Alan Holly’s short animated film, Coda, was shortlisted for the 2015 Academy Awards and nominated for an Annie Award, on its way to winning 18 awards at film festivals across the world (including Best Animated Short Film at South by Southwest). As you probably know, a coda is typically the passage that brings a song/musical piece to a close. In the case of Holly’s film, it refers to the end of life, a soul’s attempt to bargain with Death before eventually accepting his fate.
According to Filmbase, the nine-minute, hand-animated film is “the culmination of two years of painstaking work by a small team of dedicated animation artists” in Ireland. And it’s voiced “by Brian Gleeson (Standby, The Stag, Love/Hate) and Orla Fitzgerald (The Wind that Shakes the Barley).”
Aesthetically, writes Short of the Week, the “film combines many elements in a unique way—the flat shapes and refined color palettes (seen also in work by Matthias Hoegg) with the painterly, organic movement of greats like Miyazaki. In fact, one could almost view the film as a modern day Miyazaki film with it’s piano score, surreal elements, and powerful characters.”
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The digital revolution created a mighty forum for those who once held forth from around the pickle barrel or atop a sturdy soap box.
The Internet has spawned many commentators whose thoughts are cogent, well researched and well argued, but they’re sadly outnumbered by a multitude of blowhards, windbags, and other self-appointed experts, forcefully expressing opinions as fact.
And, as you’ve likely heard, many consumers fail to check credentials before believing unsubstantiated statements are the rock solid truth, to be repeated and acted upon, sometimes to lasting consequence.
Compare the unmanageability of our situation to that of 40 years ago, when an obnoxious bloviator could apparently be silenced by the introduction of irrefutable authority…
Ah, wait, this is fiction…
A notable thing about the above scene from 1977’s Annie Hall—besides how beautifully the comedy holds up—is that the bad guy’s not stupid. His qualifications are actually quite impressive.
(We speak here of the Guy in Line, not writer-director-star Woody Allen, whose reputation has been permanently tarnished by personal misconduct, some of it easy to substantiate.)
The scene’s best punchline comes from pitting intellectual against intellectual, not intellectual against some mythical “regular” American, as we’ve come to expect.
The audience is well positioned to side with Allen and his ace-in-the-hole, media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. It’s a revenge fantasy designed to appeal to anyone whose freedom has been impinged by some loudmouthed stranger sounding off in a public area.
That’s all of us, right? (Though how many of us are willing to cop to the occasions when we may have been the narcissistic jerk monopolizing the conversation at top volume …)
The courtly McLuhan, a last minute replacement for director Federico Fellini, possessed the perfect temperament to skewer the overinflated self-worth of a pontificating egomaniac.
He was, however, not much of a performer, according to Russell Horton, who played the Guy in Line:
Woody would pull him out and he’d say something like, ‘Well you’re wrong, young man.’ Or, ‘Oh, gee, I don’t know what to say.’… We did like 17 or 18 takes, and if you look at it carefully in the movie, McLuhan says, ‘You mean my whole fallacy is wrong’ which makes no sense. How can you have your fallacy wrong?
Read the recent, and extremely amusing Entertainment Weekly interview with Guy in Line (and voice of the Trix cereal rabbit) Horton in its entirety here.
The standard system of musical notation has, throughout its evolution, served many different eras of humanity, and increasingly many different cultures, quite well indeed. Still, though, when its purely visual elements can’t get the compositional intention fully across, one must resort to incorporating verbal instructions, and sometimes those instructions can seem… unconventional. Classic FM’s list of “bizarre, perplexing and distressing performance directions” includes commands to play at “tempo di PBS documentary,” to “continue in tempo, ignoring conductor,” and — these favorites of Erik Satie — to play as if “imbibet” (drunken) and “corpulentus” (corpulent).
Not long ago, jazz critic Ted Gioia, a man who’s seen a more than a few scores in his time, tweeted out a set of images of what he called “blunt musical directions.” These instruct their performers to “play without bitching about the key” — G‑flat major not, I gather, being the most enjoyable of them all — to make a “soft moan through instrument if possible,” to “STAND; TURN AROUND; BEND OVER AND PLAY OBOE BETWEEN LEGS,” to “play without taking a picture and uploading to Facebook,” and — perhaps most important of all — to “lay that shit down!”
