Freddie Mercury’s Final Days: Watch a Poignant Montage That Documents the Last Chapter of the Singer’s Life

in Music | November 8th, 2018

The “biopic” has delivered dramatic retellings of famous figures’ lives since the very earliest days of cinema. We hunger, it seems, to see more-or-less-faithful approximations of our idols stride across the screen, enacting events witnessed by millions and those hidden away from everyone. In the case of popular musicians, these tend to involve epic alcohol and drug use, tumultuous love affairs, stadium-sized triumphs and the crushing defeats of falling out of cultural favor. Such scenes can prove difficult to recreate convincingly, especially the music and signature moves of world famous stars.

Condensing lifetimes into marketable narrative films that hit typical Hollywood beats also involves taking a fair amount of license. And as a spate of articles like “Everything Bohemian Rhapsody Got Wrong About Freddie Mercury’s Life” testify, the new biopic about Queen singer Freddie Mercury, played in the film by Rami Malek, twists or totally changes key events in Mercury’s life. The film re-imagines, for example, how Mercury met his bandmembers, his girlfriend Mary, and Jim Hutton, his longtime and final partner.

And, oddly, it imagines Mercury telling Queen about his HIV diagnosis during rehearsals for their 1985 Live Aid appearance, which it stages as a reunion, showing the band as having been on hiatus while members pursued solo projects. The truth, however, is that Mercury didn’t receive his diagnosis until 1987, and his bandmates weren’t fully aware of his illness until 1989. And when the band came together to perform at Live Aid, they had just toured the world in support of their 1984 album The Works.

Such distortions are a little perplexing given that Brian May and Roger Taylor served as creative consultants, sitting in on set during the production. The film has been also been accused of “straightwashing” Mercury’s sexuality and glossing over his roots and religion. You’ll have to evaluate the merits of these charges for yourself, but the case remains that if we want to know what Mercury’s life was really like, we need to supplant the entertaining fiction with the even more compelling truth.

The video above helps in some small part to fill gaps in our knowledge of Mercury’s last years, editing together interviews, TV clips, and performance footage. Although Mercury was very sick during this period, you would hardly have known it, and most of the people around him didn’t. He continued to write and record, working hard on Queen’s last album, Innuendo, released in the final year of his life.

We learn that his closest friends, colleagues, and bandmembers were in denial, “right up to the last minute,” as Brian May says, about the severity of his disease. “We sort of refused to know” how bad it was, May admits. Mercury himself pushed the knowledge away, immersing himself in his music to keep going. “The sicker Freddie got,” says Roger Taylor, “the more he seemed to need to record to give himself something to do, you know, some sort of reason to get up… so it was a period of fairly intense work.”

Mercury’s early death was tragic, but he met it heroically. And though his bandmates struggled to face the truth, they rallied around him in support, both in life and in death. When the tabloid press viciously slandered and attacked him, May and Taylor went on television to defend their friend. “He had a very responsible attitude to everyone that he was close to and he was a very generous and caring person to all the people that came through his life and more than that you can’t ask,” said May in a 1991 interview appearance after Mercury passed away. “I tell you we do feel absolutely bound to stick up for him,” added Taylor, “because he can’t stick up for himself anymore, you know?”

via Laughing Squid

A First Glimpse of Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury, Compared with the Real Freddie Mercury Performing at Live Aid in 1985

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Disgusting Food Museum Curates 80 of the World’s Most Repulsive Dishes: Maggot-Infested Cheese, Putrid Shark & More

in Food & Drink, Museums | November 8th, 2018

Often we get to know each other by talking which foods we like. Perhaps even more often, we get to know each other by talking about which foods we hate. Entertaining disagreements tend to arise from such discussions, usually around traditionally divisive comestibles like anchovies, cilantro, brussel sprouts, or the Japanese dish of fermented soybeans known as natto. But however many of us prefer to avoid them, these foods all look more or less conventional compared to the dishes curated by the Disgusting Food Museum, which the Washington Post’s Maura Judkis describes as “the world’s first exhibition devoted to foods that some would call revolting.”

