Salvador Dalí’s Avant-Garde Christmas Cards

in Art | December 11th, 2014

navidad_1959_dali_felicitacion-de-navidad-hallmark

If ever you find your­self look­ing down on the Christ­mas card as a bland, main­stream art form, remem­ber that John Waters makes them. So did Andy Warhol. But we’ve told you about those two coun­ter­cul­tur­al cre­ators’ appre­ci­a­tion for the imagery of Christ­mas before. This hol­i­day sea­son, we sub­mit for your approval a series of Christ­mas cards from the hand of none oth­er than Sal­vador Dalí. They came our way via Span­ish lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor Rebec­ca M. Ben­der, who writes that the sur­re­al­ist painter “designed 19 unique Christ­mas cards between 1958–1976 for the Barcelona-based com­pa­ny Hoechst Ibéri­ca,” a chap­ter in a com­mer­cial career that also includ­ed “art­work for adver­tise­ments (Bryan’s Hosiery) and mag­a­zine cov­ers dur­ing the mid-20th cen­tu­ry.”

navidad_1946_dali_felicitacion-de-navidad-vogue-cover

Ben­der, a Dalí enthu­si­ast who teach­es at Grin­nell, has assem­bled an impres­sive col­lec­tion of images that give Christ­mas the sur­re­al touch that I think we can all agree the hol­i­day has always need­ed. The sketch for a 1948 Vogue mag­a­zine cov­er just above “exhibits tell-tale char­ac­ter­is­tics of Dalí’s sur­re­al­ist style, includ­ing the bar­ren, expan­sive land­scape and the incor­po­ra­tion of dou­ble-images (which also char­ac­ter­ize his depic­tion of the Span­ish Civ­il War).” While that image has today become a spe­cial­ty Christ­mas card, the art he cre­at­ed specif­i­cal­ly for cards “did not incor­po­rate tra­di­tion­al Mediter­ranean, Catholic Christ­mas imagery such as the Nativ­i­ty scene or the Reyes magos (Wise men), but rather they appro­pri­at­ed more Amer­i­can and Cen­tral Euro­pean ele­ments, such as the Christ­mas Tree,” which he some­times used as “an alle­gor­i­cal depic­tion of the year’s events” or infused “with dis­tinc­tive ele­ments of Span­ish cul­ture.”

navidad_1960_dali_felicitacion-de-navidad_arbol

When Dalí did try his hand at more tra­di­tion­al Christ­mas iconog­ra­phy, he did it for Amer­i­can greet­ing-card titan Hall­mark. You can see one fruit of this com­mis­sion in the 1959 nativ­i­ty scene at the top of the post. Ben­der cites Patrick Regan’s book Hall­mark: A Cen­tu­ry of Car­ing as describ­ing Dalí’s “take on Christ­mas [being] a bit too avant garde for the aver­age greet­ing card buy­er.” But tastes, even main­stream tastes, seem to have broad­ened quite a bit over the past 55 years. The time may have come where every man, woman, and child in Amer­i­ca could do with a lit­tle sur­re­al­ism stirred into their Christ­mas spir­it. If you agree, make sure to read and see every­thing else Ben­der has gath­ered from Dalí’s Christ­mas-card career, all of which will inspire you to make the Yule­tide more aes­thet­i­cal­ly dar­ing.

dali xmas card 4

via Rebec­ca Ben­der

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Waters Makes Hand­made Christ­mas Cards, Says the “Whole Pur­pose of Life is Christ­mas”

Watch Ter­ry Gilliam’s Ani­mat­ed Short, The Christ­mas Card (1968)

Andy Warhol’s Christ­mas Art

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Patti Smith’s Passionate Covers of Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Jefferson Airplane & Prince

in Music | December 11th, 2014

In 1966, Jimi Hen­drix released his first sin­gle, “Hey Joe,” a cov­er song, and, in a cer­tain sense, reclaimed Amer­i­can rock ‘n’ roll from the British inva­sion. Eight years lat­er in ‘74, it may have seemed like rock ‘n’ roll was dead and gone. Nos­tal­gia set in; Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” hit the charts again thanks to Amer­i­can Graf­fi­ti and Hap­py Days. And then, a skin­ny poet from New Jer­sey and four kids from Queens more or less invent­ed punk and res­ur­rect­ed the molder­ing corpse of rock. The Ramones appeared at CBGB’s for the first time in August. (See one of their ear­li­est record­ed per­for­mances here.) That same month saw the release of Pat­ti Smith’s first single—“Hey Joe”—arguably the first punk release in his­to­ry, though she sings it like a torch song. (The B‑side, the spo­ken word “Piss Fac­to­ry,” set the tone for punk rock nam­ing prac­tices for decades to come).

