On Monday, the Dutch volunteer organization called Stichting Ambulance Wens Nederland (roughly translated as Ambulance Wish Foundation Netherlands) took three terminally ill patients to see The Late Rembrandt Exhibition currently being held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The exhibit features over 100 paintings, drawings and prints that Rembrandt produced during the final phase of his life. And the patients, nearing the end of their lives, wanted to see the exhibit and experience the artistry of the great Dutch painter one last time.
Staffed by 200 medically-trained volunteers, the organization has fulfilled thousands of wishes since its creation in 2007, and they didn’t disappoint this time. As visually documented on its Twitter account, the nonprofit took the guests to the exhibit, each in an ambulance. The museum-goers were then treated to a one-hour private tour of the collection. Some poignant pictures capture the bittersweet moment.
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Kagonada, the video-essayist behind the cinematic supercuts of Kubrick’s “One-Point Perspective” and Ozu’s “Passageways” returns with a look at mirrors in the films of Ingmar Bergman, set to a plaintive Vivaldi work for two mandolins, and a reading of Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror.”
Mirrors and reflections turn up right in the beginning of Bergman’s films as a motif, when Jenny, the middle-aged protagonist of Crisis exclaims to her image, “You can’t see from the outside, but beneath this face … oh, my God!” Mirrors show their viewers a true face behind the mask in his films, mortality, failure, duplicity–everything fake stripped away. It’s a time to take stock and a time to break down.
It’s quite lovely, this cut, with Plath’s description of her wall “pink, with speckles” matching the color shot from Fanny & Alexander; or “Faces and darkness separate us over and over” as Nine-Christine Jönsson draws a frowny face and writes “lonely” on her reflection from Port of Call. The video is also a tribute to Bergman’s favorite actresses, from Harriet Andersson to Liv Ullmann.
Incidentally, Sylvia Plath was not just a fan of the filmmaker, she based her poem “Three Women” on Bergman’s film So Close to Life (aka Brink of Life) which she had seen in a London cinema in either 1961 or 1962.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.
by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on The Mirrors of Ingmar Bergman, Narrated with the Poetry of Sylvia Plath ) |
In January, we featured series of short animations from BBC Radio 4 addressing the question “How Did Everything Begin?” In February, we featured its follow-up on an equally eternal question, “What Makes Us Human?” Both came scripted by Philosophy Bites co-creator Nigel Warburton and narrated by X‑Files co-star Gillian Anderson (in full British mode). Now that March has come, so has the next installment of these brief, crisp, curiosity-fueled productions: “Has Technology Changed Us?”
In a word: yes. But then, everything we do has always changed us, thanks to the property of the brain we now call “plasticity.” This we learn from the video, “Rewiring the Brain” (right below), which, balancing its heartening neuroscientific evidence with the proverbial old dog’s ability to learn new tricks, also tells of the “attention disorders, screen addictions, and poor social skills” that may have already begun plaguing the younger generation.
The video actually spells out McLuhan’s own explanation of that much-quoted line: “What has been communicated has been less important than the particular medium through which people communicate.” Whether you buy that notion or not, the whole range of proclamations McLuhan had on the subject will certainly get you thinking — in his own words, “You don’t like these ideas? I got others.”
The other two videos in this series, despite their short length, get into other intriguing related concepts: “The Fourth Revolution” that comes as a result of life in a “mass age of information and data,” and the workings of “The Antikythera Mechanism,” the first computer ever built. Our personal technology has certainly come a long way, but we shouldn’t fall into complacency about it, lest, as Anderson says in this series, it all wrecks our attention spans and “education will all have to be delivered in two-minute animations.”
Beer, that favorite beverage of football fans, frat boys, and other macho stereotypes—at least according to the advertisers—actually has a very long, distinguished heritage. It’s older, in fact, than wine, older than whiskey, older perhaps even than bread (or so some scholars have thought). As soon as humans settled down and learned to cultivate grains, some 13,000 years ago, the possibility for fermentation—a naturally occurring phenomenon—presented itself. But it isn’t until the 5th century, B.C. that we have sources documenting the deliberate production of ale in ancient Sumeria. Nonetheless, beer has been described as the “midwife of civilization” due to its central role in agriculture, trade, urbanization, and medicine.
