscar for his song and Smith had recov­ered from a dis­as­trous fall from the stage and reboot­ed her career in a more pop direc­tion. Despite her greater mass appeal, Young still assumes that Pat­ti Smith means one thing. He even asks the kids in the stu­dio audi­ence, “didn’t you say Pat­ti Smith, punk rock, right?” The kids all yell back, “Yeah!” Hip kids or very effec­tive teleprompter? You be the judge.

*Note, an ear­li­er ver­sion of this post iden­ti­fied the host as Bob McAl­lis­ter and stat­ed that “Hearst went on to win a Nation­al Book Award.” As some read­ers have point­ed out, the host was Michael Young, and it was Smith, of course, not Pat­ty Hearst, who won the Nation­al Book Award in 2010.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Pat­ti Smith Give Two Dra­mat­ic Read­ings of Allen Ginsberg’s “Foot­note to Howl”

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

Pat­ti Smith Shares William S. Bur­roughs’ Advice for Writ­ers and Artists

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Apocalypse Now’s “Ride of the Valkyries” Attack: The Anatomy of a Classic Scene

in Film | October 17th, 2013

“I love the smell of napalm in the morn­ing.” There we have undoubt­ed­ly the most famous quote of what must count as one of Robert Duval­l’s finest per­for­mances, and sure­ly his most sur­pris­ing: that of Lieu­tenant Colonel Bill Kil­go­re in Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la’s Apoc­a­lypse Now. As you’ll no doubt recall — and if you don’t recall it, min­i­mize your brows­er for a few hours and make your way to a screen­ing, or at least watch it online — Cap­tain Ben­jamin Willard’s Con­ra­di­an boat jour­ney into the Viet­nam War’s dark heart hits a snag fair­ly ear­ly in the pic­ture: they need to pass through a coastal area under tight Viet Cong con­trol.

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Kil­go­re, ini­tial­ly reluc­tant to call in his heli­copters to back up Willard’s dubi­ous mis­sion, changes his mind when he real­izes that Willard counts among his own small crew famed pro­fes­sion­al surfer Lance B. John­son. The Lieu­tenant Colonel, it turns out, loves to surf. He also loves to blast Richard Wag­n­er’s “Ride of the Valkyries” from heli­copter-mount­ed speak­ers. “It scares the hell out of the slopes,” he explains. “My boys love it.”

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At the top, you can watch the fruits of Willard and Kil­go­re’s coop­er­a­tion, an oper­at­ic napalm airstrike that takes the entire beach: not an easy thing to accom­plish, and cer­tain­ly not an easy thing to film. As any­one acquaint­ed with the mak­ing of Apoc­a­lypse Now has heard, the pro­duc­tion tend­ed to turn as com­pli­cat­ed, con­fus­ing, and per­ilous as the Viet­nam War itself, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly for lack of plan­ning.

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At Empire, you can view the scene’s orig­i­nal sto­ry­boards and read along­side them a brief inter­view with Doug Clay­bourne, who on the film had the envi­able title of Heli­copter Wran­gler. Arriv­ing to the Philip­pines-based shoot (in “the mid­dle of nowhere”), Clay­bourne found Cop­po­la on the beach with a bull­horn, Mar­tin Sheen just replac­ing Har­vey Kei­t­el in the role of Willard, chop­pers bor­rowed from Pres­i­dent Fer­di­nand Mar­cos (who peri­od­i­cal­ly took them back to use against insur­rec­tions else­where), a com­ing typhoon, and “a lot of chaos.”

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But Cop­po­la, Clay­bourne, and the rest of the team saw it through, achiev­ing results even more strik­ing, in moments, than these sto­ry­boards sug­gest. As for the unflap­pable Kil­go­re, well, we all remem­ber him rush­ing to catch a tan­ta­liz­ing wave even before the fight­ing sub­sides. After all, to quote his sec­ond-most famous line, “Char­lie don’t surf!”

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Star in Japan­ese Whisky Com­mer­cials (1980)

Demen­tia 13: The Film That Took Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la From Schlock­ster to Auteur

Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Hand­writ­ten Cast­ing Notes for The God­fa­ther

