Last year, we posted on a song archive of novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who, it turns out, was also quite a singer. As she traveled through the American South and the Caribbean doing field research in the 1930s and ‘40s, Hurston collected and interpreted several folk songs and stories, sometimes working with folklorists Stetson Kennedy and Alan Lomax. Hurston dropped off the map for a few decades before a revival of her work in the 1970s caused literary scholars and historians to re-evaluate her place in American letters. One recent evaluation of her work and life, the 2008 PBS American Masters documentary Jump at the Sun, profiles the writer in all her independence, contrariness, and vigor. Unfortunately, the full documentary is not online, but you can order a copy of the award-winning film on DVD from California Newsreel or Amazon.
In the short clip above from Jump at the Sun, you can see footage Hurston shot herself, over which she sings, in her crystal clear alto, a bawdy old-time country blues song called “Uncle Bud.” Hurston called “Uncle Bud” a “jook song,” not the kind of thing sung around (or by) respectable ladies. The song comes from experiences with the infamous Chief Transfer Agent for the Texas prison system, “Uncle Bud” Russell, whose dreaded wagon, “Black Betty,” was possibly the reference for a work song immortalized by Lead belly, no stranger to Texas prisons (Russell also gets a name-check in Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special”).
Russell earned his notoriety, delivering 115,000 men and women to prison, including Clyde Barrow in 1930. The prison song, with equally profane, but slightly different lyrics, appeared on a 1960 album called The Unexpurgated Folk Songs of Men, compiled by Texas musicologist and folklorist Mack McCormick, and Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins had his own narrative of the lawman in “Bud Russell Blues.”
After Hurston’s brief rendition above, we see a photo montage of the author, smiling broadly, never without a rakishly cocked hat. Partly because of the work of folklorists and lovers of Americana like McCormick and Hurston, songs like “Uncle Bud” stayed in the lexicon of popular music, transmitted from obscure folk renditions to the blues and weaving together working-class black and white blues and folk traditions that were often never very far apart to begin with. Those worlds come together in Zydeco legend Boozoo Chavis’ take on “Uncle Bud,” but my favorite version by far is the lyrically cleaned-up, harmonica-driven stomper by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, recorded in 1956 (below).
On Tuesday night, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge outshined The Golden Gate Bridge for the first time in 75 years. That happened when artist Leo Villareal flipped a switch and illuminated 25,000 lights, turning the 1.8‑mile expanse into the world’s largest L.E.D. light sculpture. According to The New York Times, the privately-funded project, estimated to cost $8 million, “has become a darling of moneyed Silicon Valley types.” And, it’s not hard to see why. As Villareal explains in the video above, “The Bay Lights” installation runs on custom-designed software (written in C) that captures the kinetic activity around the bridge and then uses the data to sequence the lights, creating patterns that never occur twice. You can visit the installation through 2015. Learn more here.
“The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory,” said the Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner in his 1958 Paris Review interview. “Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice.”
All the same, Faulkner offered plenty of advice to young writers in 1957 and 1958, when he was a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. His various lectures and public talks during that time–some 28 hours of discussion–were tape recorded and can now be heard at the university’s Faulkner audio archive. We combed through the transcripts and selected seven interesting quotations from Faulkner on the craft of writing fiction. In most cases they were points Faulkner returned to again and again. Faulkner had a way of stammering when he composed his words out loud, so we have edited out the repetitions and false starts. We have provided links to each of the Virginia audio recordings, which are accompanied by word-for-word transcripts of each conversation.
1: Take what you need from other writers.
Faulkner had no qualms about borrowing from other writers when he saw a device or technique that was useful. In a February 25, 1957 writing class he says:
I think the writer, as I’ve said before, is completely amoral. He takes whatever he needs, wherever he needs, and he does that openly and honestly because he himself hopes that what he does will be good enough so that after him people will take from him, and they are welcome to take from him, as he feels that he would be welcome by the best of his predecessors to take what they had done.
2: Don’t worry about style.
A genuine writer–one “driven by demons,” to use Faulkner’s phrase–is too busy writing to worry about style, he said. In an April 24, 1958 undergraduate writing class, Faulkner says:
I think the story compels its own style to a great extent, that the writer don’t need to bother too much about style. If he’s bothering about style, then he’s going to write precious emptiness–not necessarily nonsense…it’ll be quite beautiful and quite pleasing to the ear, but there won’t be much content in it.
3: Write from experience–but keep a very broad definition of “experience.”