Beer became so important to ancient Mesopotamian culture that the Sumerians created a goddess of brewing and beer, Ninkasi, and one anonymous poet, smitten with her powers, penned a hymn to her in 1800 B.C.. A daughter of the powerful creator Enki and Ninti, “queen of the sacred lake,” Ninkasi is all the more poignant a deity given the role of women in ancient culture as respected brewers. The “Hymn to Ninkasi,” which you can read below, not only provides insight into the importance of this custom in Sumerian mythology, but it also gives us a recipe for brewing ancient Sumerian beer—the oldest beer recipe we have.
Translated from two clay tablets by Miguel Civil, Professor of Sumerology at the University of Chicago, the poem contains instructions precise enough that Fritz Maytag, founder of the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, took it upon himself to try them. He presented the results at the annual meeting of the American Association of Micro Brewers in 1991. The brewers, writes Civil, “were able to taste ‘Ninkasi Beer,’ sipping it from large jugs with drinking straws as they did four millennia ago. The beer had an alcohol concentration of 3.5%, very similar to modern beers, and had a ‘dry taste lacking in bitterness,’ ‘similar to hard apple cider.’” A challenge to all you home brewers out there.
Unfortunately, Maytag was unable to bottle and retail the recreation, since ancient Mesopotamian beer “was brewed for immediate consumption” and “did not keep very well.” But what Civil learned from the experiment was that his translation—in the hands of a master brewer “who saw through the difficult terminology and poetic metaphors”—produced results. Below, see the first part of the “Hymn to Ninkasi,” which describes “in poetic terms the step-by-step process of Sumerian beer brewing.” A second part of the hymn “celebrates the containers in which the beer is brewed and served” and “includes the toasts usual in tavern and drinking songs.” You can read that joyful text—which includes the line “With joy in the heat [and] a happy liver”—on page 4 of Professor Civil’s article on the Hymn.
Hymn to Ninkasi (Part I)
Borne of the flowing water,
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,
Borne of the flowing water,
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,
Having founded your town by the sacred lake,
She finished its great walls for you,
Ninkasi, having founded your town by the sacred lake,
She finished it’s walls for you,
Your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake.
Ninkasi, your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake.
You are the one who handles the dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics,
Ninkasi, you are the one who handles the dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date] — honey,
You are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
You are the one who waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,
Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,
You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves fall.
Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks the malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves fall.
You are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,
Ninkasi, you are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,
You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweet wort,
Brewing [it] with honey [and] wine
(You the sweet wort to the vessel)
Ninkasi, (…)(You the sweet wort to the vessel)
The filtering vat, which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a large collector vat.
Ninkasi, the filtering vat, which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a large collector vat.
When you pour out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.
Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.
Humorist James Thurber never tired of subjecting puny male milquetoasts to powerful female bullies.
In his view, members of the fairer sex were never femme fatales or fussy matrons, but rather battle-loving warriors in simple Wilma Flintstone-esque frocks. They are immune to the traditionally feminine concerns of the period—hair, children, the living room drapes… they get their pleasure dominating Walter Mitty and his ilk.
(Was he terrified of Woman? Resentful of her? The story he stuck to was that he’d conceived of his comic portrayal for the sole purpose of “egging her on.”)
There is one memorable instance where the little guy was allowed to come out on top. “The Unicorn in the Garden” is a story first published in The New Yorker on October 31, 1939. No spoilers, but there’s a close resemblance to Harvey, Mary Chase’s much-produced play about a mild-mannered gent whose devotion to a 6’ tall invisible rabbit drives his domineering sister around the bend.
The 1953 cartoon adaptation above brought Thurber’s drawings to life, whilst preserving the dialogue of the original in its entirety. The original story was published with only a single illustration, but director William T. Hurtz’s had hundreds of New Yorker cartoons to draw upon. Legend has it that Hurtz purposefully assigned some of United Productions of America’s least gifted animators to the project, hoping to duplicate Thurber’s ”nice, lumpy look.” The plan was for “The Unicorn in the Garden” to be part of a full-length Thurber feature,but alas, the studio pulled the plug on Men, Women and Dogs before it could be completed. Moral: Don’t count your boobies until they are hatched.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on Watch a 1953 Animation of James Thurber’s “Unicorn in the Garden,” Voted One of the Best Animations Ever ) |
If you know of Victor Hugo, you most likely know him as the man of letters who wrote books like Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). If you know something else about him, it probably has to do with his politics: King Louis-Philippe granted him peerage in 1841, and he became a member of the French Parliament in 1848. This position gave him something of a pulpit from which to speak on his pet causes: abolition of the death penalty, freedom of the press, universal suffrage and education, and — lest anyone call the ambitions of his secondary career minor — the end of poverty.