“The exhibit has 80 of the world’s most disgusting foods,” says the museum’s official site. Adventurous visitors will appreciate the opportunity to smell and taste some of these notorious foods. Do you dare smell the world’s stinkiest cheese? Or taste sweets made with metal cleansing chemicals?” Judkis notes that “the museum’s name and its contents are pretty controversial — one culture’s disgusting is another culture’s delicacy.

That goes for escamoles, the tree-ant larvae eaten in Mexico, or shirako, the cod sperm eaten in Japan, or bird’s nest soup, a Chinese dish of nests made from bird saliva.” It all goes to emphasize the Disgusting Food Museum’s stated premises: “Disgust is one of the six fundamental human emotions. While the emotion is universal, the foods that we find disgusting are not. What is delicious to one person can be revolting to another.”

With interest in food seemingly at an all-time high — and not just food, but traditional food from all around the world — the cultural studies wing of academia has begun to get serious mileage out of that proposition. But the Disgusting Food Museum has taken on a less intellectual and much more visceral mission, placing before its visitors durian fruit, banned from many a public space across Asia for its sheer stinkiness; casu marzu, which the museum’s site describes as “maggot-infested cheese from Sardinia”; and hákarl, which Judkis describes as “a putrid shark meat dish from Iceland that the late Anthony Bourdain said was one of the worst things he had ever tasted.”

You can learn more about these and the Disgusting Food Museum’s other offerings from the Associated Press video at the top of the post, as well as at Smithsonian and the New York Times. If you’d like to see, smell, and even taste some of its exhibits for yourself, you’ll have to make the trek out to Malmö, Sweden. The project comes from the mind of Samuel West, a Swede best known for creating the Museum of Failure (previously featured here on Open Culture), whose half-American parentage has made him familiar with several items of U.S. cuisine that gross out non-Americans, from Spam to Jell‑O pasta salad (shades of James Lileks’ midcentury midwest-focused Gallery of Regrettable Food) to Rocky Mountain oysters. Despite being American myself, I’ve never known anyone who likes that last, a dish made of bull testicles, or at least no one has ever admitted to me that they like it. But if someone did, I’d certainly feel as if I’d learned something about them.

Salvador Dalí’s 1973 Cookbook Gets Reissued: Surrealist Art Meets Haute Cuisine

What Prisoners Ate at Alcatraz in 1946: A Vintage Prison Menu

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 or on Faceboo k.

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An Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More

in Books, Literature, Maps | November 7th, 2018

Plot, setting, character… we learn to think of these as discrete elements in literary writing, comparable to the strategy, board, and pieces of a chess game. But what if this scheme doesn’t quite work? What about when the setting is a character? There are many literary works named and well-known for the unforgettable places they introduce: Walden, Wuthering Heights, Howards End…. There are invented domains that seem more real to readers than reality: Faulkner’s Yoknapatowpha, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex… There are works that describe impossible places so vividly we believe in their existence against all reason: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, China Miéville’s The City and the City, Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”….

What sustains our belief in the integrity of fictional places? The fact that they seem to act upon events as much as the people who live in them, for one thing. And, just as often, the fact that so many authors and illustrators draw elaborate maps of literary settings, making their features real to us and embedding them in our minds.

A new book, The Writer’s Map, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones, offers lovers of literary maps—whether in non-fiction, realism, or fantasy—the opportunity to pore over maps of Thomas More’s Utopia (said to be the first literary map), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Branwell Brontë’s Verdopolis (above), and so many more.

The book is filled with essays about literary mapping by writers and map-makers, and it touches on the way authors themselves view imaginative mapping. “For some writers making a map is absolutely central to the craft of shaping and telling their tale,” writes Lewis-Jones. For others, making maps is also a way to avoid the painful task of writing, which Philip Pullman calls “a matter of sullen toil.” Drawing, on the other hand, he says, “is pure joy. Drawing a map to go with a story is messing around, with the added fun of coloring it in.” David Mitchell agrees: “As long as I was busy dreaming of topography,” he says of his maps, “I didn’t have to get my hands dirty with the mechanics of plot and character.”