At the top, hear Smith’s ver­sion of “Hey Joe,” which she intro­duces with an orig­i­nal piece of trans­gres­sive poet­ry about Pat­ty Hearst, then still a cap­tive mem­ber of the Sym­bionese Lib­er­a­tion Army. In the still image, Smith wears a t‑shirt that seems to answer the echo of Bill Haley’s ghost: “F*ck the Clock. “ Just above, see Smith and band play “Hey Joe” live on The Old Grey Whis­tle Test in 1976, just after an abridged ver­sion of “Hors­es.”


One of Smith’s biggest hits, “Glo­ria,” was also a cov­er, of a song by Van Morrison’s for­mer band Them. She mem­o­rably made that song her own as well with the open­ing line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” She went on to cov­er a host of artists—Dylan, The Bea­t­les, Ste­vie Won­der, U2. In fact her 10th stu­dio album, 2007’s Twelve, con­sists entire­ly of cov­ers. Just above from that record, hear her folky take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” record­ed with stand-up bass and ban­jo. And below, she deliv­ers a spooky ren­di­tion of Jef­fer­son Airplane’s “White Rab­bit.”

While her stage per­sona may have mel­lowed with age, Smith’s voice has remained as pow­er­ful and cap­ti­vat­ing as ever. Below she belts out the Stones’ “Gimme Shel­ter” live on the BBC’s Lat­er… with Jool Hol­land, a song she also cov­ers on Twelve.

Her tastes are eclec­tic, her range wide, and though she’ll always get the cred­it as the “God­moth­er of Punk,” she’s able to work in almost any style, even a kind of adult con­tem­po­rary that doesn’t seem very Pat­ti Smith at all. But she owns it in her cov­er of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” below, from her two-disc com­pi­la­tion album Land (1975–2002). It’s a long way from “Piss Fac­to­ry,” but it’s still Smith doing what she’s always done—paying homage to the artists who inspire her. Whether it’s Smokey Robin­son, Bruce Spring­steen, or Vir­ginia Woolf, she’s able to chan­nel the genius of her influ­ences while infus­ing their work with her own pas­sion­ate sex­u­al ener­gy and poet­ic inten­si­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Pat­ti Smith Read 12 Poems From Sev­enth Heav­en, Her First Col­lec­tion (1972)

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

See Pat­ti Smith Give Two Dra­mat­ic Read­ings of Allen Ginsberg’s “Foot­note to Howl”

Pat­ti Smith’s Cov­er of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Strips the Song Down to its Heart

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

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John Waters Narrates Offbeat Documentary on an Environmental Catastrophe, the Salton Sea

in Environment, Film | December 11th, 2014

In 2004, John Waters nar­rat­ed Plagues & Plea­sures on the Salton Sea, a humor­ous doc­u­men­tary on the acci­den­tal lake cre­at­ed in the desert of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. You can now find the film host­ed on the YouTube chan­nel of KQED, the pub­lic tele­vi­sion out­fit in San Fran­cis­co (where we’re get­ting heavy, heavy rains today). They lay the foun­da­tion for watch­ing the film as fol­lows:

Once known as the “Cal­i­for­nia Riv­iera,” the Salton Sea is now con­sid­ered one of Amer­i­ca’s worst eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ters: a fetid, stag­nant, salty lake, cough­ing up dead fish and birds by the thou­sands. Nar­rat­ed by cult-movie leg­end John Waters, Plagues & Plea­sures is an epic west­ern tale of real estate ven­tures and failed boom­towns.

Find Plagues & Plea­sures on the Salton Sea list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via @Wfmu

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Waters Makes Hand­made Christ­mas Cards, Says the “Whole Pur­pose of Life is Christ­mas”

An Anti, Anti-Smok­ing Announce­ment from John Waters

John Waters: The Point of Con­tem­po­rary Art

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

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50 Film Noirs You Can Watch For Free: A Dame with a Past. A Desperate, Doomed Man. A Gun.

in Film | December 10th, 2014

Film noir isn’t real­ly a genre. It’s a mood. Its ele­ments are so well known that they bor­der on self-par­o­dy. Neon lights. Inky black shad­ows. An emp­ty bot­tle of whiskey. A gun. A dame with a past. A des­per­ate, doomed man.

