Hysterical Literature: Art & Sexuality Collide in Readings of Whitman, Emerson & Other Greats (NSFW)

in Biology, Film, Life, Literature | March 27th, 2015

Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex,

Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.

Thus spaketh Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. 160 years after that poem’s publication, how might that most American of American Romantics react to the spectacle of an attractive young woman pleasuring herself with his work, as an unseen hand beneath the table surreptitiously pleasures her with the Cadillac of vibrators?

The peephole is much larger than it would’ve been in 1855. Hysterical Literature was conceived as an online project in which each session’s featured female participant chooses a resonant text, then reads it aloud until a Hitachi Magic Wand puts an end to her ability to form coherent sentences.

Creator Clayton Cubitt has complained that the orgasmic element and the status of certain celebrity participants like comedian Margaret Cho have preoccupied the press. His preference is for viewers to take a more holistic approach, viewing the experience with some “mystery and magic and ‘WTF.’”

Accordingly, let us focus upon some of the selected works:

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

The Necrophilia Variations by Supervert

Really, no Anaïs Nin? I would’ve thought…

The most recent contributor to the series is also its oldest, 60-year-old Janet, below, who had to take leave of Whitman’s pal, Ralph Waldo Emerson, not once but twice in eight minutes.

Cumulatively, these sessions make a marvelously frank primer for actors or directors charged with creating realistic sex scenes. The dichotomy of Hysterical Lit’s staging ensures that things are fairly respectable above the waist, thus satisfying YouTube’s Community Guidelines.

Daring female lovers of literature should be advised that Cubitt seeks to include more women of color, older participants, and non-English texts. No word on who exactly is under that table. Drain your pent-up rivers by applying here.

via Kottke

This is Your Brain on Sex and Religion: Experiments in Neuroscience

An Introduction to World Literature by a Cast Of Literary & Academic Stars (Free Course)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Quentin Tarantino Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghetti Westerns

in Film | March 26th, 2015

Like many film fans, I grew up familiar with the term “Spaghetti western,” but I’d nearly reached adulthood before figuring out what, exactly, America’s most popular Italian dish had to do with America’s once-most popular movie genre. But even if they don’t know the specific definition of a Spaghetti western, those who enjoy them know a Spaghetti western when they see one. Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; Sergio Corbucci’s Minnesota Clay and Django; Enzo Barboni’s They Call Me Trinity and Trinity Is Still My Name — if a picture belongs in that company, nobody doubts it.

You’ll notice that all those directors have Italian names, and indeed, western all’italiana, the Italian equivalent of “Spaghetti western,” simply means “Italian-style western.” These Italian-produced tales of the lawless 19th-century American west, sometimes featuring fading or rising Hollywood stars (as with the young Clint Eastwood, who would become identified with Leone’s “Man with No Name”), and often shot in the Spanish desert, rode high from the mid-1960s to the early 70s, bringing a fresh sensibility and visceral impact which had for the most part drained out of the homegrown variety.

Trust a genre-loving auteur like Quentin Tarantino (and one who made his very own Django a few years back) to know Spaghetti westerns inside and out. While even those of us who never turn down the chance to enjoy a good Spaghetti western might struggle to name ten of them, Tarantino can easily run down his personal top twenty:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)
Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)
The Mercenary (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)
Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964)
Day of Anger (Tonino Valerii, 1967)
Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967)
Navajo Joe (Sergio Corbucci,1966)
The Return of Ringo (Duccio Tessar, 1965)
The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1966)
A Pistol for Ringo (Duccio Tessari, 1965)
The Dirty Outlaws (Franco Rossetti, 1967)
The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci, 1968)
The Grand Duel (Giancarlo Santi, 1972)
Shoot the Living, Pray for the Dead (Giuseppe Vari, 1971)
Tepepa (Giulio Petroni, 1968)
The Ugly Ones (Eugenio Martin, 1966)
Viva Django! (Ferdinando Baldi, 1967)
Machine Gun Killers (Paolo Bianchini, 1968)

You can watch all the trailers of these Spaghetti western masterpieces in the playlist above, created by The Spaghetti Western Database. Some may now strike you as disarmingly straightforward about ballyhooing the excitement promised by the feature they advertise, and you may find others surprisingly funny and more self-aware. While I defy anyone to watch the entire playlist of trailers without wanting to dive into this surprisingly little-explored tradition, nothing gets me quite as excited about watching a movie — old or new, subtle or schlocky, genre or otherwise — as Tarantino’s contagious cinephilia.