It may surprise you to hear that writers hate to write, but writers are people, after all, and most people find writing tedious and difficult in some part. What all of the writers featured in this collection share is that they love indulging their imaginations, making real their lucid dreams, whether through the diversion of drawing maps or the grind of grammar and syntax. Many of these maps, like Thoreau’s drawing of Walden Pond or Johann David Wyss’s illustration of the desert island in The Swiss Family Robinson, accompanied their books into publication. Many more remained secreted in authors’ notebooks.

There are many such “private treasures” in The Writer’s Map, notes Atlas Obscura: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s own sketch of Mordor, on graph paper; C.S. Lewis’s sketches; unpublished maps from the notebooks of David Mitchell… Jack Kerouac’s own route in On the Road….” Do we read a literary map differently when it wasn’t meant for us? Can maps be sly acts of misdirection as well as whimsical visual aids? Should we treat them as paratextual and unnecessary, or are they central, when an author chooses to include them, to our understanding of a story? Such questions, and many, many more, are taken up in The Writer’s Map, a long overdue survey of this longstanding literary tradition.

via Atlas Obscura

Map of Middle-Earth Annotated by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

William Faulkner Draws Maps of Yoknapatawpha County, the Fictional Home of His Great Novels

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Behind the Banksy Stunt: An In-Depth Breakdown of the Artist’s Self-Shredding Painting

in Art | November 7th, 2018

By now, even those of us who pay no attention at all to the art market have heard about Banksy’s latest art stunt: a painting called Balloon Girl that, when it sold for $1.4 million at auction, then immediately shredded itself. Assessments on the intent and impact of the piece’s self-destruction have varied: many have complained that, far from the bold statement against the economics of modern art it may have looked like (and many of Banksy’s fans may well have come to expect from his artistic persona), it could also be nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt to raise the speculative value of his work further still. And a counterpoint, in the words of economist Tyler Cowen, an expert on the economics of culture in his own right: “Banksy is a genius.”

So how properly to think about the Balloon Girl stunt, which has received no small amount of press but which remains something of an unsettled issue? Here to help clarify the matter is a new and topical episode of The Art Assignment, John and Sarah Green’s web series previously featured here on Open Culture.

As well as providing a brief primer on Banksy and the way his career has so far made its mark (often literally) on the world, the eleven-minute video gets into how his building a shredder into a picture frame and setting it off at the moment of sale fits into his body of work, art history, and the international art scene as it is today.

“There are many ways a work of art comes into being, be it an additive process, a subtractive process, one that must unfold in space and time, or one that’s immaterial and not existing until the moment it’s performed and then disappearing as soon as it’s over,” says Sarah Green. “Girl with Balloon was one artwork, and now it’s another that came into being through a public auction but which still very much has a material presence, because the object wasn’t destroyed — it’s only half-shredded — and since it was canvas going through, the remaining fringe is pretty stable.” In a sense, then, even this self-destructing artwork never really self-destructed. So what, in artistic terms, actually happened to it? We may continue arguing about it for years, but it will always come back to the shredding itself — an event relivable at any time in Banksy’s “director’s cut” video just above.

When Robert Rauschenberg Asked Willem De Kooning for One of His Paintings … So That He Could Erase It

Watch Dismaland — The Official Unofficial Film, A Cinematic Journey Through Banksy’s Apocalyptic Theme Park

Banksy Creates a Tiny Replica of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens

The Art Assignment: Learn About Art & the Creative Process in a New Web Series by John & Sarah Green

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 or on Faceboo k.

