When we think of Stanley Kubrick, we can’t help but think of perfectionism, a quality he brought even to the making of what he called a “ghost film” — a genre for which he seemed to have little respect — with 1980’s The Shining. So much did he want to get his adaptation (or rather, near-total reimagination) of Stephen King’s novel of the haunted Overlook Hotel just right that he actually had the first set of released prints recalled and destroyed because he didn’t think he’d quite nailed the ending: specifically, he wanted to remove just one short scene from it, one which came immediately before the haunting final photograph of the Overlook’s 1921 Fourth of July Ball.
“There was a big length problem with Warner Bros,” said screenwriter Diane Johnson in an interview with Entertainment Weekly’s James Hibberd. “The film was too long and people said it had to be shortened.” The two minutes Kubrick cut from the ending constituted what Hibberd describes as a hospital scene in which “the hotel manager, Ullman (Barry Nelson), visits Wendy and Danny after their ordeal and explains that no supernatural evidence was found to support their claims of what transpired,” not even the frozen body of Jack Nicholson’s crazed Jack Torrance. “Just when the audience begins to question everything they’ve seen, Ullman ominously gives Danny the same ball that was rolled to him from an unseen force outside Room 237.”
“In other words,” said Johnson in an explanation of the scene’s point, “all of this really happened, and the magic events were actual. It was just a little twist. It was easy to jettison.” Roger Ebert, in a 2006 essay on the film, also thought “Kubrick was wise to remove that epilogue,” though for a different reason: “It pulled one rug too many out from under the story. At some level, it is necessary for us to believe the three members of the Torrance family are actually residents in the hotel during that winter, whatever happens or whatever they think happens.” Whether or not you think it should have been left in, we can surely all agree that Kubrick did well to depart from King’s original ending, which had the Overlook explode in a ball of flame, taking Jack with it, as the rest of the family escaped to safety. Sometimes what works on the page just doesn’t work on the screen.
The video above features the screenplay for the deleted original ending of The Shining.
The ‘Sad Clown with the Golden Voice’ has taken to releasing emotionally-freighted covers on select Fridays.
There’s something about a giant sad singing clown that comforts us, let’s us know it’s ok to feel, to show our feelings. It’s a sad and beautiful world, and we’re all in it together, even when we’re totally alone.
So quoth Big Mike Geier, the founder and frontman of the band Kingsized, and the man behind Puddles’ white makeup and rickrack-trimmed clown suit.
Whatever he’s tapped into, it’s real. The New York Times’ Jason Zinnoman, in a slightly skeeved-out think piece on clowns last year, wrote:
What makes him transcend the trope is his vulnerability. When you first see him charging down the aisle, he’s an intimidating figure, but his body is actually not aggressive. It slumps, passively. When he asks for a hug, it looks as if he really needs it. He makes you feel bad for finding him off-putting, and then he belts out a lovely song.
Friday, March 3 found Puddles accompanying himself on a red guitar for “It’s a Heartache,” a hit for Bonnie Tyler and later, Rod Stewart. They both have their strengths, but Puddles is uniquely suited to tap into the heartache of ‘standing in the cold rain, feeling like a clown.”
A previous Friday Feel, Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” was a fan request. (Yes, he’s still taking them.)
February 10’s Friday Feel brought new listeners to a younger artist, Brett Dennen. Puddles praised his “Heaven” as “beautiful and thoughtful song,” confessing that he “barely held it together on this one.” Also see Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” down below.
The piece de resistance, wherein the lyrics of Pinball Wizard are sung to the tune of Folsom Prison Blues, is at the top of the page. It’s no great surprise that that one’s gone viral. Puddles is transparent, however, giving credit to the late Gregory Dean Smalley, an Atlanta-based songwriter who died of AIDS in the late 90s:
Back in 1994 or so, I saw (him) perform this mashup at the Star Community Bar. I was floored. Greg was a force of supernatural proportions and he is missed. Many people have done it prior to me doing it. I guess it was always meant to be.
