“Great literature is one of two stories,” we often quote Leo Tolstoy as saying: “a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” That’s all well and good for the author of War and Peace, but what about the thousands of screenwriters struggling to come up with the next hit movie, the next hit television series, the next hit platform-specific web and/or mobile series? Some, of course, have found in that aphorism a fruitful starting point, but others opt for different premises that number the basic plots at three (William Foster-Harris), six (researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab), twenty (Ronald Tobias), 36 (George Polti) — or, as some struggling screenwriters of a century ago read, 37.
The year was 1919. America’s biggest blockbusters included D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female, and The Miracle Man, which made Lon Chaney into a silver-screen icon. The many aspirants looking to write their way into the ever more celebrated and lucrative movie business could turn to a newly published manual called Ten Million Photoplay Plots by Wycliff Aber Hill. “Hill, who published more than one aid to struggling ‘scenarists,’ positioned himself as an authority on the types of stories that would work well onscreen,” writes Slate’s Rebecca Onion. In this book he provides a “taxonomy of possible types of dramatic ‘situations,’ first running them down in outline form, then describing each more completely and offering possible variations.”
Hill’s 37 basic dramatic situations include such “happy situations” as “rescue,” “loved ones lost and recovered,” and “a miracle of God”; such “pathetic situations” as “love’s obstacles,” “rivalry between unequals,” and “a mystery”; and such “disastrous situations precipitated without criminal intent” as “possessed of an ambition,” “enmity between kinsmen,” and “vengeance.” (Naturally, Hill also includes a separate category involving criminal intent.) These dramatic concepts then break down into more specific scenarios like “rescue by strangers who are grateful for favors given them by the unfortunate one,” “an appeal for refuge by the shipwrecked,” “the sacrifice of happiness for the sake of a loved one where the sacrifice is caused by unjust laws,” and “congenial relations between husband and wife made impossible by the parents-in-law.”
Already more than a few films new and old come to mind whose stories proceed from such dramatic concepts. Indeed, one could think of examples from not just cinema but literature, television, theater, comics, and other forms of narrative art besides. Situations we all know from real life may also follow similar contours, which plays no small part in giving them their impact when properly translated to the screen. Clearly aiming for timelessness, Hill enumerates plots that could have been employed in stories centuries before his time, and will continue to be long after ours. But what, exactly, is the relationship between plot and story? We now quote E.M. Forster on the matter, specifically a line from his Aspects of the Novel — a book for which Ten Million Photoplay Plots’ first readers would have to wait eight more years.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
“Not all genres in music are self-explanatory,” writes Mark Stock at The Manual. “Just ask baroque pop or post metal. With surf rock, however, it’s pretty much as advertised.” This observation gets at what makes surf rock so refreshing. Its “wavy guitar sounds” and rollicking beats are a musical onomatopoeia for the thrills of a sun-drenched sport. From its niche origins, surf rock invaded garages around the world. It found its way into the Pixies and the B‑52s. Waves of indie surf bands continue to wash ashore.
Surf rock melded with hardcore punk, another genre that does what it says and has scored many a board sport. Where hardcore is aggro, surf is mellow and joyous, even when it’s sinister and dangerous; hardcore thrives on bashing three-minute attacks, surf shows off its technical chops, even when it sticks to three chords, as in the Surfaris’ classic “Wipe Out.”
The song, a 12-bar blues driven by Ron Wilson’s drum solo, produced “the yardstick for every aspiring young drummer in the early 60s” and beyond. At the time of its recording, Wilson wasn’t even old enough to drive.
According to guitarist Bob Berryhill, the Surfaris formed in 1962 while the members of the band were still in high school. (Their sax player, Jim Pash, was 12 when he joined.) They played teen dances and talent shows, and by January the following year, they had an original, “Surfer Joe.” They had their parents drive them to a studio owned by a man named Dale Smallen.
We met at a place in the California desert called Cucamonga, and recorded Surfer Joe. In those days 45’s required a B side so Dale asked us to play another song. We had not written a song before Surfer Joe so I suggested a drum solo type of song with simple guitar breaks. Ronnie started playing the famous Wipe Out solo and in about 10 minutes we had the song together. We needed a gimmick introduction so my Dad broke a plaster soaked board close to the mic and Dale Smallen let out a laugh and screamed wipe out. We gave Dale the master tape and he took it to Hollywood, and by July 1963 it was #2 on the Billboard top 100.
Before they knew it, the teenaged Surfaris were touring Japan, Australia, and the U.S. with Roy Orbison, The Beach Boys, the Righteous Brothers, and The Ventures, a brilliant instrumental rock band who were one of the biggest things going in the early 1960s.