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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How Philip K. Dick Disdained American Anti-Intellectualism and Found His Inspiration in Flaubert, Stendhal & Balzac

in Literature, Sci Fi, Writing | October 17th, 2013

Despite some of the stranger cir­cum­stances of Philip K. Dick’s life, his rep­u­ta­tion as a para­noid guru is far bet­ter deserved by oth­er sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers who lost touch with real­i­ty. Dick was a seri­ous thinker and writer before pop cul­ture made him a prophet. Jonathan Letham wrote of him, “Dick wasn’t a leg­end and he wasn’t mad. He lived among us and was a genius.” It’s a fash­ion­able opin­ion these days, but his genius went most­ly unrec­og­nized in his lifetime—at least in his home country—except among a sub­set of sci-fi read­ers. But Dick con­sid­ered him­self a lit­er­ary writer. He left the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia after less than a semes­ter, but the “con­sum­mate auto­di­dact” read wide­ly and deeply, favor­ing the giants of Euro­pean phi­los­o­phy, the­ol­o­gy, and lit­er­a­ture. For this rea­son, Dick sus­pect­ed that his tepid recep­tion in the U.S., by com­par­i­son with the warm regard of the French, showed a “flawed” anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism in Amer­i­cans that pre­vent­ed them from appre­ci­at­ing his work. In the 1977 edit­ed inter­view above with Dick in France, you can hear him lay out his the­o­ry in detail, offer­ing insights along the way into his lit­er­ary edu­ca­tion and influ­ences.

Dick iden­ti­fies two strains of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism in the U.S. The first, he says, pre­vents Amer­i­can read­ers from appre­ci­at­ing “nov­els of ideas.” Sci­ence fic­tion, he says, “is essen­tial­ly the field of ideas. And the anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism of Amer­i­cans pro­hibits their inter­est in imag­i­na­tive ideas and inter­est­ing con­cepts.”

I don’t find Dick par­tic­u­lar­ly per­sua­sive here, but I live in a time when he has been ful­ly embraced, if only in adap­ta­tion. Dick’s more spe­cif­ic take on what may be a root cause for Amer­i­cans’ lack of curios­i­ty has to do with the read­ing habits of Amer­i­cans.

There’s anoth­er facet as regards my par­tic­u­lar work say com­pared to oth­er sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers. I grew up in Berke­ley and my edu­ca­tion was not lim­it­ed at all to read­ing oth­er sci­ence fic­tion nov­els pre­ced­ing my own, such as van Vogt, or Hein­lein, or peo­ple of that kind… Pad­gett, and so on…. Brad­bury. What I read, because it’s a uni­ver­si­ty city,  was Flaubert, Stend­hal, Balzac… Proust, and the Russ­ian nov­el­ists influ­enced by the French. Tur­genev. And I even read Japan­ese nov­els, mod­ern Japan­ese nov­els, nov­el­ists who were influ­enced by the French real­is­tic writ­ers.

Dick says his “slice of life” nov­els were well received in France because he based them on 19th French real­ist nov­els. His favorite, he tells the inter­view­er, were Madame Bovary and The Red and the Black, as well as Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons — all found in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. Per­haps a lit­tle self-impor­tant­ly, in his par­tic­u­lar con­cep­tion of him­self as a lit­er­ary writer, Dick dis­tances him­self from oth­er Amer­i­can sci­ence fic­tion authors, whom he alleges share the Amer­i­can reader’s anti-intel­lec­tu­al propen­si­ties. “I think this applies to me more than oth­er Amer­i­can sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers,” says Dick, “In fact, I think that it’s a great flaw in Amer­i­can sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers, and their read­ers, that they are insu­lat­ed from the great lit­er­a­ture of the world.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Robert Crumb Illus­trates Philip K. Dick’s Infa­mous, Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Meet­ing with God (1974)

The Penul­ti­mate Truth About Philip K. Dick: Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Mys­te­ri­ous Uni­verse of PKD

Free Philip K. Dick: Down­load 13 Great Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ries

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Best Writing Advice Pico Iyer Ever Received

in Writing | October 17th, 2013

Iyer

One can work with lan­guage all day, I have found—write, teach, blog and tweet incessantly—and still suc­cumb to all the worst habits of lazy writ­ers: indulging strings of clichés and abstrac­tions, mak­ing it impos­si­ble for a read­er to, as they say, “locate her­self” in time and space. Trav­el writer and essay­ist Pico Iyer found this out on the job. Though he had writ­ten his way through grad­u­ate school and the pages of Time mag­a­zine, he still need­ed to hear the advice of his edi­tor at Knopf, Charles Elliott. “The read­er wants to trav­el beside you,” said Elliott, “look­ing over your shoul­der.”