From filmmaker Steve Olpin comes a short documentary (a “documentary poem”) called Earth and Fire, about artist and primitive potter Kelly Magleby. The film follows Kelly as she travels into “the backcountry of Southern Utah with a knife and a buckskin for 10 days to try to learn about Anasazi pottery by doing it the way the Anasazi did it.” On her website, Kelly writes “My desire to make Anasazi pottery started with my interest in primitive and survival skills. I love the fact that you can go into the wild with nothing and get all you need to survive and even flourish from the earth. The idea that you can go out and dig up some ‘dirt’, shape it, paint it and fire it all using only materials found in nature is amazing to me.” On her site, she details her method for making the pottery. Find more info about the Anasazi and their pottery here and here.
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One of the greatest challenges for writers and greatest joys for readers of fantasy and science fiction is what we call “world building,” the art of creating cities, countries, continents, planets, galaxies, and whole universes to people with warring factions and nomadic truth seekers. Such writing is the natural offspring of the Medieval travelogue, a genre once taken not as fantasy but fact, when sailors, crusaders, pilgrims, merchants, and mercenaries set out to chart, trade for, and convert, and conquer the world, and returned home with outlandish tales of glittering empires and people with faces in their chests or hopping around on a single foot so big they could use it to shade themselves.
One of the most famous of such chroniclers, Sir John Mandeville, may now be mostly forgotten, but for centuries his Travels was so popular with aspiring navigators and literary men like Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats that “until the Victorian era,” writes Giles Milton, it was he, “not Chaucer, who was known as ‘the father of English prose.’”
Mandeville, like Marco Polo half a century before him, may have been part adventurer, part charlatan, but in any case, both drew their itineraries, as did later navigators like Columbus and Walter Raleigh, from a very long tradition: the making of speculative world maps, which far predates the early Middle Ages of pilgrimage and thirst for Eastern spices and gold.
In the Western tradition, we can trace world mapmaking all the way back to 6th century B.C.E., Pre-Socratic thinker Anaximander, student of Thales, whom Aristotle regarded as the first Greek philosopher. We have no copy of the map, but we have some idea what it might have looked since Herodotus described it in detail, a circular known world sitting atop an earth the shape of a drum. (Anaximander was also an original speculative astronomer.) His map contained two continents, or halves, “Europe” and “Asia”—which included the known countries of North Africa. “Two relatively small strips of land north and south of the Mediterranean Sea,” with ten inhabited regions in total, that illustrate the very early dichotomizing of the world—in this case divided top to bottom rather than west and east.
Anaximander may have been the first Greek geographer, but it is the 2nd century B.C.E. that Libyan-Greek scientist and philosopher Eratosthenes who has historically been given the title “Father of Geography” for his three-volume Geography, his discovery that the earth is round, and his accurate calculation of its circumference. Lost to history, Eratosthenes’ Geography has been pieced together from descriptions by Roman authors, as has his map of the world—at the top in a 19th-century reconstruction—showing a contiguous inhabited landmass resembling a lobster claw.
You’ll note that Eratosthenes drew primarily on Anaximander’s description of the world. In turn, his map had a significant influence on later Medieval geographers. A Babylonian world map, inscribed on a clay tablet around the time Anaximander imagined the world (and thought to be the earliest extant example of such a thing), may have influenced European map-making in the age of discovery as well. It depicts a flat, round world, with Babylon at the center (see the British Museum for a detailed translation and commentary of the map’s legend).
The Babylonian map is said to survive in the similar-looking “T and O map” (third image from top), representing the words orbis terrarium and originating from descriptions in 7th century C.E. Spanish scholar Isadora of Seville’s Etymologiae. The “T” is the Mediterranean and the “O” the ocean. In the version above, a recreation of an 8th century drawing, and every derivation thereafter, we see the three known continents, Asia, Europe, and Africa, with the holy city, Jerusalem, at the center. This map greatly informed early Medieval conceptions of the world, from crusaders to garrulous knights errant like Mandeville, and raconteur merchants like Polo, both of whom made quite an impression on Columbus and Raleigh, as did the circa 1300 map from Constantinople above, the oldest of many drawn from the thousands of coordinates in Roman geographer and astronomer Ptolemy’s Geographia.
It wouldn’t be until 100 years after the translation of Ptolemy’s text from Greek to Latin in 1407 that his geographical precision became widely known. Until this, “all knowledge of these co-ordinates had been lost in the West,” writes the British Library. This would not be so in the East, however, where world maps like Ibn Hawqal’s, above from 980 C.E., show the influence of Ptolemy, already so long dominant in geography in the Islamic world that it was beginning to wane. Many more world maps survive from 11–12th century Britain, Turkey, and Sicily, from 16th century Korea, and from that wandering age of Columbus and Raleigh, beginning to increasingly resemble the world maps we’re familiar with today. (See a 15th century reconstruction of Ptolemy’s geography below.)
