Five years ago, actor Christopher Walken casually shared a simple recipe for roast chicken with pears, above. The lighting was amateur, his implements fairly utilitarian, and, much to my gratification, he couldn’t keep his cat off the counter, either.
His improvised patter was as nonchalant as his handling of his ingredients. Undeterred, legions of fans still found plenty of Walken-esque quotes with which to spice up the video’s comments section.
Chalk it up to the dozens of soft spoken, seriously unhinged characters on which this actor’s reputation rests. It’s painfully easy to imagine a rival gang member or law enforcement official lashed to a chair just off camera, squirming in terror as Walken pauses to appreciate the “little cookies” the caramelized pears leave behind on the bottom of his pan.
Whatever he’s planning to do to this imaginary unfortunate, one hopes it won’t involve flaps of skin and a vertical poultry roaster.
As to the recipe, it’s as delicious as it is innocuous. Try it!
If you’re feeling less than adventurous, you can decrease the creep factor by replicating the shoot with a grandfatherly gent of your choosing prior to serving. (Anyone who’s not Christopher Walken will do.)
Things get cooking with a visit to the Byzantine Stew Leonard’s supermarket, and end with a cell phone pic of Walken’s nose. There’s a live mandolin serenade and the kitchen seems vastly more expensive, but I found myself missing the homey sense of foreboding created by the original.
We derive adjectives from great writers’ names meant to encapsulate entire philosophies or modes of expression. We have the Homeric, the Shakespearean, the Joycean, etc. Two such adjectives that seem to apply most to our contemporary condition sadly express much darker, more cramped visions than these: “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque.” These adjectives also—suggests writer Noah Tavlin—name two of the most misunderstood of authorial visions. In a TEDEd video last year, Tavlin attempted to clear up confusion about the “Orwellian,” a term that’s tossed around by pundits like a political Frisbee.
Tavlin returns in the video above to explain the meaning of “Kafkaesque,” a less-abused descriptor but one we still may not fully appreciate. He begins with a brief summary of Kafka’s novel The Trial, in which “K, the protagonist, is arrested out of nowhere and made to go through a bewildering process where neither the cause of his arrest nor the nature of the judicial proceedings are made clear to him.” The scenario is “considered so characteristic of Kafka’s work” that scholars use the term “Kafkaesque” to describe it. Kafkaesque has become evocative of all “unnecessarily complicated and frustrating experiences, like being forced to navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy.”
But the word is much richer than such casual usage as describing a trip to the DMV.
Tavlin references Kafka’s short story “Poseiden,” in which the god of the sea can neither explore nor enjoy his realm because he is buried under mountains of paperwork. In truth, he is “a prisoner of his own ego,” unwilling to delegate because he sees his underlings as unworthy of the task. This story, Tavlin argues, “contains all of the elements that make for a truly Kafkaesque scenario.”
It’s not the absurdity of bureaucracy alone, but the irony of the character’s circular reasoning in reaction to it, that is emblematic of Kafka’s writing. His tragicomic stories act as a form of mythology for the modern industrial age, employing dream logic to explore the relationships between systems of arbitrary power and the individuals caught up in them.
Tavlin refers to The Metamorphosis and “A Hunger Artist” as further examples of how Kafka’s characters overcomplicate their own lives through their fanatical, singular devotion to absurd conditions.
But as Tavlin admits later in the video, the bewildering mechanisms of power in stories such as The Trial also “point to something much more sinister”—the idea that arcane bureaucracies become self-perpetuating and operate independently of the people supposedly in power, who are themselves reduced to functionaries of mysterious, unaccountable forces. Tavlin quotes Hannah Arendt, who studied the totalitarian nightmares Kafka presciently foresaw, and wrote of “tyranny without a tyrant.” More recently, philosopher Manuel De Landa has theorized increasingly complex, impersonal systems operating with little need for human intervention. His War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, for example, imagines modern warfare as the evolving operations of more-or-less self-organizing weapons systems. Theorists frequently observe that the speed of technological advancement now proceeds at such a dizzyingly exponential rate that it will soon surpass our ability to control or understand it at all. Perhaps, as Tesla’s Elon Musk suggests, we ourselves are no more than operations in a complex system, simulated beings inside a computer program.