Such a sim­ple notion. Essen­tial even. But Elliott’s advice is not lim­it­ed to the dog­ma of “show, don’t tell” (maybe a lim­it­ed way to think of writ­ing). More point­ed­ly he stress­es the con­nec­tion of abstract ideas to con­crete, spe­cif­ic descrip­tions that anchor events to a real­i­ty out­side the author’s head, one the read­er wants see, hear, touch, etc. The “best writ­ing advice” Iyer ever received is a use­ful pre­cept espe­cial­ly, I think, for peo­ple who write all of the time, and who need to be remind­ed, like Iyer, to keep it fresh. Read his full descrip­tion at The Amer­i­can Schol­ar.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Toni Mor­ri­son Dis­pens­es Writ­ing Wis­dom in 1993 Paris Review Inter­view

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch the Very First Trailers for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back & Return of the Jedi (1976–83)

in Film | October 16th, 2013

What with all that has, over the past 36 years, grown out of it — sequels, pre­quels, toys, nov­els, radio pro­duc­tions, video games, LEGO sets, LEGO set-themed video games, con­ven­tions, PhD the­ses, and an entire uni­verse of con­tent besides — we can only with dif­fi­cul­ty remem­ber how Star Wars began. The whole thing came pre­ced­ed by the promise of noth­ing grander, more pro­found, or minu­tia-packed than a rol­lick­ing myth­ic space opera, and above, we have a reminder of that fact in the form of the first film’s orig­i­nal teas­er trail­er. “Some­where in space, this may all be hap­pen­ing right now,” intones its faint­ly haunt­ing nar­ra­tor. “The sto­ry of a boy, a girl, and a uni­verse. It’s a big, sprawl­ing saga of rebel­lion and romance. It’s a spec­ta­cle light-years ahead of its time. It’s an epic of heroes and vil­lains and aliens from a thou­sand worlds. Star Wars: a bil­lion years in the mak­ing… and it’s com­ing to your galaxy this sum­mer.”

Since noth­ing suits Star Wars quite like com­pletism, we’ve also includ­ed the teasers for the rest of the orig­i­nal tril­o­gy: The Empire Strikes Back, just above, and Return of the Jedi, below. “In the con­tin­u­a­tion of the Star Wars saga,” booms the more tra­di­tion­al voice-over about the sec­ond film over hand-drawn imagery of its scenes, “the Empire strikes back, and Luke, Han, and Leia must con­front its awe­some might. In the course of the odyssey, they trav­el with their faith­ful friends, droids and wook­iees, to exot­ic worlds where they meet new alien crea­tures and evil machines, cul­mi­nat­ing in an awe­some con­fronta­tion between Luke Sky­walk­er and the mas­ter of the dark side of the Force, Darth Vad­er.” By 1983, the time of the third pic­ture, then titled Revenge of the Jedi, the series had amassed such a fol­low­ing that the nar­ra­tor need­ed only rat­tle off the famil­iar heroes, vil­lains, and var­i­ous space crit­ters we’d encounter once again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Revis­its Aban­doned Movie Sets for Star Wars and Oth­er Clas­sic Films in North Africa

Star Wars Uncut: The Epic Fan Film

Star Wars as Silent Film

Star Wars Gets Dubbed into Nava­jo: a Fun Way to Pre­serve and Teach a Fad­ing Lan­guage

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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75 Years of Superman in 2 Minutes

in Animation, Sci Fi | October 16th, 2013

As we told you this sum­mer, Super­man is cel­e­brat­ing his 75th Anniver­sary this year. And to help com­mem­o­rate this mile­stone, “Man of Steel direc­tor Zack Sny­der teamed up with artist and ani­ma­tor extra­or­di­naire Bruce Timm to cre­ate a two-minute short that traces the Man of Steel’s his­to­ry from Superman’s debut on the cov­er of 1938’s Action Comics #1 all the way to Hen­ry Cav­ill in Man of Steel.” After you watch the video, you’ll want to head over to DC Comics, where they’ve cre­at­ed a long list of anno­ta­tions that explain the some­times sub­tle ref­er­ences in the short. You’ll also want to revis­it our post where we fea­tured Super­man (or The Mad Sci­en­tist), the 1941 film that marked Super­man’s first appear­ance on the big screen. Plus you can lis­ten to the Adven­tures of Super­man radio dra­ma that aired between 1938 and 1951. Enjoy the trib­ute.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cel­e­brate Superman’s 75th Anniver­sary by Enjoy­ing the Orig­i­nal Super­man Car­toon and Radio Show

The Mechan­i­cal Mon­sters: Sem­i­nal Super­man Ani­mat­ed Film from 1941 (by Maria Popo­va)

A Look Inside Mel Blanc’s Throat as He Per­forms the Voic­es of Bugs Bun­ny and Oth­er Car­toon Leg­ends

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Vice Meets Up with Superstar Communist Cultural Theorist Slavoj Žižek

in Film, Philosophy | October 16th, 2013

I can pop open a copy of Slavoj Žižek’s Inter­ro­gat­ing the Real to a ran­dom page and I am sud­den­ly ping-pong­ing from cri­tique of Kant, to a high-five for the “vul­gar sen­ti­men­tal” lit­er­ary kitsch of today, to “the tra­di­tion of amour cour­tois,” to “a com­plete­ly unread­able” nov­el called Inde­cent Obses­sion, all with­in the space of four sen­tences. I may not have any earth­ly idea what to make of this con­nect-the-dots, but I want to know what it means. I can look over at the shelf and see on it a vol­ume called The Mon­stros­i­ty of Christ, a respect­ful yet tena­cious dia­logue-slash-debate on Chris­tian­i­ty between dialec­ti­cal mate­ri­al­ist Žižek and “rad­i­cal ortho­dox” the­olo­gian John Mil­bank. Just in this casu­al, cur­so­ry glance, I might con­clude: this is no cranky vil­lage athe­ist (or Marx­ist as the case may be). This is a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic Marx­ist the­o­rist of breadth. And I haven’t even touched on his exten­sive engage­ment with Hol­ly­wood film.

