Alfred Hitchcock would have celebrated his 114th birthday today. And, to mark the occasion, The Guardian has created a big infographic that delves into the themes and motifs that Hitchcock obsessed over in his many films. Above, we have a segment showing the way Hitchcock characters die, and the number of people who die according to particular methods. The best part is that you can download the infographic for free online.
Now time for us to dish up our favorite Hitchcock material found on the web. The best of the best:
Next time the credits are rolling, stick around so you can educate your fellow audience members on what exactly a gaffer does.
This is but one of the mysteries addressed in Who’s Who on a Movie Crew, a campy but undeniably informative primer on film set responsibilities and hierarchies. Some job details get glossed over — grips have far more to keep track of than can ever fit in a rhyming couplet — but it’s in keeping with the deliberately anachronistic animation style and equipment. The breezy style makes for appropriate viewing for all ages. Hundreds of starry-eyed youngsters (and their parents) stand to benefit.
Honey, are you sure you want to be a production assistant?
More in-depth, non-rhyming explanations of the various roles can be found on Vimeo’s Video School. Ditto Producer Christine Vachon’s dishy how-to / memoir A Killer Life, which goes into key positions that failed to make the Video School cut, such as parking manager and caterer (when you’re starving and bored, there’s no one who’s greater-er….)
Ayun Halliday appears as the least believable female cop in NYC in an upcoming short adaption of Italo Calvino’s The Man Who Only Came Out at Night. Follow her at @AyunHalliday.
Cormac McCarthy has been—as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, dubbed him—a “disciple of William Faulkner.” He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I’d always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well. But in his very rare 2008 televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy cites two other antecedents: James Joyce and forgotten novelist MacKinlay Kantor, whose Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Joyce’s influence dominates, and in discussion of punctuation, McCarthy stresses that his minimalist approach works in the interest of maximum clarity. Speaking of Joyce, he says,
James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.
So what “weird little marks” does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief summary of his stated rules for punctuation:
1. Quotation Marks:
McCarthy doesn’t use ’em. In his Oprah interview, he says MacKinlay Kantor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stresses that this way of writing dialogue requires particular deliberation. Speaking of writers who have imitated him, he says, “You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks, and write in such a way as to guide people as to who’s speaking.” Otherwise, confusion reigns.
2. Colons and semicolons:
Careful McCarthy reader Oprah says she “saw a colon once” in McCarthy’s prose, but she never encountered a semicolon. McCarthy confirms: “No semicolons.”
Of the colon, he says: “You can use a colon, if you’re getting ready to give a list of something that follows from what you just said. Like, these are the reasons.” This is a specific occasion that does not present itself often. The colon, one might say, genuflects to a very specific logical development, enumeration. McCarthy deems most other punctuation uses needless.
3. All other punctuation:
Aside from his restrictive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his stylistic convictions with simplicity: “I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.” It’s a discipline he learned first in a college English class, where he worked to simplify 18th century essays for a textbook the professor was editing. Early modern English is notoriously cluttered with confounding punctuation, which did not become standardized until comparatively recently.
McCarthy, enamored of the prose style of the Neoclassical English writers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semicolons, remembers paring down an essay “by Swift or something” and hearing his professor say, “this is very good, this is exactly what’s needed.” Encouraged, he continued to simplify, working, he says to Oprah, “to make it easier, not to make it harder” to decipher his prose. For those who find McCarthy sometimes maddeningly opaque, this statement of intent may not help clarify things much. But lovers of his work may find renewed appreciation for his streamlined syntax.
The outspoken, ragged-edged poet and novelist Charles Bukowski entered our world 93 years ago this Friday, and presumably began making trouble immediately. HarperCollins marks the occasion a bit early this year by releasing today eight Bukowski audiobooks, the first of their kind. (Sign up for a Free Trial with Audible.com and you can get one for free.) Alas, Bukowski didn’t live quite long enough to commit Post Office, South of No North, Factotum, Women, Ham on Rye, Hot Water Music, Hollywood, and Pulp to tape himself. ”
It would be Bukowski himself reading here, if the technology had advanced quickly enough,” Galleycat quotes publisher Daniel Halpern as saying, “but his voice rings clear and deep in these renditions – and from them, the genius of Bukowski flows forth.” Whether or not you plan to purchase these new audiobooks, we offer you here a dose of Bukowski out loud.
At the top you’ll find one of Bukowski’s own readings, “The Secret of My Endurance,” a poem that appeared in Dangling In The Tournefortia(1982). Down below you can hear Bukowski’s “Nirvana” as read by Tom Waits, who possesses a voice famously evocative of unforgiving American life, one that perhaps sounds more like that of a Bukowski poem than Bukowski’s own. And if you missed our earlier post featuring Waits’ interpretation of “The Laughing Heart (middle),” what more suitable occasion could you have to circle back and heed its battered yet optimistic guidance: “Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.”