But scenarios like De Landa’s and Musk’s are also not the Kafkaesque, for these theorists of modern technocracy lack a key feature of Kafka’s vision—his dark, tragicomic, absurdist sense of humor, which permeates even his bleakest visions. On the one hand, Tavlin says, we “rely on increasingly convoluted systems of administration” and find ourselves judged and ruled over “by people we can’t see according to rules we don’t know”—a situation bound to provoke profound anxiety and psychological distress. On the other hand, Kafka’s attention to the absurd, “reflects our shortcomings back at ourselves,” reminding us that “the world we live in is one we created.” I’m not so sure, as Tavlin concludes, that Kafka believed we have the “power to change for the better” the overcomplicated systems we barely understand. Kafka’s comic vision, I think, ultimately partakes in what Miguel de Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life.” But he does not fully deny his characters all freedom of choice, even if they frequently have no idea what it is they’re choosing between or why.
Anyone who loves cities almost certainly loves transit maps: for well over a century, they’ve not only played an essential role in the navigation of urban spaces but developed into their very own distinctive form at the intersection of utility and aesthetics. The finest examples simultaneously possess the clarity and information-richness of the best graphic design and hold out promises of excitement and modernity that require a true artistic sensibility to properly express. None of this is lost on Cameron Booth, the Australian graphic designer living in Portland, Oregon who runs the site Transit Maps.
“A well designed transit map conveys a lot of information in a very small space,” writes Booth on the site’s About page. “In an instant, we learn how to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’, simply by following some coloured lines. The very best maps become symbols of their city, admired and loved by all.” None have become quite so symbolic as the map of the London Underground, the oldest subway system in the world, and Transit Maps’ posts filed under the London Underground tag, such as the 1929 cutaway diagram of its Piccadilly Circus station by Italian architect and urban designer Renzo Picasso just above provide plenty of good reading — and even better viewing — for its many enthusiasts.
Among American cities, no subway system has a more respected map than Washington, DC’s, the work of graphic designer Lance Wyman, for whom it has remained a work in progress: he oversaw a redesign just five years ago, almost forty years after the system went into service and his original map made its debut. Here we have one of Wyman’s original working sketches for the map straight from his notebook. “Interestingly, it looks like Wyman was experimenting with textural treatments for the route lines at this time,” adds Booth, “an idea I’m ever so glad he abandoned, because it would have looked so busy and hideous.”
Having seen many more transit maps than most, and even having designed some of his own (including a reworking of the DC Metro map), Booth doesn’t hesitate to point out both the virtues and the flaws of the ones he posts. He even grades them on a star rating system (with, of course, circular London Underground logos substituting for actual stars), collecting the very best under the five-star tag. One such passage with flying colors, the 1950s Yorkshire coast train map at the top of the post, has Booth exclaiming that “they don’t make ‘em like this any more. The 1908 bird’s-eye view of Chicago, source of the legend above, scores its own five stars by “minute attention to detail,” down to the inclusion of “smoke curls from factory chimneys” and “almost every tree in the city’s parks.”
Few cities have attracted as much attention from mapmakers as New York, possibly due to all its wonders — or at least those are what IBM graphic designer Nils Hansell emphasizes in his mid-1950s map “Wonders of New York” which, despite not looking far past Manhattan, does include transit and much else besides: Booth mentions its depiction of “300-odd numbered points of interest” as well as “the last vestiges of New York’s once-extensive elevated railway lines.” You need quite a high-definition scan to really appreciate all this, and Booth found one in the David Rumsey Map Collection, which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture.