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What Are the Most Influential Books Written by Scholars in the Last 20 Years?: Leading Academics Pick “The New Canon”

in Books | November 7th, 2018

It’s a fraught time to be an academic. Budgets have been slashed, departments decimated, political battles sensationalized by partisan opportunists, social media posts intensified into test cases for speech. Yet as corporatism and culture wars have pushed their way into academia in the past twenty plus years, more scholarship has seemed to make its way out into the mainstream, with books by academic historians like Eric Foner and Ibram X. Kendi, literary scholars like Stephen Greenblatt and bell hooks, sociologists like Robert Putnam, scientists like Richard Dawkins, economists like Thomas Piketty, legal scholars like Michelle Alexander, and so on, topping bestseller lists and winning National Book Awards.

Such books distill difficult ideas without dumbing them down, in accessible and often urgent prose. Their popularity speaks to how they address the pressing issues of their times, and undercuts the stereotype of academics as jargon-spewing, out-of-touch inhabitants of ivory towers. And they often have the power to not only radically alter public discourse, but to inspire mass movements and shift public policy.

Most of the more than 15,000 academic books published each year—by university presses or tiny independents—reach only “their core audience of disciplinary specialists.” A few resonate outside their fields yet still fail to find an audience outside higher education circles (nor are they really meant to).

But some books by scholars, like those by the authors named above, “enter the public consciousness,” writes The Chronicle of Higher Education, and thus deserve to be described as “influential” in a broad sense, “like On the Origin of Species or Das Kapital or The Interpretation of Dreams,” as Yale professor of psychology Paul Bloom writes (while also pointing out that none of these books’ authors were professional academics). Under the banner of forming a “New Canon,” the Chronicle asked Bloom and a number of other scholars—including Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics and author of several best-selling popular books—to name what they believed were the most influential scholarly books of the past 20 years.

Each respondent was asked “to select books—academic or not, but written by scholars—from within or outside their own fields.” Each wrote a brief defense of their choice and, in some cases, of their criteria for “influence.” You can read these blurbs at the Chronicle’s site, and just below, see a full list of the picks. Some of the books, the Chronicle concedes, fall “slightly outside our time frame, but we included them anyway.”

Some of them are typically academic works, like Mark Greif’s choice of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, a book unlikely to inspire a Netflix documentary. Others, like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, an impetus for Ava DuVernay’s 13th, were written for the widest of readerships. Do these distinctions make books like Alexander more “influential” than those like Sedgewick’s? It all depends, I suppose, on what we mean by the word—and by what, or whom, or how, or why, or how many we think need to be influenced.

The Better Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

The History Manifesto, by Jo Guldi and David Armitage

Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, Jonathan Levy

What Art Is, by Arthur Danto

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, by Dorothy Roberts

The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, by Antonio R. Damasio

Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, by Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton

A Brief History of NeoLiberalism, by David Harvey

Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement, by Kimberle Crenshaw and Neil Gotanda

The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, by Jessica Riskin

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, by Barbara Ransby

Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, by Bernard Williams

War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution, by Peter Irons

Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers

Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship, by Daniel T. Rodgers

The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson

Read about all of the books at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Top 100 Foreign-Language Films of All-Time, According to 209 Critics from 43 Countries

in Film | November 6th, 2018

What qualifies as a “foreign-language film” is in the ear of the beholder, even if the global dominance of Hollywood effectively makes the category refer to any film in a language other than English. The sheer cultural and linguistic diversity in world cinema can seem to render the term too all-encompassing to be of much critical use. From the point of view of cinema’s purest, earliest aspirations—to be an international visual language that transcends linguistic barriers—emphasizing spoken language differences can seem to miss the point of filmic art.

On the other hand, these days multi-million-dollar popcorn blockbusters are created with international audiences foremost in mind. But that impulse, too—purely, venally, commercial—doesn’t begin to get at what makes film both a culturally specific and a universal medium.

We go to the movies to be entertained, but also to be shocked, surprised, intrigued, to be let in on the lives of people we might never meet. International film, even in its most experimental deviations, respects the universal conventions that give audiences entry to those lives, no matter what language they hear.