Faulkner agreed with the old adage about writing from your own experience, but only because he thought it was impossible to do otherwise. He had a remarkably inclusive concept of “experience.” In a February 21, 1958 graduate class in American fiction, Faulkner says:
To me, experience is anything you have perceived. It can come from books, a book that–a story that–is true enough and alive enough to move you. That, in my opinion, is one of your experiences. You need not do the actions that the people in that book do, but if they strike you as being true, that they are things that people would do, that you can understand the feeling behind them that made them do that, then that’s an experience to me. And so, in my definition of experience, it’s impossible to write anything that is not an experience, because everything you have read, have heard, have sensed, have imagined is part of experience.
4: Know your characters well and the story will write itself.
When you have a clear conception of a character, said Faulkner, events in a story should flow naturally according to the character’s inner necessity. “With me,” he said, “the character does the work.” In the same February 21, 1958 American fiction class as above, a student asked Faulkner whether it was more difficult to get a character in his mind, or to get the character down on paper once he had him in his mind. Faulkner replies:
I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says. It’s the ingestion and then the gestation. You’ve got to know the character. You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then, of course, you will have to do a certain amount of picking and choosing among the possibilities of his action, so that his actions fit the character which you believe in. After that, the business of putting him down on paper is mechanical.
5: Use dialect sparingly.
In a pair of local radio programs included in the University of Virginia audio archive, Faulkner has some interesting things to say about the nuances of the various dialects spoken by the various ethnic and social groups in Mississippi. But in the May 6, 1958 broadcast of “What’s the Good Word?” Faulkner cautions that it’s important for a writer not to get carried away:
I think it best to use as little dialect as possible because it confuses people who are not familiar with it. That nobody should let the character speak completely in his own vernacular. It’s best indicated by a few simple, sparse but recognizable touches.
The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.
7: Don’t make excuses.
In the same February 25, 1957 writing class, Faulkner has some blunt words for the frustrated writer who blames his circumstances:
I have no patience, I don’t hold with the mute inglorious Miltons. I think if he’s demon-driven with something to be said, then he’s going to write it. He can blame the fact that he’s not turning out work on lots of things. I’ve heard people say, “Well, if I were not married and had children, I would be a writer.” I’ve heard people say, “If I could just stop doing this, I would be a writer.” I don’t believe that. I think if you’re going to write you’re going to write, and nothing will stop you.
Name the three figures, living or dead, with whom you would most like to sit down to dinner. Though perhaps a little tired, the challenge still reveals something worth knowing about the respondent’s personality. If I know the personalities of Open Culture readers at all, I’d wager that more than a few of you would choose to set places at the table for Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Arthur C. Clarke. Anyone interested in asking the big, existential questions and understanding the science underneath them would have the time of their lives at such a meal, especially if astrophysically inclined. But until a genie grants you this wish, may we offer God, the Universe, and Everything Else?
Presented by Magnus Magnusson, longtime host of the BBC’s Mastermind, this program brings the three together to discuss “the Big Bang theory, God, our existence as well as the possibility of extraterrestrial life.” Hawking, of course, talks through his signature speech synthesizer, and Sagan joins up through a satellite link — beamed through, yes, the very sort of floating miracles of engineering that Clarke wrote about in his novels. With minds like these, you can rest assured that the conversation won’t stray far from what Sagan calls “the fundamental questions,” nor will it come untethered from established human knowledge and float into the realms of wild speculation and wishful thinking. And of course, in such conversations, a sense of humor like Hawking’s — a man who, not expected to reach age thirty, would nevertheless live to see more advancement in human knowledge than anyone else on the broadcast — never goes amiss.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Today at 8 p.m. EST Google Art Project will launch a new series, Art Talks. Like Google’s other Hangouts on Air, Art Talks will convene some of the most influential people of our time.
Each month Art Talks will feature a conversation with curators, museum directors, historians, or educators from world-renowned cultural institutions, who “will reveal the hidden stories behind particular works, examine the curation process and provide insights into particular masterpieces or artists.”
For today’s talk Deborah Howes, director of digital learning at the Museum of Modern Art, will moderate a panel of artists and students for a discussion about how to teach art online. To post a question for the group, visit the Google event page.
The talk will be broadcast live at 8 p.m. EST. Afterwards it’ll be available on Google Art Project’s YouTube channel.
Later this month Caroline Campbell and Arnika Schmidt from the National Gallery will discuss depictions of the female nude. In April, a panel will examine the gigapexil project based on Bruegel’s “Tower of Babel.”