via The Spaghetti Western Database

Quentin Tarantino Lists the 12 Greatest Films of All Time: From Taxi Driver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Tarantino’s Handwritten List of the 11 “Greatest Movies”

Watch John Wayne Star in 25 Classic Westerns: All Free Online

The Great Train Robbery: Where Westerns Began

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How Akira Kurosawa Used Movement to Tell His Stories: A Video Essay

in Film | March 24th, 2015

The history books say that there were three Japanese filmmakers to emerge in the 1950s – Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. Never mind that Mizoguchi and Ozu made many of their best movies in the 1930s. Never mind that masterful, innovative directors like Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita have been unfairly overshadowed by the brilliance of these three greats.

Mizoguchi was an early modernist who by the end of his career made meditative movies about how women suffer at the hands of men. His masterpieces like Ugetsu and Sansho Dayu feel like Buddhist scroll paintings come to life. Ozu, “the most Japanese” of all filmmakers, made quietly moving dramas about families, like Tokyo Story, but did so in a way that discarded such Hollywood principles as continuity editing and the 180 degree rule. Ozu was a quiet radical.

Compared to Ozu and Mizoguchi, Kurosawa’s movies are noisy, masculine and vital. Unlike Ozu, he didn’t challenge Hollywood film form but improved on it. Born roughly a decade after the other two filmmakers, Kurosawa spent his youth watching Western movies, absorbing the lessons of his cinematic heroes like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra. At his creative height, in the 1950s and 60s, Kurosawa produced masterpiece after masterpiece. Hollywood would remake or reference Kurosawa constantly in the years that followed but few of those films had Kurosawa’s inventiveness.

Tony Zhou, who has made a career of dissecting movies in his excellent video series Every Frame a Picture, argues that the key to Kurosawa is movement. “A Kurosawa movie moves like no one else’s,” Zhou notes in his video. “Each one is a master class in different types of motion and also ways to combine them.”

Kurosawa had an innate understanding that there is inherent drama in the wind blowing in the trees. Like Andrei Tarkovsky and later Terrence Malick, he liked to place human drama squarely in the realm of nature. The rain falls, a fire rages and that movement makes an image compelling. He understood that graphic considerations outweighed psychological ones – he simplified and exaggerated a character’s movement with the frame to make character traits and emotions easy to register for the audience. His camera movements were clear, motivated and fluid. Zhou compares Seven Samurai with The Avengers. You might have thought that The Avengers was uninspired and soulless but after watching Zhou’s video, you’ll understand why – aside from the silly plot and characters – the movie was uninspired and soulless. The piece should be required viewing for filmmakers everywhere. You can watch it above.

And below you can see another video Zhou did on Kurosawa, focusing on his 1960 movie The Bad Sleep Well.

David Lynch Lists His Favorite Films & Directors, Including Fellini, Wilder, Tati & Hitchcock

Andrei Tarkovsky Creates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Stanley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Created)

Listen to François Truffaut’s Big, 12-Hour Interview with Alfred Hitchcock (1962)

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

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Touching Story Behind Paraguay’s Landfill Orchestra: Now Told in Film, and Soon a Book

in Film, Life, Music | March 23rd, 2015

Back in 2012, I first told you about the amazing youth chamber orchestra from Cateura, Paraguay. The families from this small impoverished town, located alongside a vast landfill, can’t afford many luxuries — like buying instruments for their kids. But what they lack in money, they make up for in ingenuity and good spirit. The short documentary above gives you a glimpse of their touching story, showing how creative leaders in the community fashioned instruments with their own hands, turning oil cans into cellos, and aluminum bowls into violins. Watch them in action:

But why stop with the short story, when you can get the longer story. Last week, a full blown film called Landfill Harmonic premiered at the SXSW Film Festival 2015. And now the film (see a short trailer here) will be screened at selected film festivals while the producers try to find a distributor who can bring the production to a wider audience. And, in another piece of good news, Simon & Schuster announced that it plans to publish a picture book about the Recycled Orchestra. Look for Ada’s Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay in March 2016.

You can watch Landfill Harmonic at the festivals mentioned below. To keep tabs on future showings, follow this Facebook page.