It is no empty saying that “the language of film is universal,” as the BBC writes in the introduction to its list of “The 100 Greatest Foreign-Language Films.” Nor is it contradictory to also point out that “the cinema of an individual nation is inevitably tied to its unique identity and history.” The latter quality is what makes non-Western film challenging, even forbidding, for viewers with more insular perspectives. The former is what makes world cinema accessible to them nonetheless.

If you’ve somehow avoided seeing some of the world’s greatest “foreign-language films”—for reasons of subtitle-aversion or otherwise, it’s never too late to overcome your resistance and discover how the cultural richness of world cinema still speaks an international language. And you can hardly go wrong with the BBC list as a guide. Compiled by 209 critics from 43 different countries who speak a total of 41 different languages, the list seems about as inclusive as it gets, with some qualifications.

“French can claim to be the international language of acclaimed cinema,” with 27 of the highest-rated films in that language, “followed by 12 in Mandarin, and 11 each in Italian and Japanese.” A full quarter of the list of films come from East Asia—Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. “If there’s anything disappointing about the final list,” the BBC notes, “it’s the paucity of films directed or co-directed by women,” just four out of 100. But female critics made up 45 percent of the respondents.

Just below see the first ten films on the list. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Akira Kurosawa makes the top ten twice, with Seven Samurai at number one and Rashomon coming in at number four. Kurosawa “was loved by critics everywhere,” except, perhaps surprisingly, in Japan, where the six critics who voted “didn’t go for a single Kurosawa film between them,” a reminder that film may be universal but criticism is not. Or as the great John Carpenter once put it, “In France, I’m an auteur. In England, I’m a horror movie director. In Germany, I’m a filmmaker. In the U.S., I’m a bum.”

You can dive into the full list of top 100 “foreign-language” films at the BBC here.

Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948)
Tokyo Story (Yasujirô Ozu, 1953)
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)
The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)

The Top 100 American Films of All Time, According to 62 International Film Critics

The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Century (So Far) Named by 177 Film Critics

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Exhilarating Filmmaking of Robert Bresson Explored in Eight Video Essays

in Film | November 6th, 2018

“Who’s afraid of Robert Bresson?” New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane once asked. “Me, for a start.” But he didn’t mean that he dreaded screenings of Au hasard Balthazar, Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, The Devil, Probably, or any other acclaimed work in the auteur’s filmography. “It’s not that I don’t look forward to a Bresson picture,” Lane clarified. “It’s just that as I shuffle into the theatre I feel like a pupil approaching the principal’s door, wondering what crimes I may have committed and how I must answer for them.”

Even now, 35 years after his final picture, Bresson intimidates with his rigor — rigor of the moral variety, certainly, but even more so of the aesthetic variety — often described (not least by the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky) in the terms of asceticism. Nevertheless, Indiewire offers a brief and friendly introduction to his cinema in the three-minute video essay at the top of the post.

Just above, in “Robert Bresson: The Essence of Cinema,” A‑BitterSweet-Life gets deeper into the Bressonian sensibility by showing clips of his films alongside clips of him working and speaking, all narrated with his own words.

“I always like to see and hear the film before I shoot it, to come up with things by working on my own, things from my memory or imagination, even if I don’t end up filming them,” Bresson says in one piece of interview footage. “These are often things I can’t come up with on the set, so I believe it’s important to create a solid groundwork, a set of constraints within which the film will take shape. Because I’m aware of these constraints, I can ask my actors, nonprofessional actors, to surprise me. Unlimited surprises but within a limited context.”

Those worlds will sound familiar to anyone who has read Notes sur le cinématographe (variously translated as Notes on Cinematography or Notes on the Cinematographer), Bresson’s collection of maxims laying out his view of his art. If observations like “To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks,” “Empty the pond to get the fish,” and “Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence” seem abstract on the page, Filmscalpel’s “Notes on Pickpocket” illustrates their enormous relevance to the effectiveness of Bresson’s work by weaving them directly into scenes of one of his best-known works.