The Ventures took “Wipe Out” further into the reaches of drumming legend in their cover (see drummer Mel Taylor attacking the skins like Gene Krupa in a live performance in Japan from 1965, above). Then, in 1966, the Surfaris broke up. The Beatles had wiped them off the charts, or as Berryhill puts it, somewhat bitterly, “The British Invasion changed music to focus more on the introspective needs of the ‘Me Generation.’” Surf lost its hip appeal, but it was not forgotten.
“In 1980,” Berryhill says, “the punk/new wave movement revived ‘Wipe Out,’ which gave it a new audience.” It popped up in commercials, The Fat Boys teamed up with The Beach Boys for a rap cover, even the Muppets had a version. Surf rock “became a sponge,” surf guitarist Jason Loughlin says. “In the 80s through the 90s [it] soaked up influences from punk music and alternative rock.” Bands like Man or Astro-Man? brought in period sci-fi reverences; surf teamed up with rockabilly, another genre that “had a short window of popularity and growth and then went underground” until the 80s.
But “Wipe Out” acquired a special status as a pure specimen of surf. It remains one of the most popular instrumental songs of all time. And all because of an inventive 15-year-old drummer, his high school buddies, and their supportive parents. It may not be the most rock ’n’ roll of musical histories, but it is the most surf rock of stories. A tale of talent, teenage enthusiasm, and the guileless desire to make other kids dance.
As I write this, the smoke from the numerous forest fires across California are making the air quality terrible, so we are being told to stay inside. However, the heatwave is making it insufferable to *be* inside. And we also have to be wary of COVID-19 and wear a mask. You could say this is a slightly stressful situation. And a lot of us are dealing with even more than that–job stability, rent, and on and on. Just typing this made me anxious!
During this time we should try not to neglect our mental health. Fortunately Coursera offers free online courses about Mental Health and Well-Being.
The Coursera video above comes from a Facebook live event that features Yale University’s Laurie Santos, who teaches Coursera’s Science of Well-Being course. This 30 minute Q&A dives right in to our current situation, with Santos outlining a protocol for mental health that should be as much a part of your regimen as wearing a mask and washing your hands with soap (while singing Happy Birthday to yourself, don’t forget.)
Here’s a top ten of Coursera’s most popular health & well-being courses to check out:
Santos answers questions from viewers, covering topics like avoiding tension and arguments with our loved ones, staying informed on the world without creating more anxiety, how can frontline/healthcare workers combat anxiety, how to keep yourself positive when living alone without family or friends, how to keep productive and healthy at work with the threat of layoffs, how to look for a new job after being laid off because of COVID, how to help your child who is missing their school friends, how do we create good experiences to create good memories, what we can do about sleep problems, how to care for family members with COVID while also working a job, and how to show random acts of kindness during this time (which is what Santos covers often in her Happiness Lab podcast).
Overall, focus on self-compassion, Santos says, which has to be the starting point for all of this. When you enroll in these courses, Coursera gives you two options. You can enroll as a paid student and get a certificate at the end. Or choose to “audit” the course (as shown here) and the course is free. Just like in college! All the learning, none of the blue book essays!
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
We may all have the best of intentions when we collect and share reading lists. We buy the books, stack them neatly by the chair or bed, then something happens. Like… literally, every day, something happens…. Let’s cut ourselves some slack. We’ll get to those books, or give them away to people who will read them, which is also a good thing to do.
But even if we can’t keep up, reading lists are still essential educational tools, especially for kids, young adults, and their parents and teachers. As we celebrate the centenary of the 19th Amendment (which fell on August 18th) and talk about its many shortcomings, it may be more important than ever to understand the U.S. history that brought us to the current moment.
This is a history in which—whether rights were guaranteed by the constitution or not—people historically denied suffrage have always had to struggle. Each generation of women, but most especially Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and LGBTQ women, must claim or reclaim basic rights, liberties, and protections. More than ever, feminist reading lists reflect the vast differences in collective and personal experience that fall under the label “Feminist.”
To illustrate the continued critical importance of feminist history, theory, and literature, the New York Public Library published reading lists for adults, kids, and teens on the 19th Amendment’s 100th anniversary. These books can help create community and solidarity and inspire deep reflection as kids are pushed back into schools and parents and teachers try to help them cope.
The adult list contains 126 books and includes links to the library catalog or e‑Book editions. “The titles bridge the past and present of feminist movements, from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Independent Woman(1949) to Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist: Essays (2014), and from the earliest manifestos for equality to contemporary writings on intersectionality,” Valentina Di Liscia writes at Hyperallergic.