Scroll through the pages and pages of Transit Maps’ historical tag, and you’ll find a wealth of fascinating showpieces of the transit mapper’s art, not just from the Londons and New Yorks of the world, but also from times and places like Berlin in 1931, Madison, Wisconsin in 1975, and Booth’s own old hometown of Sydney in 1950 and new hometown of Portland in 1978. The archive even includes transit maps from unusual places, such as a delightful one printed on the back of a Japanese matchbox in the 1920s, and maps for transit systems never completed, such as the one for the Baghdad Metro from the early 1980s just above. Iraq’s capital may still await a full-service subway system — and much else besides — but at least its map earns top marks.
The Brexit votes have been counted. The Brits have decided to leave the European Union. And the financial markets are taking it hard. Right now, futures on the London stock exchange are down 8%. The pound is down 9.8 percent, more than double its previous record decline of 4.1 percent. We’re living in interesting times.
No doubt, some of you are suddenly wondering, what exactly is Brexit? And what’s at stake? Up top, you can watch a four-minute primer created by The Wall Street Journal. Bloomberg has its own two-minute version here (or view below). The Toronto Star breaks down Brexit in 13 points. And The Guardian went so far as to create a guide just for Americans. (For anyone who wants to dissect the propaganda for leaving Brexit, you can watch the feature-length documentary film, Brexit: The Movie, released last month.) Please feel free to add other primers in the comments below.
For Americans reading this, I’d point out that Brexit and Trump share some important things in common: they’re both about putting up walls, placing blame on immigrants and minorities; exploiting the resentments of the economically disadvantaged; dismissing experts and establishment figures; and risking upending a fragile world order. How England looks on June 24th is perhaps a small preview of how America might look on November 9th. Only there will be trillions more at stake.
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From 1930 to 1941, Pathetone Weekly ran film clips that highlighted ‘the novel, the amusing and the strange.’ At some point during the 1930s (the exact date isn’t clear), Pathetone asked American designers to look roughly 70 years into the future and hazard a guess about how women might dress in Year 2000. Apparently, fashion designers don’t make great futurists, and the designs fell rather wide of the mark — unless you want to count Lady Gaga’s wardrobe, in which case they didn’t do a half bad job. Or, for that matter, the male connected 24/7 to his phone and sundry gadgets…
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One of the initial impressions of the British punks–and one that impresario Malcolm McLaren tried to cultivate–was that they were dangerous, unschooled yobs creating rock music from primordial materials. That’s why McLaren was unhappy about John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten’s appearance on Capital Radio’s Tommy Vance Show in the middle of the summer of punk, 1977.
DJ Tommy Vance was sixteen years older than Lydon, but Capital Radio was an independent station and offered an alternative to the BBC, which only a few months earlier banned outright “God Save the Queen” from the airwaves and refused to award it a number one single spot, even though the single had earned it, saleswise.
Lydon was asked to bring in records from his own collection and talk about them, and, in doing so, demonstrated that he wasn’t a thug, but an eclectic young music fan with broad tastes. He liked a lot of reggae (Peter Tosh, Makka Bees, Dr. Alimantado) and dub, and says he grew up with it. It also explains the dub heavy outings he’d soon do with Public Image Ltd. And he chooses tracks by singer-songwriters like Tim Buckley, Kevin Coyne, and Neil Young; John Cale, Lou Reed, and Nico; and art rock like Can, a band introduced to him by Sid Vicious.
He’s still abrupt, insulting and dismissive when he needs to be. He calls David Bowie a “real bad drag queen,” doesn’t think much of the Rolling Stones or most ‘60s bands (“terrible scratching sound” he says), and says most of his contemporary punk bands are “stagnant” and predictable. But it wouldn’t be Johnny Rotten any other way, would it?
When asked about his record collection, Lydon says it’s quite big:
I ain’t got a record player at the moment, so I have to pass them around, because music’s for listening to, not to store away in a bloody cupboard. Yeah, I love my music.