Film scholar David Bordwell examines the same movie, but takes a much less aphoristic and much more technical tack, in “Constructive Editing in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket,” which contextualizes Bresson’s technique of constructive editing, or building a space while showing only small pieces of it at a time, as opposed to “analytical editing” that first establishes the entire space and then moves within it. Just above, critic and well-known Bresson enthusiast James Quant breaks down the much later L’Argent — or at least its use of reflections and repetition, just the R in the longer “L’Argent, A to Z” video essay Quandt created for the Criterion Collection’s release of the film.

The video essayist Kogonada, now a respected filmmaker in his own right, has so far put out two tributes to Bresson: “Hands of Bresson” just above, which concentrates on the director’s use of those body parts, and “Once There Was Everything,” about the great cinematic effect to which he put doors all throughout his career. “Why shouldn’t I put ten times more doors in my films if I feel like it?” the essay quotes him as saying. But then, the true fan knows that Bresson could hardly have countenanced using even one more door than absolutely necessary — or one more of anything else, for that matter.

In Bresson’s world, to put it in drastically reduced terms, less is more: Julian Palmer’s short video essay above even takes that phrase as its title. Bresson’s work has many virtues, few as nameable as their simplicity, but for the man himself it always had to be just the right kind of simplicity. In Notes sur le cinématographe he identifies two types: “The bad: simplicity as starting-point, sought too soon. The good: simplicity as end-product, recompense for years of effort.” Or, as he he writes elsewhere, “It is with something clean and precise that you will force the attention of inattentive eyes and ears.” A cinema that has forgotten these lessons of Bresson’s — now there’s a truly frightening proposition.

Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals His Favorite Filmmakers: Bresson, Antonioni, Fellini, and Others

The Eyes of Hitchcock: A Mesmerizing Video Essay on the Expressive Power of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

An Introduction to Jean-Luc Godard’s Innovative Filmmaking Through Five Video Essays

The Surreal Filmmaking of David Lynch Explained in 9 Video Essays

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 or on Faceboo k.

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Edward Gorey Talks About His Love Cats & More in the Animated Series, “Goreytelling”

in Animation, Books, Literature | November 6th, 2018

My childhood discovery of Edward Gorey proved revelatory. I recognized my own bewilderment in the blank expressions of his obsessively-rendered Edwardian children. His characters, imprisoned in starched collars and stays, stared at the world through hollow eyes, struck dumb by alternating currents of absurdity and horror. Every youngster with budding goth and New Romantic sensibilities found themselves drawn into Gorey’s weird worlds. Confessed Goreyphiles like Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman took much from a style Steven Kurutz describes as “camp-macabre, ironic-gothic or dark whimsy.”

He gave his readers permission to be odd and haunted, and to laugh about it, but he never seemed to have needed such permission himself. He was as sui generis as he was mysterious, the scowling older gentleman with the long white beard assumed the role of an anti-Santa, bestowing gifts of guilt-free, solitary indulgence in dark fantasy.

But the man himself remained shrouded, and that was just as well. Learning more about him as an adult, I have been struck by just how closely he resembles some of his characters, or rather, by how much he was, in work and life, entirely himself.

A fashionably bookish hermit and Wildean aesthete, a man to whom, “by his own admission… nothing happened,” Gorey organized his life in New York around reading, seeing films, and attending George Balanchine’s ballets. (He rarely missed a performance over the course of three decades, then moved to his famed Cape Cod house when Balanchine died in the mid-80s.) “Despite being a lifelong Anglophile, he made just one brief visit to Scotland and England,” writes Kurutz, “his only trip abroad.”

In a Proust Questionnaire he answered for Vanity Fair, Gorey wrote that his favorite journey was “looking out the window.” The supreme love of his life, he wrote: his cats. Those beloved creatures are the subject of the third episode of Goreytelling, at the top, an animated web series consisting of short excerpts from an upcoming documentary simply titled Gorey, directed by Christopher Seufert, who spent several years recording his conversations with Gorey. The very Gorey-like animations are by Benjamin and Jim Wickey.