To those who can’t read a score, the ability to turn a bunch of lines, dots, and other even less intuitively decipherable symbols into full-bodied music on the fly looks like a superpower. But those who can read a score know that the real musicianship all happens between what some composer wrote on the page and what the audience hears, balancing loyalty to the composer’s intention with the degree of personal interpretation that makes the piece come alive. All the discipline cultivated through musical training no doubt ensures that most of them can resist the temptation of Facebook while actually playing, but when a composer’s directions get really ambiguous, cranky, or simply strange — well, that’s where their professional judgment comes in. And so live music remains interesting, even this deep into the age of the recorded stuff.
“The last people anyone expected to come out of that gig as being the memorable ones was Queen,” said Bob Geldof in an interview, looking back at the band’s stunning 24 minute set at Live Aid on July 13, 1985. In front of 72,000 people in Wembley Stadium and millions watching worldwide, Queen resuscitated their career with a selection of hits and new material.
The band, as Roger Taylor says in the mini docbelow, was “bored” and “in a bit of a trough.” They also had been criticized for playing Sun City in South Africa during the reign of Apartheid.
Going into Live Aid, a lot of the artists didn’t know what to expect of the entire event. Many, including Bob Geldof himself, wondered if the event would flop. But Queen more than any of them seemed to intuit right from the start the importance of the day, though they were very nervous backstage. But once onstage they completely own it, even more so Freddie Mercury who rises to the occasion as a front man and as a singer, giving one of his best performances.
In that short set, Queen gives a full concert worth of energy and the audience responds. Not all were Queen fans, but by the end everybody had become one, singing along to “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You.” Across the Atlantic, the 90,000 strong Philadelphia audience followed suit, watching the jumbotron simulcast.
“Do you now how hard it is to get someone’s attention who’s on the other side of the room?” asks Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters in this other short doc on the set. “Imagine a stadium and making them sing along with you.”
This hot summer concert would turn out to be the zenith of Queen’s career. There would be more albums and singles, but Freddie Mercury would slowly succumb to AIDS, and disappear from public view, until passing in 1991. The Live Aid set stands as one of the band’s final, iconic, and major achievements. Watch it, in all of its glory, above. You can find this, and other Live Aid performances, on this 4 disc DVD.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Here, in Silicon Valley, failure isn’t always failure. At least according to the local mythology, it’s something to be embraced, accepted, even celebrated. “Fail fast, fail often,” they say. And eventually you’ll learn enough to achieve real success.
On June 7th, the Museum of Failure will open in Helsingborg, Sweden. There you’ll find the remains of failed innovation. Google Glass, the Sony Betamax, the Apple Newton, Nokia’s N‑gage–they’re all there. Ditto a bottle of Harley-Davidson Perfume, Coca-Cola BlāK (aka coffee-flavored coke), and a Colgate Beef Lasagne TV Dinner. And, don’t forget the Trump monopoly-style board game–part of a long line of failed Trump products and businesses.
Above, curator Samuel West highlights items in the collection. Bringing together over 60 failed products and services from around the world, the collection provides “unique insight into the risky business of innovation.” You can get another glimpse of the new institution below. Fittingly, the museum is free.
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It comes as something of a surprise to realize that the filmmaker Jonathan Demme, who died last week, never made a television series of his own. He did, in addition to features like Something Wild and The Silence of the Lambs and documentaries like Stop Making Sense, direct a few episodes of TV shows as varied as Saturday Night Live and Enlightened. But we never got to see a full-on created-by-Demme series that, in this long Golden Age of Television in which we live, could surely have showcased in an even deeper way his much-praised interest in and empathy for humanity. But we can get a sense of how one might have played from “A Family Tree,” the Rosanna Arquette-starring sitcom episode he made in 1987 for the PBS prime-time comedy series Trying Times.
Demme, in the words of The New Yorker’s Dan Piepenbring, “directed an ensemble comedy about CB-radio enthusiasts, a documentary on an Episcopalian minister, and the only episode of Columbo to traffic in the drama of haute cuisine. But never did he roam farther afield than he does in ‘A Family Tree,’ a pitch-black anti-sitcom about an anxious young woman whose desire to belong leads her — perhaps in a nod to Stop Making Sense — to literally burn down the house. Fittingly, David Byrne himself is there to watch the flames go up, enjoying an imperious turn as a cigar-puffing, pie-hiding, reptile-obsessed brother-in-law.” And who could resist, having read a description like that, giving the episode a watch on Youtube, available there in three parts (watch them above and below)?
