When it comes to title design, no one did it better than Saul Bass (1920–1996). During his long career in Hollywood, Bass designed sequences for Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm, Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Cape Fear, Kubrick’s Spartacus, and several classic films by Alfred Hitchcock. And that’s just beginning to scratch the surface. (You can delve into Bass’ other creative work via the links below.)
How does one read Twitter literature? Your thoughts are as good as mine. I suppose I’ll have to learn or end up in the ash heap of old-timey turners of pages. Because Twit Lit is upon us, manifested by Jennifer Egan and now, under the twitter handle “Bitchuation,” by mercurial filmmaker Steven Soderbergh. Having announced his retirement from filmmaking in 2011, Soderbergh made another announcement at the San Francisco Film Festival on the State of Cinema (video above, transcript here). The following day, Soderbergh’s Twitter novella Glue began with the laconic April 28 tweet “I will now attempt to tweet a novella called GLUE.”
Some unique features of Twit Lit: Soderbergh can twitpic an establishing shot—which he does, of Amsterdam—along with pics of other locations (or just vaguely suggestive images). The individual tweets often read like Horse ebooks absurdities. He’s up to Chapter Fourteen now. The later tweets replicate screenplay dialogue, with copious insertions of BEAT to signify dramatic pauses. Taken together, I suppose there’s coherence, though as I admitted above, I have not mastered the ability to pull tweets together into longer text in my mind, Twitter being where I go when my attention span is spent.
I leave it to savvier, more patient readers to judge the success of Soderbergh’s attempt. It may suffice to say that his pessimism about the state of film does not apply to Twitter Lit. Or maybe he’s just passing time before he makes movies again.
John Waters seems, now, to have a grand old time being John Waters. But what kind of trials must the director of Pink Flamingos have endured growing up in midcentury suburban America with his distinctive set of interests, proclivities, and aesthetics? The half-hour Channel 4 documentary Growing Up John Waters asks the filmmaker directly, and he responds with stories of the many acts of rebellion he’s had to engage in, from childhood through adulthood, to reach his full taste-transgressing potential. Along the way, we get his always entertainingly askew (if ultimately sensible) perspectives on the early sixties, religion, the Cold War, sports, shoplifting, the Civil Rights movement, and Elvis.
Rebellion John Waters-style, as fans would expect, bears little resemblance to the ways we’ve long expected kids to push back against authority. “What were your childhood fantasies?” the interviewer asks as an opener. “I ain’t tellin’ you,” Waters responds. “If I ever write about my sex life, I’m making the money on it, not Channel 4.” And indeed, you can read much in his three books of prose now available, but Growing Up John Waters by no means skips on the insight, even in matters copulatory. While discussing the surreal nature of his movies’ love scenes, for instance, Waters makes an admission that foreshadows the theme of A Dirty Shame, which he would make a decade later: “I love sex. But it would be better if I had thought it up.”
What would a modern Marie Antoinette look like? Her hair would hang down; her once crooked teeth would be straightened; she’d continue to wear designer clothes; and, yes, she’d sadly have some surgical enhancements too. A far cry from how the more stately Queen Elizabeth I might look today. These images come out of a Telegraph gallery that gives historical figures a modern makeover. Other figures re-imagined here include Shakespeare (who goes a little hipster doofus), Henry VIII, and Admiral Lord Nelson.
Who were the first economic thinkers? What are the very origins of economic thought? What did earlier economists understand but has been lost to the modern world? Why is Adam Smith the greatest economist of all time? How did the economic issues of the 18th and 19th centuries shape the thoughts of the classical economists? This class, which covers the history of economic thought up until the “Marginal Revolution” in the 1870s, will answer all of these questions and many others.
The course starts with Galileo and the theory of value; touches on Montesquieu and Mandeville; offers to an introduction to Mercantilism and the Physiocrats, and then really comes to focus on David Hume and mostly Adam Smith and his classic treatise, The Wealth of Nations (find it in our collection of Free eBooks), before turning to later thinkers and periods.
You can sign up for The Great Economists here. And it will be added to our list of 300 MOOCs from Great Universities.
Here’s a strikingly unconventional interpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 1806 composition, 32 Variations on an Original Theme in C minor, by the Canadian virtuoso pianist Glenn Gould. It was recorded in Toronto in March of 1966 for a special program, “Conversations with Glenn Gould,” which featured an in-depth discussion between Gould and the BBC arts reporter Humphrey Burton. You can find the complete program broken up into pieces at the CBC Web site. And for an especially interesting 35-minute segment, in which Gould explains and demonstrates his idiosyncratic approach to interpreting Beethoven, see below:
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—often considered the first existentialist—was born 200 years ago this past Sunday in Copenhagen. Writing under pseudonyms like Johannes Climacus and Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard attacked both the idealism of contemporary philosophers Hegel and Schelling and the bourgeois complacency of European Christendom. A highly skilled rhetorician, Kierkegaard preferred the indirect approach, deploying irony, ridicule, parody and satire in a paradoxical search for individual authenticity within a European culture he saw as beset by self-important puffery and unthinking mass movements.
While millions of readers have embraced Kierkegaard’s probing method, as many have also rejected his faith-based conclusions. Nevertheless, his strikingly eccentric skewering of the tepidly faithful and overly optimistic breathed light and heat into the nineteenth century debates among modern Christians as they confronted the findings of science and the challenges posed by world religions and materialist philosophers like Karl Marx.