You can listen to the broadcast here:
And here’s the full track listing:
Tim Buckley – Sweet Surrender
The Creation – Life Is Just Beginning
David Bowie – Rebel Rebel
Unknown Irish Folk Music / Jig
Augustus Pablo – King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown
Gary Glitter – Doing Alright With The Boys
Fred Locks – Walls
Vivian Jackson and the Prophets – Fire in a Kingston
Culture – I’m Not Ashamed
Dr Alimantado & The Rebels – Born For A Purpose
Bobby Byrd – Back From The Dead
Neil Young – Revolution Blues
Lou Reed – Men Of Good Fortune
Kevin Coyne – Eastbourne Ladies
Peter Hammill – The Institute Of Mental Health, Burning
Peter Hammill – Nobody’s Business
Makka Bees – Nation Fiddler / Fire!
Captain Beefheart – The Blimp
Nico – Janitor Of Lunacy
Ken Boothe – Is It Because I’m Black
John Cale – Legs Larry At Television Centre
Third Ear Band – Fleance
Can – Halleluhwah
Peter Tosh – Legalise It
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.
When I first read all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, having found them collected in full (not, of course, including last year’s “lost” story) in two old volumes at an antique store, I understood immediately why they’d so quickly become so popular with their first readership in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Or rather, I should say that I felt it–that perfect alignment of form and substance that only comes along in popular art every few decades.
Whether that happened as a result of Doyle’s craftsmanship or his luck I don’t know, but it turns out that the adventures of his consulting detective play as well on the speakers as they do on the page, though in quite a different way. You can experience that difference for yourself, and experience it extensively, with Spotify’s 64-hour, 163-track playlist of Sherlock Holmes stories performed aloud. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.)
The very first voice it presents is Doyle’s own, speaking briefly on Holmes and spiritualism, which gives us time to settle in for a five-part rendition of the very first in the Holmes canon (and thanks to “more female interest than is usual,” one of Doyle’s personal favorites), “A Scandal in Bohemia.” It comes performed by Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson, two of the most respected actors in 20th-century British theater. We’ve previously featured their portrayals, Gielgud’s of Holmes and Richardson’s of Watson (and we can hardly neglect to mention the one and only Orson Welles’, of Moriarty), on the New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes radio drama.
But this playlist provides a wealth of other voices from various eras interpreting Doyle’s most beloved works as well, a variety that certainly suits its protagonist, the most-portrayed literary character of all time — which means that, unlike the collected print canon of Sherlock Holmes adventures (that “lost” story and its mysterious authorship aside), the collected audio adventures of Sherlock Holmes will only grow longer and longer, so those who want to listen to them all had best get on the case without delay.
Every human culture has practiced some form of ritual mutilation, from the mild marring of a Spring Break tattoo to the disfigurement of foot-binding. On the more extreme end of the scale, we have the early modern European practice of castrating young boys to inhibit growth of their vocal cords and thyroid glands during puberty. Such singers, known as castrati, became “high-sopranos, mezzos, and altos, strident voices and sweet ones, loud and mellow voices,” writes Martha Feldman in her book The Castrato.
The purpose of mutilating these singers initially had to do with a ban on women in church choirs. Castrati took their place, and were in very high demand. “Opportunities for castrati were staggering,” writes i09, “and many families were facing starvation” in 16th century Italy, where the practice began. Despite a church prohibition on unnecessary amputation, parents and surgeons conspired to illegally castrate boys chosen to fulfill the role, and the practice continued into the 19th century.
Several castrati achieved lasting popular fame. “The best castrati were superstars,” remarks Sarah Bardwell of the Handel House Museum, “adored by female fans.” Others, io9 points out, “were low-rent singers who spent their time doing small gigs in small towns, and others spun their singing careers into positions as ministers at royal courts.” One of the more glamorous fates awaited one of the last of the castrati, Alessandro Moreschi, who may have been castrated to remedy an inguinal hernia or may have been intentionally mutilated to become a castrato.