The lists for kids and teens are of a more manageable length, and “if you’re looking to stock the bookshelves before history class starts this fall,” you can hardly do better than to start with these titles (or just bookmark the lists for now), as Danielle Valente—who helpfully transcribes both lists, below—notes at Time Out New York.
Alice Paul and the Fight for Women’s Rights by Deborah Kops
Ask a Queer Chick: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life for Girls Who Dig Girls by Lindsay King-Miller
Because I Was a Girl: True Stories for Girls of All Ages by Melissa de la Cruz
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon
Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Pénélope Bagieu
The Bride Was a Boy by Chii
Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism by Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman (eds.)
Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Feminism Is… by Alexandra Black, Laura Buller, Emily Hoyle and Dr. Megan Todd
Feminism: Reinventing the F‑Word by Nadia Abushanab Higgins
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom
Fight Like a Girl: 50 Feminists Who Changed the World by Laura Barcella
Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters by Jessica Valenti
Girl Rising: Changing the World One Girl at a Time by Tanya Lee Stone
Girls Resist!: A Guide to Activism, Leadership, and Starting a Revolution by KaeLyn Rich
Girls Write Now: Two Decades of True Stories from Young Female Voices
Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World by Kelly Jensen (ed.)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman In Guatemala by Rigoberta Menchú
Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement by Janet Dewart Bell
Modern Herstory: Stories of Women and Nonbinary People Rewriting History by Blair Imani
Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age by Amani Al-Khatahtbeh
Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns
#NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women by Lisa Charleyboy and Mary Beth Leatherdale (eds.)
Rethinking Normal: A Memoir in Transition by Katie Rain Hill
She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story by Jacob Tobia
Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir by Liz Prince
Trans Teen Survival Guide by Owl and Fox Fisher
Trans+: Love, Sex, Romance, and Being You by Kathryn Gonzales and Karen Rayne
Votes for Women!: American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot by Winifred Conkling
With Courage and Cloth: Winning the Fight for a Woman’s Right to Vote by Ann Bausum
You Don’t Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism by Alida Nugent
Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights by Mikki Kendall
This is, indeed, an excellent place to start. Given younger generations’ levels of engagement with current events, it’s likely your kids or students are already familiar with many of the newer books on the lists.
If there’s any overarching theme to be found among such a vast and ever-expanding canon of feminist literature, it might be summed up best in the title of a recent Angela Davis book on feminist movements around the world: “Freedom is a constant struggle.”
If you’re fascinated by certain artists and thinkers, you can learn about them from books. Anyone who has a significant cultural or intellectual influence on humanity sooner or later gets a biography written about them, and usually more than one. But how many get their own graphic novels? The versatility of the “comic book,” long unsuspected by many Western readers, has been more and more widely discussed in recent decades. Some of those readers, however, won’t believe what can be done with the form until they see what can be done with it. So why not show them the graphic novel on the life of David Bowie published not long ago — and if they remain unconvinced, why not show them the other one?
Few subjects demand a visual form as much as Bowie, because of the centrality of his ever-changing appearance to his artistic project as well as the need to evoke the effervescent cultural periods he lived through and did more than his part to define.
You can also read a graphic-novel adaptation of a source work never completed in the first place — but never completed, one must note, by Salvador Dalí and the Marx Brothers. A collaboration between pop-culture scholar Josh Frank, artist Manuela Pertega, and comedian Tim Heidecker, Giraffes on Horseback Salad realizes on the page a film that not only was never, but quite possibly could never have been made. For readers closer to worldly reality, there’s Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick’s Feynman: A Biography, which tells and shows the life of world-famous theoretical physicist, teacher, and bon vivant Richard Feynman. Never before, surely, has a comic book had to legibly and convincingly depict quantum electrodynamics, safe-cracking, and bongo-paying — to name just three of Feynman’s pursuits.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
New Yorkers have borne witness to a noticeable uptick in the number of shiny, new buildings going up in the city over the last few years, crowding the waterfront, rising from the ashes of community gardens and older, infinitely more modest structures.
Their developers have taken care to top load them with luxury amenities—rooftop cabanas, 24-hour fitness clubs, marble countertops, screening rooms.
But one thing they can’t provide is the sense of lived history that imbues every old building with a true sense of character, mystique, and oft-grubby charm.
I fear that the occupants of these newer buildings won’t have nearly as much fun as the rest of us searching for our current addresses on the NYC Municipal Archives’ interactive map, above.
Every dot represents a Works Progress Administration photograph of a New York City building, snapped between 1939 and 1941 as a means of standardizing the way in which property values were assessed and recorded.
There are 4,282,000 dots, spread out between five boroughs.
Does that sound densely packed?
You should see it today… there’s been a lot of vertical build.