But this sensibility made Hugo no friend of Napoleon III, who took power in 1851, and so the writer went into political exile in Guernsey. That year marked the end of a period, beginning with his election to Parliament, during which Hugo put writing aside in order to devote himself fully to politics — well, almost fully. Even as he laid down his writing pen, he picked up his drawing pen, producing the images you see here and many, many more.
Hugo, writes The Paris Review’s Dan Piepenbring, “made some four thousand drawings over the course of his life. He was an adept draftsman, even an experimental one: he sometimes drew with his nondominant hand or when looking away from the page. If pen and ink were not available, he had recourse to soot, coal dust, and coffee grounds.” The Tate’s Christopher Turner writes of rumors “that he used blood pricked from his own veins in his many drawings.” Whatever liquid substance he used, in the drawing at the top we can see “a giant, menacing octopus, fashioned from a single stain [that] contorts its suckered limbs into the initials VH.”
A bold signature indeed, but then, Hugo hardly played the shrinking violet in any domain. And yet, so as not to distract from the rest of his career, he seldom showed his drawings to anyone but family and friends, coming no closer to publishing anything any of his art than the hand-drawn calling cards he handed visitors in his period of exile. No less a painter than Eugène Delacroix, when he saw these drawings, thought that if Hugo hadn’t become a writer, he could have become one of the 19th century’s greatest artists instead. I’d certainly like to see what Andrew Lloyd Webber would have adapted that octopus into.
Matt Zoller Seitz is easily one of the finest film critics working today. Over the years, he has done quite a lot of work unpacking the dense visual world of filmmaker Wes Anderson, culminating in a gorgeous coffee table book called, aptly, The Wes Anderson Collection. Today you can explore a series of video essays that delve into the filmmaker’s work. Zoller Seitz argues that Anderson’s distinctive look is not merely empty aesthetics. Instead, he asserts that there is substance to Anderson’s style.
The first video outlines three of Anderson’s biggest cinematic influences. The filmmaker’s love of virtuous camera moves and preoccupation with fallen geniuses can be traced right back to Orson Welles. His focus on young people struggling to find peace in the adult world is influenced by Francois Truffaut, particularly his masterpiece 400 Blows. And the third, and perhaps most surprising, influence is Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts.
While the previous videos come close to hagiography, the third video compares Anderson with another obvious influence Hal Ashby. It’s just about impossible to imagine Anderson’s delightfully twee world and deadpan humor without Ashby’s Harold and Maude. Like Anderson, Ashby too slipped effortlessly between different tones and different genres. But Anderson’s movies focus exclusively on upper class white people, something that he has been frequently criticized for. Ashby’s movies, on the other hand, cast a much wider socio-economic net. After watching this video, you get the sense that Ashby might be the better filmmaker.
The fourth video lays out how Anderson’s tendency of defining characters through their wardrobe goes right back to writer J.D. Salinger.
And with the fifth and final video, Zoller Seitz pulls together all of his arguments by annotating the prologue to arguably Anderson’s best and most influential movie, The Royal Tenenbaums.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
If you have toured the home of a famed writer, seen the desk at which they worked, or visited their grave, you are a literary pilgrim, partaking in a form of tourism first popular in the Victorian era. In our free e‑book for March, Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave, Simon Goldhill makes a pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott’s baronial mansion, Wordsworth’s cottage in the Lake District, the Brontë parsonage, Shakespeare’s birthplace, and Freud’s office in Hampstead. He gamely negotiates distractions ranging from broken bicycles to a flock of giggling Japanese schoolgirls, as he tries to discern what our forebears were looking for at these sites, as well as what they have to say to the modern pilgrim. Take your literary pilgrimage in our free e‑book, Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave.
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At home I often watch EBS, essentially Korea’s equivalent of PBS, which often airs short interstitial segments drawn in sand to fill the time between programs. Only recently have I learned that sand actually has a genuine history as a medium for animation, one that has produced a work as striking as Caroline Leaf’s The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa back in 1977. Astute (or even not-very-astute) Kafka fans will recognize this as an adaptation of TheMetamorphosis, far and away the writer’s best-known story, in which the young salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into a giant bug. Find it in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.
We see this bug writhing his way out of bed before we see any other action in Leaf’s ten-minute sand short, whose (yes) ever-shifting visual texture lends itself well to the theme of the tale. Not that this convergence of form and substance came easily: “What makes [Leaf’s] work stand out is the control of the material,” writes Johnny Chew, About Tech’s animation expert. “The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa is an awesome short film on its own, and a great adaptation of the Kafka work, but when you consider the style in which it was made and the control that would have to go into each frame, it’s unbelievable.”