The production certainly stood out from the American televisual landscape of the time. The Chicago Tribune’s TV critic Clifford Perry, after trashing the then-new Full House, described Demme’s episode of Trying Times, the series’ premiere, as “built upon sick humor and a pervasive nastiness,” highlighting “an appealingly vulnerable performance by Arquette as the harassed outsider who suffers through cigar smoke, belching, homemade applejack, intramural bickering and a barrage of insults — as well as her own ineptitude, which results in a series of household disasters. Fine support is given by Hope Lange as the shrewish mother, Robert Ridgely as the just-fired father,” and particularly Byrne “as the acerbic yet boring brother-in-law-to-be.”
Ultimately, Perry judged “A Family Tree” as a “schizophrenic half-hour” that “veers between the farcical and the surreal,” which presumably wasn’t intended as a straightforward compliment. Today, however, its laugh track-free tone of intimate unease and realism unapologetically tinged with the bizarre would no doubt win it a considerable following. The tributes paid to Demme have described him as a maker of films well rooted in their eras and settings, but now we know he could make television thirty years ahead of its time as well.
In a post last year on an ambitious musical adaptation of Finnegans Wake, I noted that—when most in bafflement over the Irish writer’s final, seemingly uninterpretable, work—I turn to Anthony Burgess, who not only presumed to abridge the book, but wrote more lucid commentary than any other scholarly critic or writerly admirer of Joyce. In his study ReJoyce, Burgess described the novel—or whatever-you-call-it—as a “man-made mountain… as close to a work of nature as any artist ever got—massive, baffling, serving nothing but itself, suggesting a meaning but never quite yielding anything but a fraction of it, and yet (like a tree) desperately simple.”
Joyce did seem to aspire to omniscience and the power of godlike creation, to supplant the “old father, old artificer” he beseeches at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And if Finnegans Wake is a work of nature, it seems to me that we might approach it like naturalists, looking for its inner laws and mechanisms, performing dissections and mounting it, flayed open, on display boards.
Or we might approach it like poets, painters, field recordists—like artists, in other words. We might leave its innards intact, and instead represent what it does to our minds when we confront its nigh-inscrutable ontology.
This latter approach is the one adopted by Waywords and Meansigns’ latest release, which brings together recordings from over 100 artists from 15 different countries—some semi-famous, most thrillingly obscure. Joyce’s book, explains project director Derek Pyle, is “the kind of thing that demands creative approaches—from jazz and punk musicians to sound artists and modern composers, each person hears and performs the text in a way that’s totally unique and endlessly exciting.” We first commented on the endeavor two years ago, when it released 31 hours of unabridged Joyce interpretation. Last year’s second edition greatly expanded on the singing, reading, and experimental noodling of and around Finnegans Wake.
The third edition continues what has becoming a very fine tradition, and perhaps one of the most appropriate responses to the novel in the 78 years since its publication. This release (streamable above, or on Archive.org) adds to the second edition a belated contribution from iconic bassist and songwriter Mike Watt (of The Minutemen, fIREHOSE, and solo fame) and “actor and ‘JoyceGeek” Adam Harvey. (And a Gumby-starring illustration, above, by punk rock cover artist Raymond Pettibon). The third unabridged collection of interpretative musical readings, further up, offers contributions from:
Mercury Rev veterans Jason Sebastian Russo and Paul Dillon, Joe Cassidy of Butterfly Child, Railroad Earth’s Tim Carbone and Lewis & Clarke’s Lou Rogai, psych-rockers Kinski, vocalist Phil Minton, poet S.A. Griffin, translator Krzysztof Bartnicki, “krautrock” pioneer Jean-Hervé Péron of faUSt, British fringe musician Neil Campbell, Martyn Bates of Eyeless in Gaza, Little Sparta with Sally Timms (Mekons) and Martin Billheimer, composer Seán Mac Erlaine, indietronica pioneer Schneider TM, and many more.