Marx and Kierkegaard’s many contrasts and contradictions are well represented in Episode 4 of the BBC documentary series Sea of Faith, “Prometheus Unbound” (part one at top, part two immediately above). The 1984 six-part series—named in reference to Matthew Arnold’s famous poem “Dover Beach” and hosted by radical theologian Don Cupitt—examines the ways in which the Copernican and Darwinian scientific revolutions and the work of critics of religious doctrine like Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Strauss, and Schweitzer shook the foundations of orthodox Christianity. Here, Kierkegaard is played in reenactments with appropriate intensity by British actor Colin Jeavons.
You can learn more about the documentary series (and purchase DVDs) here. And for more on Kierkegaard, you would be well-served by listening to Walter Kaufmann’s lecture above. For a lighter-hearted but still rigorous take on the philosopher, be sure to catch the well-read, irreverent gents at the Partially Examined Life podcast in a discussion of Kierkegaard’s earnest and often disturbing defense of existential Christianity, The Sickness Unto Death.
Anyone who’s watched Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver surely remembers, or has remained haunted by, many images from the film, most of which — if not all— began as humble pencil drawings. Like many major motion pictures, Taxi Driver began not just as a script but also as a storyboard, the piece of comic book-like sequential art filmmakers use to plan shots, camera movements, and character placements. Some directors, like Ridley Scott, spend time crafting detailed storyboards, while others, like the thoroughly improvisational Werner Herzog, don’t use them at all. Scorsese falls somewhere in between, sketching out storyboard panels that feel more like brief notes to himself and his closest collaborators. You can see them alongside the Taxi Driver scenes they produced in the video above.
“Storyboards express what I want to communicate,” Scorsese told Phaidon in 2011 for an article on the exhibition “Between Film and Art: Storyboards from Hitchcock to Spielberg.” “They show how I would imagine a scene and how it should move to the next.” And the effect on his process of using as seemingly flimsy a tool as a pencil? “The pencil line leaves little impression on the paper, so if the storyboard is photocopied it loses something. I refer back to my original drawings in order for me to conjure up the idea I had when I saw the pencil line made.” Every filmmaker has their own way of doing things, and as you can see when the video lines up these pencil drawings with (millions of dollars later) the finished sequences, Scorsese’s method gets results. “These storyboards are not the only means of communication for what I imagine,” the director adds at the article’s end, “but they are the point where I begin.”
From Gutenberg’s inky, monk-inspired Blacklister font to the ever-controversial Comic Sans, Barrett-Forrest employs stop motion to spell out the quantifiable reasons that certain serifs and stroke types are easy on the eye. Let’s not tell the creators of Llama Font or Mr. Twiggy, but legibility is the mother of survival in this arena.
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Ayun Halliday has devoted the last 15 years to producing The East Village Inky, an entirely handwritten zine whose aging readers complain that they can no long make out the tiny print.
Andy Stewart builds boats with his own hands for life-affirming reasons. It’s a way to make inanimate objects come alive, to breathe new life into our world. But Stewart also enjoys the challenge of it all. The sea, he tells us, is the “final arbitrator” of your work. Quite decisively, it tells you whether a boat has been crafted with precision, whether every piece of wood contributes to the larger hull/whole. If your boat can stand the rigorous tests of nature and time, you know you’ve mastered your craft. The short documentary above, Shaped on all Six Sides, was directed by Kat Gardiner.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Great talents seem to embody their craft. It’s as if they invented the form and then broke the mold when they were finished with it.
One of the best modern examples of this virtuosity is Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs Bunny and nearly all of the Looney Tunes cartoon gang. Blanc, who voiced more than 1,000 characters, was famously hard-working. At one point in his career, he scrambled from studio to studio around Los Angeles to work on 18 radio shows in one week.
As Malcolm Gladwell likes to say, that kind of practice leads to mastery. And, in Mel Blanc’s case, it may have saved his life.
Radio Lab, broadcast over WNYC, recently aired a piece about Blanc (listen below) featuring an interview with his son Noel Blanc, who is also a voice actor. Noel Blanc tells the story of a terrible car accident that badly injured his father in 1961 as he was driving home along Sunset Boulevard from a job in San Francisco. Mel Blanc, driving an Aston Martin, collided with another car on Dead Man’s Curve. Blanc was almost killed and slipped into a coma. Blanc’s son and wife spent two weeks at his bedside trying to revive him, but got no response.
One day, about 14 days after the accident, one of Blanc’s neurologists walked into the room and tried something completely new. He went to Mel’s bed and asked, “Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today?”
There was a pause while people in the room just shook their heads. Then, in a weak voice, came the response anyone would recognize.
“Myeeeeh. What’s up doc?”
The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there too.
“I tot I taw a puddy tat,” was the reply.
It took seven more months in a body cast for Blanc to recover. He even voiced Barney Rubble in the first episodes of The Flintstones whilelying in bed with a microphone dangling from above.
The Radio Lab piece includes excerpts from an episode of This is Your Life when Blanc’s doctor tried to explain how he revived his patient. “It seemed like Bugs Bunny was trying to save his life,” was all he could say.
Radio Lab features another neurologist’s opinion: Blanc was such a hard-working professional that his characters lived, protected from the brain injury, deep in his unconscious mind. The doctor’s question must have sounded like a director’s cue.
Essentially, “Mr. Blanc, you’re on.”
And he was, until 1989. Listen through to the end of the podcast. The end of Blanc’s life is as remarkable as his long career.
Below, we have added a related documentary, Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices.
Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Visit her website to see more of her work. Follow her on Twitter: @mskaterix.
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