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One of my favorite songs comes from the Quiet Beatle, George Harrison. A tune that can rival anything from the Lennon/McCartney songbook, Here Comes the Sun was written in 1969, during a fairly bleak time. Harrison sets the scene is his 1980 book, I, Me, Mine. He recalls:
“Here Comes the Sun” was written at the time when Apple [the Beatles’ record label] was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘sign that’. Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote “Here Comes the Sun.”
It’s a song about getting through the darkness — personal, professional, seasonal, etc. And it’s simply a perfect pick for the flashmob performance you’ll witness above. Unlike so many other feel-good flashmob performances staged in Europe (see below), this one takes place in a dreary unemployment office in Spain (Madrid, to be precise) where unemployment hovers around 26% and homelessness is on the rise. It doesn’t try to sugarcoat life in Spain. It just provides a little ray of hope.
Soon after I started driving, back in high school, I got a mobile phone capable of SMS messaging. As with any technology not yet widespread, it then seemed more novelty than convenience; I hardly knew anybody else with a cellphone, much less with one capable of receiving my messages. But in the intervening dozen years, everyone started texting, and the practice turned from oddity into near-necessity, no matter the time, no matter the place.
Now, having taken for granted the ability to instantly send short messages across the city, country, or world to one another, society has, inevitably, begun to focus on the associated dangers of texting. But few of us have thought quite as hard about them as has Werner Herzog, director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and now a documentary against texting while driving. But don’t people already know the dangers? Haven’t public service announcements cautioned them not to do it, and stiff, fee-threatening laws gone on the books across America?
Judging by the sudden popularity of Herzog’s new 35-minute film From One Second to the Next, sponsored by cell service provider AT&T, a German New Wave luminary’s words carry more weight. “I’m not a participant of texting and driving — or texting at all,” many have already quoted him as saying, “but I see there’s something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.” Despite not having driven regularly since high school, I do on my rare occasions at the wheel feel that strangely strong temptation to text in motion. Having watched Herzog’s unblinking take on the real-life consequences of doing so — unpayably high medical bills at best, paralysis and death at worst — I don’t see myself giving in next time. Whether or not it similarly effects the students of the 40,000 schools in which it will screen, it marks a vast improvement upon all the murky, heavy-handed cautionary videos I remember from my own driver’s ed days. Perhaps what Herzog did for Bad Lieutenant, he should now do for that classroom classic Red Asphalt.
You can find From One Second to the Next in our collection of 550 Free Movies Online.
The song was written especially for Warwick. David’s lyrics are about a woman’s daily thoughts of her man, who is away in Vietnam. Bacharach arranged and produced the original recording in April of 1966, but was unhappy with the result. “I thought I blew it,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1998. “The tempo seemed too fast. I never wanted the record to come out. So what happens? They put out the record and it was a huge hit. I was wrong.” The song was released over Bacharach’s objections in October, 1967 and rose to number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 8 on the Billboard R & B charts.
Aretha Franklin:
A few months after Warwick’s single came out, Aretha Franklin and The Sweet Inspirations were singing “I Say a Little Prayer” for fun during a break in recording sessions for Aretha Now. Producer Jerry Wexler liked what he heard, and decided to record the song. With Franklin on piano and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section behind her, it was recorded in one take. Franklin’s version has more of a gospel and rhythm & blues feel, with a fluid call-and-response interplay between the lead and backup singers.
Released in July of 1968, the single was less of a crossover hit than Warwick’s version — it peaked at number 10 on the Hot 100 chart — but rose all the way to number 3 on the R & B chart. Overshadowed at first, Franklin’s recording has grown in stature over the years. Even Bacharach likes it better than the one he made with Warwick. As he told Mitch Albom earlier this year, “Aretha just made a far better record.”
You can listen above, as Warwick performs “I Say a Little Prayer” in an unidentified television broadcast and Franklin sings it with the Sweethearts of Soul on the August 31, 1970 Cliff Richard Show. Tell us: Which version do you think is better?
Last night marked the beginning of the final season of Breaking Bad, the AMC television series that chronicles the life and times of Walter White, the chemistry teacher-turned-meth kingpin. To get in the spirit of things, Andrew Huang decided to record the Breaking Bad theme song with a guitar and some meth lab equipment. On his YouTube page he writes:
I don’t know anything about making meth but a little Googling let me know that if you come across a meth lab you might find, among other things:
Other than the guitar, all of the sounds in this piece were produced using the items above, with minimal effects and some speed adjustments to change pitches.
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Alfred Hitchcock would have celebrated his 114th birthday today. And, to mark the occasion, The Guardian has created a big infographic that delves into the themes and motifs that Hitchcock obsessed over in his many films. Above, we have a segment showing the way Hitchcock characters die, and the number of people who die according to particular methods. The best part is that you can download the infographic for free online.