New York Children’s Film Festival March 21, 2015
Environmental Film Festival DC March 25, 2015
TIFF Kid’s Film Festival April 10 – 17, 2015

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Mesmerizing Supercut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

in Film | March 19th, 2015

On his Vimeo page, Jacob T. Swinney frames his pretty remarkable supercut with these words:

What can we learn by examining only the first and final shot of a film? This video plays the opening and closing shots of 55 films side-by-side. Some of the opening shots are strikingly similar to the final shots, while others are vastly different–both serving a purpose in communicating various themes. Some show progress, some show decline, and some are simply impactful images used to begin and end a film.

Below the jump, you can find a complete list of the films used in the supercut, some released long ago (Dr. Strangelove), some more recently (Birdman). It was while watching Gone Girl in the cinema that Swinney first came up with the idea for the clip. He started “by choosing movies that possessed either very similar or very contrasting opening/closing shots.” Then, he adds, “I decided to expand a bit to include films that show a story of sorts with just the first and final shots. Basically, if an opening and closing shot stuck with me, I included it.” You can find more videos by Swinney over on Vimeo.

(more…)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Take a “Breath” and Watch Samuel Beckett’s One-Minute Play

in Film, Theatre | March 19th, 2015

As Samuel Beckett’s writing progressed through the ’60s, it became even more minimal, despairing, and bleak. It was as if he was paring away as much as he could to see if theater was left standing. If a painting could be one color like Ad Reinhardt, what would be the Reinhardt of theater? Jonathan Crow mentioned yesterday how Beckett’s 1969 play Breath, for instance, “runs just a minute long and features just the sound of breathing.” There is a bit more to it than that. Not a lot more, but yes, more. Here’s the play’s script in full:

Curtain.

1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold for about five seconds.

2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold about five seconds.

3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in I) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold for about five seconds.

Beckett adds some notes:

Rubbish. No verticals, all scattered and lying.

Cry. Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical, switching on and off strictly synchronized light and breath.

Breath. Amplified recording.

Maximum light. Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back.

The play came about when one of the most important English theater critics of his time Kenneth Tynan asked for short skits for an erotic revue he was putting on in 1969, called Oh! Calcutta. Others invitees included Jules Feiffer, John Lennon, Edna O’Brien, Jacques Levy, Sam Shepard, and Leonard Melfi. The plan was to perform each skit but keep each writer’s name a secret. Beckett reportedly wrote the play on a postcard and sent it to Tynan, then became enraged when he heard that instead of rubbish on stage, Tynan had used naked bodies *and* in fact had explicitly credited Beckett in the program. Breath wouldn’t get a proper staging until 1999 in London’s West End, as part of an evening with Beckett’s more substantial Krapp’s Last Tape. You can read reports of how the audience reacted.

Several directors have brought Breath to life. Artist Damien Hirst had a go for the 2002 Beckett on Film project. As seen above, his version has very spectacular rubbish gathered from a hospital and, glimpsed in the final seconds, a cigarette butt swastika.

Below, check out a more “traditional” interpretation of the play from the National Theatre School of Canada’s Tech Production class. After that comes a repeat of Hirst’s version, and then one more alternative, Darren Smyth’s 2009 TV static-filled attempt. (The rest of the video is a mixed bag of the Alan Parsons Project and a Tim Burton short, don’t ask why.)

Despite Beckett’s morose reputation, there’s always a black humor underneath it all. And if you’re going to ask the man to write an “erotic skit,” this is what you get, the futility of life from womb to tomb in a minute.

Finally, you can watch an informative mini lecture on the play, presented by Dr. Catherine Brown for the New College of the Humanities.

Samuel Beckett Directs His Absurdist Play Waiting for Godot (1985)

Monsterpiece Theater Presents Waiting for Elmo, Calls BS on Samuel Beckett

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Meryl Streep Have Fun with Accents: Bronx, Polish, Irish, Australian, Yiddish & More

in Comedy, Film, Television, Theatre | March 18th, 2015

Meryl Streep, frequently hailed as one of our Greatest Living Actresses — she claims there’s no such thing — commands a near-encyclopedic mastery of accents.

Others may prepare for their roles by working with a dialect coach or listening to tapes of native speakers, but Streep pushes to the limit, as indicated in the conversation with author Andre Dubus III, below.