It is this mag­nan­i­mous, play­ful, and hyper-engaged side of Žižek—that and his unflag­ging sense of humor and high­ly vis­i­ble pub­lic persona—that makes him seem approach­able. Even if, as the inter­view­er in the Vice encounter with Žižek above says, “most of [his books] remain impen­e­tra­ble” to many read­ers, he is undoubt­ed­ly “the most broad­ly pop­u­lar anti-cap­i­tal­ist philoso­pher work­ing today.” The occa­sion for the inter­view: a 2012 doc­u­men­tary film star­ring Žižek called The Pervert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy, which opens Novem­ber 1st in the U.S.. Direct­ed by Sophie Fiennes and a fol­low-up to 2006’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma, the film has Žižek deploy his rapid-fire ref­er­enc­ing abil­i­ty to “explain why the bulk of us remain enslaved to cap­i­tal­ist pow­er struc­tures.” His mate­r­i­al, as with The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma, is once again clas­sic Hol­ly­wood films like Full Met­al Jack­et, The Searchers, Taxi Dri­ver, The Sound of Music, and The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ. Žižek even takes on such recent, less clas­sic, block­busters as I Am Leg­end and The Dark Knight. (Some­thing cov­ered in our recent post.) In the inter­view above, staged in Žižek’s cozy Sloven­ian flat, see the philoso­pher in typ­i­cal­ly ani­mat­ed style poke fun at him­self as he dis­cuss­es the newest film’s inten­tions, expands on his rev­o­lu­tion­ary analy­ses, and ges­tures mani­a­cal­ly about the apart­ment while offer­ing his guest a “f*cking fruit juice.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy Decodes The Dark Knight and They Live

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)

A Shirt­less Slavoj Žižek Explains the Pur­pose of Phi­los­o­phy from the Com­fort of His Bed

Žižek!: 2005 Doc­u­men­tary Reveals the “Aca­d­e­m­ic Rock Star” and “Mon­ster” of a Man

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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MOOC Providers Take Flight in Britain and Germany: Introducing Future Learn and Iversity

in MOOCs, Online Courses | October 16th, 2013

They may be a lit­tle late to the MOOC par­ty, but two new­ly-launched Euro­pean open course plat­forms might still be able to carve out a niche.

Cours­era and edX, the two main play­ers in the US at this point, have been up and run­ning for almost 18 months. And although both ven­tures have a long list of inter­na­tion­al part­ners, the ris­ing cost of high­er edu­ca­tion is build­ing inter­est in MOOCs in Europe and the UK. The founders of new Euro­pean plat­forms  — Future Learn in the UK, and iver­si­ty in Ger­many — are bet­ting they can still make head­way in an increas­ing­ly crowd­ed mar­ket.

A sub­sidiary of the British Open Uni­ver­si­ty, Future Learn is in its beta stage, but it’s already boast­ing part­ner­ships with uni­ver­si­ties across Britain, Ire­land, and Aus­tralia. And come this Novem­ber, it will be rolling out cours­es across mul­ti­ple dis­ci­plines. Take for exam­ple:

Mean­while Berlin-based start­up iver­si­ty recent­ly relaunched itself as a MOOC plat­form. This week, iversity’s first six cours­es begin. Four are in Ger­man and two are in Eng­lish: Con­tem­po­rary Archi­tec­ture and Dark Mat­ter in Galax­ies. A total of 115,000 stu­dents are cur­rent­ly enrolled.

Future Learn and iver­si­ty both seem to be aimed at audi­ences who are rel­a­tive­ly new to the MOOC con­cept. Both sites take care to explain what MOOCs are in very sim­ple terms—which may be a smart strat­e­gy for busi­ness­es set­ting out to con­vince Europe and Britain that the MOOC trend is for real.

You can find all cours­es by Future Learn and iver­si­ty list­ed in our big col­lec­tion of 600+ MOOCs from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs) Go Inter­na­tion­al

625 Free MOOCs from Great Uni­ver­si­ties (Many Offer­ing Cer­tifi­cates)

The Big Prob­lem for MOOCs Visu­al­ized

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. 

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