“The medium of animation, and specifically certain animated techniques, offer an ability to faithfully reproduce in part both the content and the perceptual experience of a literary work,” writes Geoffrey Beatty in his paper “The Problem of Adaptation Solved!.” In it, he quotes the animator on why she chose this particular story: “ ‘Kafka’s stories give this kind of room to invent,’ she says. This was an important value for Leaf as she was establishing a body of work based on a unique visual approach. The Metamorphosis, suggested to her by a friend and mentor, was a good fit, as her own ‘black and white sand images had the potential to have a Kafka-esque feel – dark and mysterious.’ ”
Any worthwhile artistic medium imposes limitations — and sand, as you’d imagine, imposes some pretty serious ones. Working with it, Leaf “would not be able to create highly detailed images [such as] the festering wound on Gregor’s back or his overall deterioration and decay. However, this limitation was not necessarily a problem. ‘I think that the limitations of drawing in sand, the simplifications that it requires, made me inventive in the storytelling in the ways I mentioned above. Sand forced me to adapt the story to sand, which is interesting.’ ”
Those readers who apply the word “Kafkan” to any pointlessly difficult task (like, say, getting out the door to work when you’ve become a giant bug) might also use it to describe Leaf’s labor-intensive sand animation process. But unlike a truly Kafkan labor, Leaf’s generated a result — and a delightful one at that. Now if only the next generation of sand animators would step foward to adapt the rest of Kafka’s oeuvre. Maybe we could interest PBS in airing it?
by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa: A Wonderful Sand Animation of the Classic Kafka Story (1977) ) |
I’ll admit it. I have a thing for listening to rock biographies and autobiographies on Audible, particularly memoirs narrated by the author him or herself. Look in my personal Audible library and you’ll find Patti Smith reading Just Kids. Keith Richards reading sections of his bestseller Life. And Pete Townshend narrating his 18-hour tome Who Am I. That’s just naming a few.
Right now, I’m getting started with Girl in a Band, the new memoir released by Kim Gordon, the co-founder of the influential indie rock band, Sonic Youth. And it looks like you can do the same with me. Rough Trade has made available online five audio clips, starting with Gordon reading from Chapter 1. Together, they amount to almost an hour of free audio. Find them all below.
Meanwhile, if you want to download the entire memoir for free, you can go here, and then click on the “Try Audible Free” button in the upper right corner. Just realize that you’re signing up for Audible’s 30-Day Free Trial program, which lets you download two free audiobooks and try out the service for 30 days. If you so choose, you can cancel before a fee kicks in. Please make sure you read all of the fine print before you sign up.
People can, and do, spend lifetimes tracking down and cataloguing all of the various releases of their favorite bands—studio, stage, bootleg, and otherwise. Certain groups—the Grateful Dead, naturally (hear 9,000 Dead shows here)—encourage this more than others. And if a rock band can send completists on lifelong scavenger hunts, how much more so a prolific jazz artist such as, say, Miles Davis? Like the musical form itself, jazz artists are mercurial by nature, spending years as journeymen for any number of other bandleaders before breaking off to form their own quartets, quintets, sextets, etc. Add to the profusion of different groups the tendency of jazz players to record the same songs—but never in the same way—dozens, hundreds, of times, and you’ve got discographies that number well into double-digit page lengths.
That’s the situation with Miles, for sure—even the most studied of his collectors couldn’t possibly call to mind all of his immense catalog without some handy reference guide. Perhaps “Scaled in Miles” can help. Condensing an incredible amount of musical history into a very concise and attractive form, “Scaled in Miles,” as it’s called—a huge online interactive discography—“tries to make sense of Davis’s storied career by visualizing each of the 577 artists he collaborated with over 405 recording sessions.” That description comes from Fast Company, who feature a few close-ups of the related “Scaled in Miles” poster, which they describe as resembling NASA’s “Golden Record.” The interactive visualization allows you to listen to the tunes as you learn the musicians who created them and the wheres and whens of their recordings.
Something about Miles’ music lends itself particularly well, I have to say, to the very streamlined, clean design of this impressive catalog’s online interface. Were someone enterprising enough to make one for the Grateful Dead, I’m guessing it would look less like a golden record in space and more like another, messier kind of spaced-out voyage. That’s not to suggest that Davis and the Dead have little in common but their vast recorded output. They did, after all, once share a stage at the Fillmore West in 1970. No need to go digging in the vaults to find that one; see the personnel from that night at the top of the post and stream the whole thing right here.
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