Like Ger­man Expres­sion­ism dur­ing the 1930s, it was a cul­tur­al pro­cess­ing of a his­toric trau­ma. Like French Poet­ic Real­ism dur­ing that same decade, film noir is fixed in a par­tic­u­lar cul­ture dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar time. In this case, the cul­ture was the inher­ent­ly opti­mistic one of the Unit­ed States. The time was just after World War II when the foun­da­tions of that opti­mism were severe­ly test­ed. A gen­er­a­tion of men returned from Europe and the Pacif­ic scarred and dazed by the mind-bog­gling car­nage of the war only to dis­cov­er that their women were doing just fine work­ing in fac­to­ries and offices. Is it any won­der then that per­haps the most fre­quent trope in noir is of a man, seem­ing­ly tough but riv­en with weak­ness, undone by a pow­er­ful, sex­u­al­ly-dom­i­nat­ing femme fatale?

Though those gen­der roles were quick­ly reshuf­fled and women were, for a time, ban­ished back to the realm of domes­tic­i­ty, cracks remained in the brit­tle veneer of Amer­i­can mas­culin­i­ty. Add to that exis­ten­tial anx­i­eties over the bomb and the Red Scare’s cor­ro­sive para­noia and you have a whole tox­ic stew of cul­tur­al fears bur­bling out of the Amer­i­can col­lec­tive uncon­scious. And film noir artic­u­lat­ed those fears bet­ter than just about any­thing else.

Of course, the rea­son film noir has proved to be so endur­ing is because of its look. The spare light­ing, the cant­ed angles, the grotesque shad­ows. It’s Ger­man Expres­sion­ism cast through the lens of Orson Welles. Its stark style meld­ed per­fect­ly with noir’s bleak cyn­i­cism. It should come as no sur­prise that some of the best noir direc­tors – Fritz Lang, Robert Siod­mak and espe­cial­ly Bil­ly Wilder – fled Ger­many for the warmer climes of Hol­ly­wood. The style was also cheap — lots of shad­ows means less mon­ey spent on lights. It was a boon for the scores of inde­pen­dent pro­duc­ers who made noirs on a shoe­string.

If you want get into that film noir mood, Open Cul­ture has 50, count ‘em, 50 film noir movies that you can watch right now for free. They include:

  • Detour Free – Edgar Ulmer’s cult clas­sic noir film shot in 6 days. (1945)
  • D.O.A. — Free — Rudolph Maté’s clas­sic noir film. Called “one of the most accom­plished, inno­v­a­tive, and down­right twist­ed entrants to the film noir genre.”  (1950)
  • The Hitch-Hik­er —  Free –  The first noir film made by a woman noir direc­tor, Ida Lupino. It appears above. (1953)
  • The Naked Kiss — Free - Con­stance Tow­ers is a pros­ti­tute try­ing to start new life in a small town. Direct­ed by Sam Fuller. (1964)
  • The Stranger — Free – Direct­ed by Orson Welles with Edward G. Robin­son. One of Welles’s major com­mer­cial suc­cess­es. (1946)

Check out the full list of 50 free noir films here, or find them in our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Fritz Lang’s Cen­sored Noir Film, Scar­let Street, Star­ring the Great Edward G. Robin­son (1945)

Detour: The Cheap, Rushed Piece of 1940s Film Noir Nobody Ever For­gets

Watch D.O.A., Rudolph Maté’s “Inno­v­a­tive and Down­right Twist­ed” Noir Film (1950)

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.

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Three Strikingly Different Views of North Korea, the Most Secretive Country in the World

in Current Affairs, Travel | December 10th, 2014

I once asked a friend based in Seoul, South Korea who used to write for a pres­ti­gious news mag­a­zine what that mag­a­zine want­ed to hear from the Korea beat. “Let’s see… North Korea, North Korea, and more North Korea,” he replied. “Oh, and did I men­tion North Korea?” Since the cre­ation of two Kore­as after the Sec­ond World War, North Korea, the far less pop­u­lat­ed and infi­nite­ly more secre­tive sib­ling of the land of all-you-can-eat bar­be­cue and “Gang­nam Style,” has inspired deep and fear­ful fas­ci­na­tion in its observers. This has held truer and truer as time goes on; South and North Korea looked sur­pris­ing­ly sim­i­lar in the twen­ty years or so right after they put the Kore­an War on pause, but now they’ve diverged so far that one can scarce­ly believe that so lit­tle time, and even less dis­tance, sep­a­rates the two.