She not only learned Polish in order to play a troubled Holocaust survivor in Sophie’s Choice, she thought deeply about the way gender roles and period inform vocal presentation.

Clearly a lot of effort goes into the performances that leave British critics cheering Streep as she sails above playing fields littered with American actors who dared attempt English accents.

Her commitment to her craft is inadvertently to blame for popularizing the phrase “dingo’s got my baby.”

How refreshing that this versatile and accomplished actor is not precious about her skills. She gamely trotted them out for the comedian Ellen DeGeneres’ parlor game, above. Looks like fun, provided one’s not an introvert. Each player draws a card labelled with an accent, sticks it to the brim of a silly hat, then tried to guess the accent, based on her partner’s impromptu performance.

“Brooklyn?” Streep giggles when the Louisiana-born DeGeneres has a go at Boston.

Her stab at the Bronx shows off her improv chops far better than the most recent stunt DeGeneres roped her into.

(For what it’s worth, Ben Affleck also excelled at this game. The late Robin Williams was less convincing, but characteristically irrepressible, even when called upon to impersonate speakers of other races.)

- Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and low budget theater impresario. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Elementary School Students Perform in a Play Inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

in Film | March 17th, 2015

Image by Janet McMillan appeared in The Milwaukee Record

For those of us with kids, the grade school play is usually a combination of parental pride and teeth-grating nostalgic civic lesson and/or Bible study. Not so at Milwaukee, WI’s Highland Community School where super cool drama teacher Barry Weber has written and produced Judy Plays with Fire, a love letter to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks and other Lynchophilia.

The play has all the hallmarks of the director–red curtains, strobe lights, smoke machines, a Badalamenti-esque score–along with a backwards-speaking character in a red suit, two earnest and upstanding detectives, lumberjacks, rabbits, mysterious people in white masks, a Log Lady-like character who talks to a Slinky, and a middle America town called “Centerville” that, like Laura Palmer, is “full of secrets.” One character mimes Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Understood” into a LED wand–shades of Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet. Character names like Mr. Frost and the MacLachlans nod to the creators and actors behind Twin Peaks. The entire cast is played by 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, and apart from Mr. Weber, the production is crewed by Highland students as well.

This isn’t Weber’s first go at pushing the boundaries of school theater. His student theater group put on 2014’s ZERO, a cyberpunk tale, and a post-apocalyptic zombie production in 2010 called Penguin Attack.
The production got the attention of the Milwaukee Record who sent reporter Matt Wild out to see the three performance run that finished last Friday. He even gave it a bit of a Variety-style review, saying that

“In the case of Judy, (Maeve) Haley is terrific as the inquisitive Cooper surrogate, though diminutive CJ Young steals the show as the scheming Mr. Frost. Whether he’s barking orders to his flunkies or lording over his animatronic house band, Young—who had to take time off from acting two years ago due to conflicts with basketball practice—imbues his character with a surprising amount of gravitas and menace.”

Matt Wild also talked to Weber, who spoke of his desire to give kids more challenging works.

“I want to make sure that when I write the scripts there are no ‘trees,’” Weber says, referencing grade school plays that often give students thankless roles as inanimate objects. “I want to write the kind of plays that as a kid I would have really wanted to do. I certainly didn’t know who David Lynch was when I was a kid, but I’m sure I would have really enjoyed it.”

No video has surfaced yet to match the intriguing production stills, but we’re on the lookout. In the meantime, how well do you know Judy?

via Welcome to Twin Peaks

The Paintings of Filmmaker/Visual Artist David Lynch

Watch David Lynch’s Hotel Room: The Complete Miniseries Featuring Harry Dean Stanton, Griffin Dunne, and Crispin Glover (1993)

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hysterical Literature: Art & Sexuality Collide in Readings of Whitman, Emerson & Other Greats (NSFW)

Quentin Tarantino Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghetti Westerns

How Akira Kurosawa Used Movement to Tell His Stories: A Video Essay

The Touching Story Behind Paraguay’s Landfill Orchestra: Now Told in Film, and Soon a Book

A Mesmerizing Supercut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

Take a “Breath” and Watch Samuel Beckett’s One-Minute Play

Watch Meryl Streep Have Fun with Accents: Bronx, Polish, Irish, Australian, Yiddish & More

Elementary School Students Perform in a Play Inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search