If something on that list doesn’t grab you, you may have stumbled into the wrong party. In any case, you’ll find hundreds other readings, songs, etc. to choose from in the expanding three-volume compilation. Or you can listen to it straight through, from the first edition, to the second, to the third. Like the book, this project celebrates, imitates, reflects, and refracts, Waywords and Meansigns admits entry at any point, and nearly always charms even as it perplexes. The fact that no one can really grasp the slippery nature of Finnegans Wake perhaps makes the book, and its best creative interpretations, all the more genuinely for everyone.
In one school of popular reasoning, people judge historical outcomes that they think are favorable as worthy tradeoffs for historical atrocities. The argument appears in some of the most inappropriate contexts, such as discussions of slavery or the Holocaust. Or in individual thought experiments, such as that of a famous inventor whose birth was the result of a brutal assault. There are a great many people who consider this thinking repulsive, morally corrosive, and astoundingly presumptuous. Not only does it assume that every terrible thing that happens is part of a benevolent design, but it pretends to know which circumstances count as unqualified goods, and which can be blithely ignored. It determines future actions from a tidy and convenient story of the past.
We might contrast this attitude with a more Zen stance, for example, a radically agnostic “wait and see” approach to everything that happens. Not-knowing seems to give meditating monks a great deal of serenity in practice. But the theory terrifies most of us. Effects must have causes, we think, causes must have effects, and in order to predict what’s going to happen next (and thereby save our skins), we must know why we’re doing what we’re doing. The deep impulse is what psychologist and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl identifies, in his pre-gender-neutrally titled book, as Man’s Search for Meaning. Despite the misuse of this faculty to create neurotic or dehumanizing myths, “man’s search for meaning,” writes Frankl, “is the primary motivation in his life and not a ‘secondary rationalization’ of instinctual drives.”
Frankl understood perfectly well how the construction of meaning—through narrative, art, relationships, social fictions, etc.—might be perverted for murderous ends. He was a survivor of four concentration camps, which took the lives of his parents, brother, and wife. The first part of his book, “Experiences in a Concentration Camp,” recounts the horror in detail, sparing no one accountability for their actions. From these experiences, Frankl draws a conclusion, one he explains in the interview above in two parts from 1977. “The lesson one could learn from Auschwitz,” he says, “and in other concentration camps, in the final analysis was, those who were oriented toward a meaning—toward a meaning to be fulfilled by them in the future—were most likely to survive” beyond the experience. “The question,” Frankl says, “was survival for what?” (See a short animated summary of Frankl’s book below.)
Frankl does not excuse the deaths of his family, friends, and millions of others in his psychological theory, which he calls logotherapy. He certainly does not trivialize the most unimaginable of in-human experiences. “We all said to each other in camp,” he writes, “that there could be no earthly happiness which could compensate for all we had suffered.” But it was not the hope of happiness that “gave us courage,” he writes. It was the “will to meaning” that looked to the future, not to the past. In Frankl’s existentialist view, we ourselves create that meaning, for ourselves, and not for others. Logotherapy, Frankl writes, “defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses.” We must acknowledge the need to make sense of our lives and fill what Frankl called the “existential vacuum.” And we alone are responsible for writing better stories for ourselves.
Architect, inventor, theorist, and all-around fount of ideas Buckminster Fuller came up with many new things, though most of us associate him with one above all: geodesic domes. Those distinctive hemispheric structures built out of strong triangular parts, having gone in and out of vogue over the decades, most recently reappeared in the zeitgeist as the type of lodging promised to the attendees of the ill-conceived Fyre Festival — an ultra-luxury market-targeted disaster not representative, safe to say, of the world Fuller spent his entire career trying to realize. His vision of a future for “Spaceship Earth,” as he called it, drove him to create all he created, from new maps to new houses to new cars to new sleeping methods. But what did he base that vision on?
“Fuller’s philosophy could be best summarized as being a social thinker, believing that humanity’s survival is contingent upon how it manages Spaceship Earth and the resources it contains,” says the narrator of the three-minute Prosocial Progress Foundation primer above, “and that creating abundance whilst doing little to no harm to the environment would help to alleviate a lot of the problems in the world today.”