If you’ve ever wondered what Edward Gorey sounded like, wonder no more. Hear his solidly Midwestern accent (Gorey grew up in Chicago) as he describes the travails of living with adorable, frustrated predators who destroy the furniture and throw themselves on his drawing table, ruining his work. Further up, he tells the story of a mummy’s head he kept wrapped up in his closet, and just above he tells a story about The Loathesome Couple a 1977 book he wrote based a series of real-life murders of British children by a married couple. “A lot people,” he says, would tell him “this one book of yours, I really find a little… much.”

Goreyphiles out there, and they number in the millions, will thoroughly enjoy these animations (see episode 2, “Fan Mail,” here and 4, “Dracula,” here). Gorey the documentary promises to bring us even closer to the curmudgeonly author and artist. His life makes for a quirky series of vignettes, but ultimately Gorey was a “Magellan of the imagination,” says cultural critic and biographer Mark Dery. “He journeyed vastly between his ears…. So that’s where you have to look for the life. On the psychic geography of his unconscious,” and in the pages of his over 100 satisfyingly unsettling books.

via Laughing Squid

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The “Most Secretive Library in the World”: The Future Library Will Collect 100 Original Manuscripts by Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell & More, to Be Read for the First Time in 2114

in Books, Libraries, Literature | November 5th, 2018

Should intelligent life of some form or another still inhabit the planet in the year 6939, such beings might come upon an “800-pound tube of an alloy of copper and chromium called Cupaloy” that was buried 50 feet beneath what was once Queens. The first time capsule, lowered under the Westinghouse exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair contains “35 items one might find in any run-of-the-mill Smith family household,” as Jinwoo Chong writes at Untapped Cities, “including copies of Life magazine, a Sears and Roebuck catalog, cigarettes and seeds of wheat, corn, alfalfa and soy.”

The Future Library, a time capsule-like project presently in the works, takes a very different approach to the concept. “A forest is growing in Norway,” explains an introductory video on creator Katie Paterson’s website. “In 100 years it will become an anthology of books.” The books that will be printed from 1,000 trees planted in Nordmarka, north of Oslo, will not, however, transmit mining and navigational instructions, but a full range of human emotion and personal experience. Or so we might assume. Unlike the 1939 time capsule, we’ll never know what’s inside them.

Scottish artist Paterson has planned a library of 100 creative works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—one manuscript submitted every year until 2114, when she intends them all to be printed in 3,000 copies each and read for the first time. Almost none of us will be there to witness the event, yet “the timescale is… not vast in cosmic terms,” she says. “It is beyond our current lifespans, but close enough to come face to face with it, to comprehend and relativize,” unlike the incomprehensible future of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or the far-off world for which Westinghouse designed their capsule.

Nonetheless, technological, and perhaps even evolutionary, change has increased exponentially in the past several decades, as have the possibilities for global extinction events. Margaret Atwood, the first author to submit an unpublished, unread manuscript to the Future Library in 2014, is characteristically less than sanguine about the existence of future readers for her manuscript, entitled Scribbler Moon. “It’s very optimistic to believe that there will still be people in 100 years,” she says in the short video above, and “that those people will still be reading.” Atwood imagines a near-future that may not even recognize our time.

Which words that we use today will be different, archaic, obsolete? Which new words will have entered the language? We don’t know what footnotes we will need. Will they have computers? Will they call them something else? What will they think smartphones are? Will that word still exist?

Writers for the project are chosen by the Future Library’s board of trustees. After the canny selection of Atwood, they chose the equally on-the-nose David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, who calls the library “the Ark of Literature.” It is a strange ark, filled with animals few people living now will likely ever see. “The world’s most secretive library,” The Guardian calls it. In 2016, Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón submitted his mysterious text. The fourth work came from Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, who named the project “a secular act of faith.”