This unassuming fuel oil plant near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal has given way to a 430-unit building boasting a yoga room, spin studios, and valet services for those in need of dry-cleaning, laundry, apartment cleaning, or dog walking…though sadly, no on-premises motor oil. We find that omission somewhat surprising for such a full-service residential development on the banks of a Superfund site, whose clean up is estimated to tip the scales at $500 million.
We also wonder what the occupants of the above buildings would have made of the glassy 25-story complex that opened on their coordinates earlier this year. Is it just us, or does it seem a bit disingenuous of its developers to trumpet that its location is “the epitome of New York City’s authenticity, with over a century of rich history, where the world’s sartorial and culinary trends are born”?
(You can find us a few blocks away muttering into our chopped liver at Russ and Daughters, a venerable food shop that looks much the same today as it did in 1940, though you’ll have to confirm with a bit of research on your own if you don’t want to take our word for it, the WPA “dot” revealing little more than a man with a stick and several moving vehicles.)
Our final stop is one of many architectural ghosts to haunt the Hudson Yards colossus, the self-described “epicenter of Manhattan’s New West Side… a beacon for creative professionals, a hub for fashion, design, communications and art.” In addition to a much reviled $200 million shawarma-shaped “3‑dimensional public space” and state of the art wine fridges, amenities now include diagnostic and antibody testing “performed by top medical professionals.”
It’s telling that in the summer of 2020, prospective tenants were offered incentives including two months’ free rent and a $2,000 gift card.
Proof, perhaps, that New York will continue as it always has—a city in constant flux. The prevalence of modern high rise buildings in dystopian fiction gives us pause.…
Remember when The Hunger Games was everywhere? Its author Suzanne Collins has decided that young people could benefit from more exploration of Just War Theory through the world of Panem, and so has published The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel covering the early years of future president Coriolanus Snow during the 10th Hunger Games.
Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt give their spoiler-free reviews of the new book and look back on the original book trilogy and its adaptation into four films (and do spoil those, in case you want to go watch them). We talk about what makes these novels “YA,” the function of adapting them to film, and the limits of the franchise’s premise and world-building. Does the work critique yet glorify violence at the same time? Will the film version of the new novel be our next Phantom Menace?
“They say — and I gladly believe it — that it is difficult to know yourself,” Vincent Van Gogh once wrote to his brother Theo, “but it isn’t easy to paint oneself either.” This from one of the most prolific self-portraitists of all time. Between the years 1885 and 1889, Van Gogh painted himself more than 35 times, most of them during the two years in the middle when he lived in Paris. Always short of funds, but especially straitened there, he saved the cost of hiring models by investing in a mirror instead.
That mirror, Van Gogh wrote in another letter, was “good enough to enable me to work from my image in default of a model, because if I can manage to paint the coloring of my own head, which is not to be done without some difficulty, I shall likewise be able to paint the heads of other good souls, men and women.” At the Van Gogh Museum’s online collection you can browse up close and in detail — as well as download — seventeen examples of the painter’s essays in his own headcolor, and much else about himself besides.
We’ve all seen Van Gogh’s two or three most well-known self-portraits. The most famous of those, 1889’s Self-Portrait With a Bandaged Ear (one of two painted that year), hints at the act of self-mutilation that followed one of his many quarrels with his friend and colleague Paul Gauguin. Held at the Courtauld Gallery, that painting doesn’t appear on the Van Gogh Museum’s site, but those that do reveal aspects of the painter (literally, in some cases) artistically unexplored by his more widely seen works.
Take Self-Portrait as a Painterat the top of the post, an unusual depiction in that Van Gogh makes reference in it to his profession. Created between December 1887 and February 1888, this final Parisian work includes a palette, paintbrushes, and an easel, but the way in which Van Gogh painted it tells us something more: “He showed that he was a modern artist by using a new painting style, with bright, almost unblended colors,” says the Van Gogh Museum’s web site, “the blue of his smock, for instance, and the orange-red of his beard” chosen to intensify one another.
Different self-portraits emphasize different distinctive elements of Van Gogh’s appearance and self-presentation. In 1887’s Self-Portraitwith Straw Hat he wears the titular piece of headwear that allows him to use his beloved color yellow, even as he “examines us with one blue and one green eye.” In some self-portraits he goes not just without a hat but without any of the accoutrements of his work at all, including his artist’s smock. In others, as in the Adolphe Monticelli-inspired example here, he smokes a pipe; in the clearly Impressionist-influenced self-portrait just above, he opts for both pipe and hat. Yet we can always recognize Van Gogh by the intensity of his expression — or as Douglas Coupland less reverently put it, his “selfie face.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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