For most of recorded history, knowledge of the world from any one place in it was almost wholly or partly speculative and imaginative, often peopled with monsters and wonders. “All cultures have always believed that the map they valorize is real and true and objective and transparent,” as Jerry Brotton Professor at Queen Mary University of London tells Uri Friedman at The Atlantic. Columbus believed in his speculative maps, even when he ran into islands off the coast of continents charted on none of them. We are still conceptual prisoners—or consumers, users, readers, viewers, audiences—of maps, though we’ve physically plotted every corner of the globe. Perspectives cannot be rendered objective. No gods-eye views exist.
Nonetheless, several culturally formative projections of the world since Ptolemy’s Geography and well before it have changed the whole world, pointing to the power of human imagination and the legendarily imaginative, as well as legendarily brutal, acts of “world building” in real life.
We all have a favorite Quentin Tarantino scene, but the director of Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, The Hateful Eight, and other movies that can seem made out of nothing but memorable scenes also has one of his own. “My favorite thing I think I’ve ever written is the scene at the French farmhouse at the beginning of Inglourious Basterds,” Business Insider quotes him as saying in a panel at San Diego Comic-Con. “The scene Tarantino refers to is the very first one of his brutal World War II epic” wherein “SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arrives at a remote dairy farm in France that is suspected of hiding Jewish people. Landa sits down with the farmer (Denis Menochet) and questions him about the whereabouts of the Dreyfus family.” A “tense and sneaky psychological mind game” ensues.
You can learn exactly what makes those opening twenty minutes such a miniature masterpiece in the Lessons from the Screenplay video above. Drawing from psychological research on the nature of tension and suspense, series creator Michael Tucker highlights certain “key components of tension experiences,” including uncertainty, instability, and a lack of control, and shows how Tarantino uses them to heighten the tension as much as possible throughout these seventeen minutes.
“It’s like the suspense is a rubber band,” Tarantino says in a Charlie Rose interview clip included in the video, “and I’m just stretching it and stretching it and stretching it to see how far it can stretch.”
Tarantino also uses a suite of techniques that moviegoers have come to associate specifically with him, such as long stretches of dialogue that go off on extended tangents (“Part of my plan,” he says in another interview clip, “is to bury it in so much minutia about nothing that you don’t realize you’re being told an important plot point until it becomes important”), the charged consumption of food and drink, and the potential for carnage at any moment. “The fact that the audience is aware they’re watching a Tarantino film adds to the suspense,” says Tucker. “We know there will be consequences, and that Tarantino has no qualms about showing violence.” And after the tour de force of its opening, the movie still has well over two hours of pure Tarantinian cinema to go.
Last year we alerted you to a short doc about authors and their relationship with writer’s block. Many were philosophical. Others like Philipp Meyer dismissed it: ““I don’t think writer’s block actually exists,” he said. “It’s basically insecurity.”
How seriously you take it or how terribly it affects you, we have a Spotify playlist created by Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame called “Write Your Way Out.”
He revealed the playlist on his Twitter feed on March 20 with an apology that the mix took longer to make than expected. It is a mix, he said, “about writing, songs that feature great writing, and everything in between.” Like his other mixes, he’s thinking about us, that kindly Mr. Miranda.
The eclectic mix begins with “Happy Birthday Darling” from Bright Lights Big City (“Now when you write my son, make the choice, find your voice, look down deep in your heart”), then features English-language hip hop from the Hamilton Mixtape (Nas’ “Wrote My Way Out”) and Spanish-language hip hop from Calle 13 (“Adentro”), folk classics (Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning”, Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”), even some jaunty pop from Vampire Weekend (“Oxford Comma”) and Sara Bareilles (“Love Song”). He ends with Raúl Esparza’s ballad “Why” from the musical Tick, Tick, BOOM!, which closes the mix with a paean to the healthy addiction of creativity. (“I make a vow, right here and now / I’m gonna spend my time this way,” he sings.)
It’s nice to know that Miranda fussed over this selection like one used to do back in the days of cassette tapes. Does that mean he has a crush on all of us?