However he came by it, Moreschi’s voice so impressed a Roman choirmaster that he appointed the singer first soprano of the Papal basilica of St. John Lateran in 1873 at age 15. Soon after, Moreschi, his fame spreading widely, joined the Sistine Chapel Choir and took on several administrative duties. By this time, it’s said that Moreschi was so popular that audiences would call out “Eviva il coltello” (“Long live the knife!”) during his performances. While still with the Sistine Choir and near the end of his career, Moreschi began to make recordings for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company of London—the only known recordings of a castrato.
Between 1902 and 1904, Moreschi recorded 17 tracks, and you can hear them all here. At the top of the post, hear a restored version of “Ave Maria,” further down, a rendition of Eugenio Terziani’s “Hostias et Preces,” and here, the complete recordings of Alessandro Moreschi, in their noisy original state. Nicholas Clapton, curator of a 2006 castrati exhibit at the Handel House Museum in London, describes Moreschi’s voice as “Pavarotti on helium” and historican David Starkey tells of the “full horror” of the procedure, but also adds, “it’s horribly like the child star of today, forced into this artificiality, forced… to deliver that ineluctable, strange, desirable thing of star quality.”
Sadly, like many of today’s harried child singers and actors, few castrati actually achieved stardom. But those few who did, like Moreschi, “had a tremendous emotional impact on the audiences of the day,” Bardwell tells us. Moreschi’s recordings, made while he was in his mid-forties, sound alien to us not only because of the strangeness of castrati singing but because of the highly melodramatic style popular at the time. His singing may not be representative of some of the most renowned castrati in history, like the 18th century sensation Farinelli, but it is—barring a resurgence of the pretty barbaric practice—probably the closest we’ll come to hearing the infamous castrati voice.
And now for something a little whimsical and fun.
Above, watch artist Garip Ay use a traditional Turkish art form, known as Ebru art, or marbling, to paint Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Self-Portrait’ on water. Marbling, Ay told ABC News, is “the practice of applying paint to the surface of thickened water and creating patterns and images by manipulating the paint.” “The water, in addition to being thickened by carrageenan powder, was colored black for this project.” Give the video four short minutes, and you can watch Ay’s project unfold. Find many more marbling videos on the artist’s website.
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Richard Linklater’s films have become increasingly sophisticated as the 90s indie breakout writer-director has grown into his auteurhood. From the loose stoner vérité of Slackers (watch it online) to the loose but heady animation of Waking Life to the painstakingly meticulous “model of cinematic realism” of Boyhood, Linklater has a uniquely American vision and the undeniable talent to realize it in full.
But mostly when I think of Linklater, I think—excuse my language—of cock rock.
So, okay, it ain’t all cock rock. But Linklater’s films are often so dude-centric, and so informed by popular music of certain eras, that he titled two of his most personal—Dazed and Confused and its recent “spiritual sequel”—after anthems from the two most archetypically cock rock bands, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen.
Where Dazed and Confused’s high school milieu more or less stayed anchored in 70s hard rock, Everybody Wants Some!!—like its comparatively adventurous college jocks—takes several musical detours from beer-and-babes 80s clichés. The film’s soundtrack, for example, includes “deep cuts” from Brian Eno, obscure local Texas punk rock band The Big Boys, and L.A.-based 80s New Wave/R&B band The Busboys.
It’s true, then, that the songs choices on Everybody Wants Some!!, which you can hear almost in their entirely (sans a few) above, are fairly diverse, genre-wise, compared to the cock-rock-heavy list of songs from Dazed and Confused (further up). And when it comes to Linklater’s musical inspirations for both films, we see that difference as well.
As the Criterion Collection blog documents—bringing us the 1992 letter above (read it here) from Linklater to his cast—the director put together “a thoughtful series of mixtapes to get his cast into the mind-set” of Dazed and Confused. And Criterion put together the Spotify playlist below of the songs Linklater gave his actors. As you’ll see, it’s mostly balls-to-the-wall hard rock, with some obligatory 70s disco and a few cuts from Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Elton John. In his accompanying letter, Linklater admits “a few of the songs are a little cheezy,” but also notes “there are a few places for ironic usage.” For the most part, he says, “this music… is like the movie itself—straightforward, honest and fun.”