The question “what is art?” has not been answered so much as exponentially dismantled in the past 100 years, such that, at present, it’s more or less meaningless to assert that some higher aesthetic realm exists apart from the splash and topicality of street art, product design, or advertising. Museums find themselves not so much curators of high culture as interpreters of what’s happening now, including such “low” arts as, say, graffiti, hip hop, rock photography, and, most recently, video games.
Which brings us to the Museum of Modern Art’s video game exhibit opening this Friday. Does the idea make you gasp? Well, according to MoMA Senior Curator Paola Antonelli in the video above, you are “in a dramatic minority… out of space and out of time.” Is she for real? It really doesn’t matter, since the final word on what is or isn’t art rests with… well, no one, really. And that is, in my humble opinion, a salutary legacy of the modernist revolution in the arts. Maybe if everyone’s a critic these days, then everyone’s also an artist, but especially those designers and programmers who gave us such enduring classics as Pac-Man, Tetris, SimCity, and Myst, all of which have made the cut in MoMA’s exhibition.
This is not the first large-scale exhibition of video games in a major art museum. In March-September, 2012, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art staged The Art of the Video Game, which featured eighty games, selected with help from the public, and video interviews with twenty game developers. Curated by gamer and collector Chris Melissinos, the exhibition made an extensive case for video games as art. See the Smithsonian exhibition trailer below, and decide for yourself if video games belong in museums. You’re the critic, after all.
Update: Not long after we posted this, NPR took the audio offline. We told you to act quickly, but we didn’t expect that quickly! Sorry for the inconvenience.
We all need guides for the overwhelming world of the Internet. Digital curators are essential to sifting through the vast and expanding supply of online content because they find the good stuff that’s worth checking out.
When Download the Universe launched a year ago, the digital world gained a smart and discerning curator for the growing number of science ebooks. What a boon for science lovers. Science lends itself uniquely to apps and ebook publishing. And doing what digital publishing does best, a good ebook can bring content to life like no paperback or hardcover can.
Take Harper Collins’ Fragile Earth ($2.99 on iTunes), which came out originally as a glossy coffee table book. Loaded with before and after photos of places on the planet scarred by deforestation and climate change, the book was visually stunning, if pedantic. But when released as an ebook, the whole experience unfolded like a beautiful, heartbreaking origami.
As Download the Universe’s review of the Fragile Earth ebook points out, the app version benefits from digital technology, laying before and after satellite images over one another, rather than side by side, making the experience of seeing them even more profound.
Here’s another one: Color Uncovered (free on iTunes), produced by San Francisco’s Exploratorium Museum, is a rich experience like a museum exhibit itself. Combining text with images and interactive features, the ebook explores how the eye perceives color. The reviewer, New York Times contributor Carl Zimmer, uses his review to discuss what the ebook experience shares with museum exhibits.
In the hands of Download the Universe, it appears that ebook publishing has matured into its own genre, with its own distinct advantages.
Sometimes ebook publishers don’t make good use of available features. This review of Blindsight by journalist Chris Colin notes that the book’s app version, telling the story of a television director who suffers a brain injury, should have included neurological background information in the main story, not as a separate feature.
Download the Universe only reviews ebooks in the digital universe, not spin-offs from traditional print books. They look at Kindle products, self-published pdf manuscripts and apps, and they’ve got top-notch talent reviewing this brave new world on our behalf. The editorial board includes some names you may well recognize, like Sean Carroll (Caltech physicist), Steve Silberman (Wired), Maggie Koerth-Baker (Boing Boing), Annalee Newitz (io9), and David Dobbs (NYTimes, Nat Geo, etc.).
Most theaters in America seem by now to have equipped themselves for digital projection. But just a year or two ago, distributors had to send out digital copies of their movies to some venues and celluloid prints to others. As it hasn’t proven quite the revelation its boosters had hoped, the latest wave of 3D pictures still has to deal with the fact that certain theaters accept a higher-tech version, but most need a lower-tech one. In 1929, cinema found itself in much the same technical situation, but regarding sound. Even as Alfred Hitchcock began shooting his tenth film, Blackmail, as a traditional silent, British International Pictures decided he should join the popular “talkies” just then opening in England. This required Hitchcock to deliver both a sound and a silent version of the picture — and to incorporate sound recording on the fly.