The latest writer chosen is Man Booker-winning South Korean novelist Han Kang, who described the Future Library as a literal expression of the writer’s thoughts on their duty to posterity: “I cannot survive 100 years from now, of course. No one who I love can survive, either. This relentless fact has made me reflect on the essential part of my life. Why do I write? Who am I talking to, when I write?” Did Jane Austen imagine her readers of 100 years later? Could she ever have imagined us?

Not only is the Future Library an act of literary faith, but it is an ecological one. “The next 96 years do not look promising for the seedlings,” writes Merve Emre at The New York Times, “which are more vulnerable than their ancestors to all manner of man-made disasters.” The project symbolically binds together the fates of the book and the trees, making “the physicality of culture palpable by insisting that we confront the long, laborious process of preserving language.”

In 2020, the collection of manuscripts will be moved to a “Silent Room” in Oslo, a “womb-shaped chamber facing the forest, lined with wood from its trees.” Visitors can come and venerate these secretive future relics in their ribbon-wrapped gray boxes. But their contents—should the ambitious endeavor go as planned—will remain as elusive as the shape of our collective future 100 years from now.

via NYTimes

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Bette Davis Divorced: “She Read Too Much,” Says Husband (1938)

in Life | November 5th, 2018

On December 7, 1938, The New York Times reported on the dissolution of Bette Davis’ marriage with Harmon “Oscar” Nelson. The stated reason for the divorce? The actress read too much. The report goes on to say: Harmon “usually just sat there while his wife read ‘to an unnecessary degree.” “She thought her work was more important than her marriage.” “She even insisted on reading books or manuscripts when [Harmon] had guests. It was all very upsetting.”

Davis later discussed the emotional gulf that had separated the husband and wife. She also addressed an affair with business magnate Howard Hughes–something that apparently got mentioned in the divorce proceedings but not the pages of The New York Times itself.

via @Tom DC Roberts

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How to Make and Wear Medieval Armor: An In-Depth Primer

in History | November 5th, 2018

Look at a medieval knight in armor and you can’t help but wonder how he got the stuff on. Then follows a question with an even more complicated answer: how did the armor get made in the first place? Luckily, we in the 21st century have medievalists who have dedicated their lives to learning and explaining just such pieces of now-obscure knowledge (as well as the ever-growing legion of medieval battle enthusiasts doing their utmost to both demand that knowledge and hold the scholars who possess it to account). You can see what went into the making of a knight’s armor — and still goes into it, for those inclined to learn the craft — in the video above, a live presentation of the real tools and techniques by armorer Jeffrey D. Wasson at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With narration by Dirk Breiding, Assistant Curator of its Arms and Armor Department, the video reveals every step of Wasson’s process, beginning with research into how 500-year-old components of armor looked and work, and ending with pieces that, while newly made, could easily have fit into the suit worn by a knight of those days.

Wasson’s next demonstration, in the second video just above, shows the process of getting dressed in armor, one a knight could hardly execute by himself. Much like the videos about how women got dressed in the 14th and 18th centuries previously featured here on Open Culture, it required an assistant, but in both cases the result is supposed to have been less restrictive and cumbersome than we today might expect — or somewhat less restrictive and cumbersome, anyway.

Though we associate this kind of plate armor with the Middle Ages, it actually developed fairly late in that era, around the Hundred Years’ War that lasted from the mid-14th to the mid-15th century. As a form, it peaked in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, spanning the end of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance; the image of the knight we all have in our heads is probably wearing a suit of 16th-century armor made for jousting. That practice continued even as the use of armor declined on the battlefield, the development of firearms having greatly lessened its protective value and put a high premium on agility. Yet armor remains an impressive historical artifact and, at its best, an achievement in craftsmanship as well. But now that we know how to make it and put it on, how best to keep it shining?

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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 or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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The “Most Secretive Library in the World”: The Future Library Will Collect 100 Original Manuscripts by Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell & More, to Be Read for the First Time in 2114

Bette Davis Divorced: “She Read Too Much,” Says Husband (1938)

How to Make and Wear Medieval Armor: An In-Depth Primer

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