With every project he emphasized “systems thinking,” or thinking premised on “the idea that the world is an interconnected system with interconnected problems, and that a way to solve these problems would be to call upon collective action.” We’d all have to work together, in his view, to solve the problems we suffer together.
That notion may strike us as utopian even today, and indeed, most of Fuller’s inventions only saw limited application during his lifetime. But the label of utopian, which suggests a disregard for the rigors of reality, doesn’t quite fit the man himself, so much concern did he have for practicalities like the efficient allocation of resources, quick construction and deployment, and ease of use. But given the dystopian terms we’ve increasingly come to use to describe events here on Spaceship Earth, maybe we need a Fuller-style practical utopianism now more than ever. If these three minutes have given you a taste for more of the details, have a look at Fuller’s video lecture series Everything I Know — but make sure to clear 42 hours of your calendar first. The future of humanity may depend on it!
Somewhere between working at Goldman Sachs, and calling the shots for Breitbart and Donald Trump, the Voldemortian Steve Bannon went to Hollywood and made 18 films, many of them political. Described “as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement” (by Andrew Breitbart himself), Bannon helped produce the Ronald Reagan documentary In the Face of Evil and Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman. But he’s perhaps best known for writing a treatment for the never-made documentary, Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Fascism in America. The eight page draft, writes The Washington Post, proposed “a three-part movie that would trace ‘the culture of intolerance’ behind sharia law, examine the ‘Fifth Column’ made up of ‘Islamic front groups’ and identify the American enablers paving ‘the road to this unique hell on earth.’ ” Looking back, it’s no wonder that Bannon tried to engineer a ban of Muslims immigrants upon entering the White House.
For anyone interested in revisiting another unrealized Bannon production, you can now watch (above) a table read of his screenplay for The Thing I Am. Co-written with Julia Jones during the late 1990s, it’s a “rap musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus set in South Central Los Angeles during the 1992 riots after the LAPD beating of Rodney King.” Put together by an organization called Now This, the read features Rob Corddry, Lucas Neff, Parvesh Cheena, Daniele Gaither, Gary Anthony Williams, Charlie Carver, Cedric Yarborough, and hip hop artist A.J. Crew. And, as the website Refinery29 warns, it’s “full of cussing, the n‑word, and mentions of crotch grabs.”
Paper, books, wooden joints, tea whisks — Japanese culture has, for seemingly all of its long recorded history, greatly esteemed the making of objects. But no one object represents the Japanese dedication to craftsmanship, and within that the eternal pursuit of approachable but never quite attainable perfection, than the sword. You can see what it takes to make a katana, the traditional Japanese sword of the kind carried by the armed military class of the samurai between roughly the 8th and 19th centuries, in the 26-minute video above, which offers a close look at each stage of the swordmaking process: the Shinto blessing of the forge, the hammering of the red-hot metal, the tempering of the freshly shaped blade, the construction of the scabbard and hilt, the final assembly, and every painstaking step in between.
Originally produced for the United Kingdom’s National Museum of Arms and Armour and Portland Art Museum’s collaborative 2013 special exhibition “Samurai! Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection,” the video’s wordless but certainly not silent portrayal of this ancient and continuing practice has a kind of hypnotic quality.
But if you’d like a more verbal explanation to accompany your views of the making of a traditional Japanese sword, you’ll get it in the 50-minute documentary above, The Secret World of the Japanese Swordsmith, a portrait of the highly respected Yoshindo Yoshihara, one of only thirty full-time swordsmiths currently practicing in Japan. If you then feel up to a Japanese swordsmithing triple-bill, give Samurai Sword: Making of a Legend a watch as well.
This 50-minute program tells the story of the katana itself, beginning with this breathless narration: “For over one thousand years, one weapon has dominated the battlefields of Japan, a weapon so fearsome that it can split a man from throat to groin — yet it spawned an an entirely new art form and spiritual way of life. A sword so technologically perfect in structure, so beautiful in creation, that it gave rise to an aristocratic warrior creed.” It also gave rise to no small number of samurai movies, a tradition that many a cinephile among us can certainly appreciate. Though inextricably tied to a specific time and place in history, and an even more specific class that arose from the peculiar political circumstances of that time and place, the katana continues to fascinate — and in this digital, hands-free age, its makers draw a more intense kind of respect than ever.
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