Above you see — and, more importantly, hear — a sound test Hitchcock made with Anny Ondra, Blackmail’s lead actress. For a demonstration of what at the time surely seemed like a complicated new cinematic technology, it has an amusingly risqué goofiness. Starting this 42-second conversation, a wisecracking young Hitchcock asks to hear Ondra’s voice. “But Hitch, you mustn’t do that,” she insists. “Why not?” asks the director. “Well,” replies the hesitant actress, “because I can’t speak well.” Indeed, the Czech Ondra spoke with an accent, which forced the production to “dub” her lines, live, with an English actress standing offstage. As sound swept the motion picture industry, Blackmail’s leading lady suffered the fate of many an unacceptably-voiced silent star and returned to the Continent. As for its director, well, we’d hear a bit more from him. You can watch Hitchcock’s first talkie in full below.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
According to Buddhist scholar and translator Robert Thurman (father of Uma), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Bardo Thodol, “organizes the experiences of the between—(Tibetan, bar-do) usually referring to the state between death and rebirth.” While The Book of the Dead has, of course, a long and illustrious history in Tibetan Buddhist life, it also has its place in the history of the West, particularly among 20th century intellectuals and artists. In the 1950s, for example, there was talk among Igor Stravinsky, Martha Graham, and Aldous Huxley to turn the Bardo into a ballet with a Greek chorus. Huxley, who famously spent his final hours on an acid trip, asked that a passage from the book be read to him as he lay dying: “Hey! Noble one, you named Aldous Huxley! Now the time has come for you to seek the way….”
In another, less trippy, example of Eastern mysticism meets Western artist, the video above (continued below) features poet and troubadour Leonard Cohen narrating a two-part documentary series from 1994 that explores the ancient Tibetan teachings on death and dying. As Cohen tells it above, in Tibetan tradition, the time spent in the between supposedly lasts 49 days after a person’s death. During that time, a Buddhist yogi reads the Bardo each day, while the consciousness of the dead person, so it is believed, hovers between one life and another, and can hear the instructions read to him or her. The film gives us an intimate look at this ceremony, performed after the death of a villager—with its intricate rituals and ancient, unbound, hand-printed text of the book—and touches on the tricky political issues of Buddhist practice in largely Chinese-controlled Tibet. In this first installment above, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Way of Life, the Dalai Lama weighs in with his own views on life and death (at 33:22). Before his appearance, the film provides some brief context of his supposed incarnation from the 13th Dalai Lama and his rise to governance, then exile.
The second installment of the series, The Great Liberation (also above), follows an old Buddhist lama and a thirteen-year-old novice monk as they guide another deceased person with the text of the Bardo. The National Film Board of Canada, who produced the series (you can purchase the DVD on their website), did well in their choice of Cohen as narrator. Not only is his deep, soothing voice the kind of thing you might want to hear reading to you as you slipped into the between realms (or just slipped off to sleep), but his own journey has brought him to an abiding appreciation for Buddhism. Although Cohen has always identified strongly with Judaism—incorporating Jewish themes and texts into his songs and poetry—he found refuge in Zen Buddhism late in life. Two years after this film, he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk at age 62, at the Mount Baldy Zen Center east of Los Angeles (where Ram Dass, Oliver Stone, and Richard Gere also practiced). Cohen’s “Dharma name”? Jikan, or “Silent One.”
In late 1964, when he was at the height of his success, Peter Sellers filmed a series of vaudevillian sketches with a group of wealthy and socially elite friends. He edited the scenes together into a movie and called it I Say I Say I Say.
The ten-minute film was made during a weekend at the home of Jocelyn and Jane Stevens. Jocelyn Stevens was the publisher of Queen magazine and had recently gained notoriety by financing the controversial pirate radio ship Caroline–hence the reference to “the Duke and Duchess of Caroline.” A drawing of the pirate ship appears at the beginning of the film on top of the Duke and Duchess’s coat of arms, with its symbols for money and guns and the Latin motto “Errare Humanum Est” (“To Err is Human”).
Sellers is joined in the film by his pregnant wife Britt Ekland, the Stevenses, Princess Margaret and her husband Anthony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon. Sellers jokingly called the enterprise “Snowdodeodo Productions.” In one scene, Lord Snowdon appears as a rather effeminate gangster. But the most famous episode features Sellers as “The Great Berko,” recently returned from his “dramatic success at the Workmen’s Institute, Penge,” who presents an uncanny impersonation of Her Royal Highness, Princess Margaret. Sellers disappears behind a screen and out comes–of course–the real Princess Margaret, sister of Queen Elizabeth II.
I Say I Say I Say was locked away in the Sellers family archives until about 1995, when the BBC produced The Peter Sellers Story. The film was never intended for public exhibition. “It was totally improvised,” Lord Snowdon told The Telegraph in 2004. “Peter had a camera that he wanted to try out. It was all very haphazard. We made the whole thing in I should think two hours.”
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