When it came time to begin shooting Everybody Wants Some!! (get the official soundtrack here), Linklater again used the same method to get his cast in the mood, circulating the songs in the playlist below (though probably not on cassettes). Here we get a much more diverse, comprehensive musical summary of the decade in question, with Michael Jackson sitting next to Elvis Costello, Pat Benatar and Dire Straits next to Pink Floyd, Sister Sledge, Queen, and Chaka Khan.
It’s an interesting transition that may—musically—signal the move from teenage fandom to the more curious, adventurous listening habits of early adulthood. College, after all, is not only where young Americans of the modern era discover new sexual and chemical pleasures, but also where they acquire new musical tastes. And in the 80s especially, the boundaries of pop music expanded.
“That’s just how it felt to me to be a young person at that time. It was cool to be into everything,” Linklater commented to Cornelia Rowe at Yahoo: “There was a lot of newness in the era. You didn’t really appreciate it at the time – it’s like, there are all these new bands! There’s this new wave, punk, party, R&B – there’s a thing called rap music from New York!”
The athlete bros in Linklater’s latest, very male-oriented piece of cinematic nostalgia “at once embody and upend the stereotype of the shallow, sexually entitled jock,” writes A.O. Scott in his review. Roaming far afield of their comfort zones, they “have a good time wherever they are.” That’s pretty much guaranteed, I think, with the finely-curated 80s gems in these playlists as their soundtrack.
No filmmaker combines live action with stop-motion quite like Jan Švankmajer, and certainly no filmmaker has used that combination to such imaginative and troubling ends. An avowed surrealist who got his start in animation more than half a century ago in his homeland of the former Czechoslovakia, he’s continued to craft his distinctive cinematic experiences however and whenever possible through the decades. His filmography now includes such enduring trips as Dimensions of Dialogue (see below), which no less a visionary than Terry Gilliamcalls one of the best animated films of all time; Alice, his dark interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and Little Otik, a modernization of a folktale about a tree stump that turns into a monstrous baby.
But as well as he brings the bizarre to vivid life on screen, he’s always had higher ambitions than that. “Švankmajer is capable of creating dark yet playful worlds that dissect the very core of our society,” says the Indiegogo page now raising the funds for his latest — and last — feature film, Insects. “The civilization we live in has little interest in authentic artistic creation,” laments the filmmaker. “What it needs is well-working advertisement, the iconographic contemporary art, pushing people towards more and more mass consumption. It gets increasingly difficult to fund independent art that scrutinizes the very core of our society. Who would deliberately support their own critics?”
Now, in this age of crowdfunding, you can support one of its most entertaining critics alive yourself. Insects has already succeeded in raising the first phase of its budget, but still has a way to go before it can assure its esteemed creator and his collaborators full artistic freedom (Švankmajer is looking to raise $400,000 in total), so if you’d like to chip in, you can make yourself eligible for such rewards as the first opportunity to download the film, its Blu-Ray edition with an accompanying art book, or even — if you’ve got $15,000 to put toward the cause — “a dinner with Jan Švankmajer at his mansion in Czech Republic and a commented visit to his Kunstkabinet.” Even now, work on Insects, its Indiegogo page assures us, is underway, with Švankmajer “very busy visiting entomological auctions, buying various kinds of bugs, doing rehearsal shots with them and so on.”
If you’d like to learn more about the drama that they’ll ultimately act out, watch the promo video at the top of the post. In it, Švankmajer describes it as set in a pub, after hours, where an amateur theater group has gathered to rehearse The Insect Play by the Čapek brothers. But “as the rehearsal progresses, the characters of the play are born and die with no regard to time,” and the actors “experience frightening transformations.” Švankmajer, who has planned not a direct adaptation of The Insect Play but a more complex work that draws inspiration both from it and The Metamorphosis by his other well-known countryman Franz Kafka, puts the appeal of this story where “bugs behave as human beings, and people behave as insects” simply: “The Čapek brothers’ play is very misanthropic. I’ve always liked that.”
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