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in common. Alexander in particular draws our attention to the so-called “Coltrane circle,” which resembles what any musician will recognize as the “Circle of Fifths,” but incorporates Coltrane’s own innovations. Coltrane gave the drawing to saxophonist and professor Yusef Lateef in 1967, who included it in his seminal text, Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Where Lateef, as he writes in his autobiography, sees Coltrane’s music as a “spiritual journey” that “embraced the concerns of a rich tradition of autophysiopsychic music,” Alexander sees “the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s” quantum theory.
Neither description seems out of place. Musician and blogger Roel Hollander notes, “Thelonious Monk once said ‘All musicans are subconsciously mathematicians.’ Musicians like John Coltrane though have been very much aware of the mathematics of music and consciously applied it to his works.”
Coltrane was also very much aware of Einstein’s work and liked to talk about it frequently. Musican David Amram remembers the Giant Steps genius telling him he “was trying to do something like that in music.”
Hollander carefully dissects Coltrane’s mathematics in two theory-heavy essays, one generally on Coltrane’s “Music & Geometry” and one specifically on his “Tone Circle.” Coltrane himself had little to say publically about the intensive theoretical work behind his most famous compositions, probably because he’d rather they speak for themselves. He preferred to express himself philosophically and mystically, drawing equally on his fascination with science and with spiritual traditions of all kinds. Coltrane’s poetic way of speaking has left his musical interpreters with a wide variety of ways to look at his Circle, as jazz musician Corey Mwamba discovered when he informally polled several other players on Facebook. Clarinetist Arun Ghosh, for example, saw in Coltrane’s “mathematical principles” a “musical system that connected with The Divine.” It’s a system, he opined, that “feels quite Islamic to me.”
Lateef agreed, and there may be few who understood Coltrane’s method better than he did. He studied closely with Coltrane for years, and has been remembered since his death in 2013 as a peer and even a mentor, especially in his ecumenical embrace of theory and music from around the world. Lateef even argued that Coltrane’s late-in-life masterpiece A Love Supreme might have been titled “Allah Supreme” were it not for fear of “political backlash.” Some may find the claim tendentious, but what we see in the wide range of responses to Coltrane’s musical theory, so well encapsulated in the drawing above, is that his recognition, as Lateef writes, of the “structures of music” was as much for him about scientific discovery as it was religious experience. Both for him were intuitive processes that “came into existence,” writes Lateef, “in the mind of the musican through abstraction from experience.”
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Music and writing are inseparable in the hippest modern novels, from Kerouac to Nick Hornby to Irvine Welsh. It might even be said many such books would not exist without their internal soundtracks. When it comes to hip, prolific modern novelist Haruki Murakami, we might say the author himself may not exist without his soundtracks, and they are sprawling and extensive. Murakami, who is well known for his intense focus and heroic achievements as a marathon and double-marathon runner, exceeds even this consuming passion with his near-religious devotion to music.
Murakami became a convert to jazz fandom at the age of 15 and until age 30 ran a jazz club. Then he suddenly became a novelist after an epiphany at a baseball game. (Hear Ilana Simons read his version of that story in her short animated film above). His first book’s story unfolded in an environment totally permeated by music and music fan culture. From then on, musical references spilled from his characters’ lips, and swirled around their heads perpetually.
What sets Murakami apart from other music-obsessed novelists is not only the degree of his obsession, but the breadth of his musical knowledge. He is as fluent in classical as he as in jazz and sixties folk and pop, and his range in each genre is considerable. He has so much to say about classical music, in fact, that he once published a book of six conversations between himself and Seiji Ozawa, “one of the world’s leading orchestral conductors.” Murakami’s 2013 Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage—its title a reference to Franz Liszt—contains perhaps his most eloquent statement on the role music plays in his life and work, phrased in universal terms:
Our lives are like a complex musical score. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It’s next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could then transpose them into the correct sounds, there’s no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein.
Hoagy Carmichael, Lionel Hampton, Herbie Hancock, Gene Krupa, Django Reinhardt, Sergei Prokofiev, Frederic Chopin… it’s quite a mix, and one that may not only remind you of several moments in Murakami’s body of work, but will also give you a sampling of the soundtrack to its author’s imagination as he transcribes the “cryptic writing” we have to “transpose… into the correct sounds” as we try to make sense of it.
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