The world’s inter­est in North Korea has run espe­cial­ly strong in the 21st cen­tu­ry, dur­ing the reigns of the late (and cinephilic) Kim Jong-Il and now his son, the even high­er-pro­file (and seem­ing­ly unap­pre­cia­tive of the upcom­ing North Korea-themed James Fran­co-Seth Rogen com­e­dy The Inter­view) Kim Jong-Un. Vice catered straight to it when they pro­duced the doc­u­men­tary The Vice Guide to North Korea at the top, which pro­vides a wise­crack­ing first-per­son per­spec­tive on what you get when you sign up for a tour of the place. (Shoot­ing pool with a lone­ly tea-shop girl ranks not low­est among the attrac­tions.) If you sign up for one your­self, you’ll prob­a­bly go with Koryo Tours, the firm with whose aid city-­bran­der JT Singh and video­g­ra­ph­er Rob Whit­worth put togeth­er “Enter Pyongyang,” the time-bend­ing com­pos­ite flight through the North Kore­an cap­i­tal just above.

prison-sinuiju

Pyon­gang shows up on illu­mi­na­tion maps as the sole point of light in an oth­er­wise dark coun­try. So what goes on in the rest of it? Accord­ing to One Free Korea, “the Com­mit­tee for Human Rights in North Korea esti­mates that North Korea holds as many as 120,000 peo­ple in its sys­tem of con­cen­tra­tion and deten­tion camps, and that 400,000 peo­ple have died in these camps from tor­ture, star­va­tion, dis­ease, and exe­cu­tion.” On that page, they’ve assem­bled Google Earth satel­lite images doc­u­ment­ing the prob­a­ble loca­tions and ele­ments of these camps. For more on these least-known parts of this least-known nation, see also Vice’s 40-minute pro­gram on North Kore­an Labor Camps below:

If all this does­n’t sati­ate your curios­i­ty about North Korea — and what amount of infor­ma­tion ever could? — have a look at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s Inside North Korea, a slow-motion film of an intense­ly chore­o­graphed North Kore­an mil­i­tary parade, and of course, our guide to the five best North Kore­an movies, all free to watch online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Dic­ta­tor Kim Jong-il’s Writ­ings on Cin­e­ma, Art & Opera: Cour­tesy of North Korea’s Free E‑Library

Orches­tral Manoeu­vres in North Korea Prove Yet Again That Music is Uni­ver­sal

A Slo-Mo Look Inside North Korea

The Five Best North Kore­an Movies: Watch Them Free Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Digital Dostoevsky: Download Free eBooks & Audio Books of the Russian Novelist’s Major Works

in Books, Literature | December 10th, 2014

Fyodor_Mikhailovich_Dostoyevsky_1876

In the pan­theon of Great Russ­ian Writ­ers, two heads appear to tow­er above all others—at least for us Eng­lish-lan­guage read­ers. Leo Tol­stoy, aris­to­crat-turned-mys­tic, whose detailed real­ism feels like a fic­tion­al­ized doc­u­men­tary of 19th cen­tu­ry Russ­ian life; and Fyo­dor Mikhailovich Dos­to­evsky, the once-con­demned-to-death, epilep­tic for­mer gam­bler, whose fever-dream nov­els read like psy­cho­log­i­cal case stud­ies of peo­ple bare­ly cling­ing to the jagged edges of that same soci­ety. Both nov­el­ists are read with sim­i­lar rev­er­ence and devo­tion by their fans, and they are often pit­ted against each oth­er, writes Kevin Hart­nett at The Mil­lions, like “Williams vs. DiMag­gio and Bird vs. Mag­ic,” even as peo­ple who have these kinds argu­ments acknowl­edge them both as “irre­ducibly great.”

I’ve had the Tol­stoy vs. Dos­to­evsky back and forth a time or two, and I have to say I usu­al­ly give the edge to Dos­to­evsky. It’s the high-stakes des­per­a­tion of his char­ac­ters, the trag­ic irony of their un-self-aware­ness, or the gnaw­ing obses­sion of those who know a lit­tle bit too much, about them­selves and every­one else. Dos­toyevsky has long been described as a psy­cho­log­i­cal nov­el­ist. Niet­zsche famous­ly called him “the only psy­chol­o­gist from whom I have any­thing to learn.” Hen­ry Miller’s praise of the writer of par­tic­u­lar­ly Russ­ian forms of mis­ery and tres­pass is a lit­tle more col­or­ful: “Dos­to­evsky,” he wrote, “is chaos and fecun­di­ty. Human­i­ty, with him, is but a vor­tex in the bub­bling mael­strom.”

Per­haps the most suc­cinct state­ment on the Russ­ian novelist’s work comes from Scot­tish poet and nov­el­ist Edwin Muir, who said, “Dos­toyevsky wrote of the uncon­scious as if it were con­scious; that is in real­i­ty the rea­son why his char­ac­ters seem ‘patho­log­i­cal,’ while they are only visu­al­ized more clear­ly than any oth­er fig­ures in imag­i­na­tive lit­er­a­ture.” Joseph Con­rad may have found him “too Russ­ian,” but even with the cul­tur­al gulf that sep­a­rates him from us, and the well over one hun­dred years of social, polit­i­cal, and tech­no­log­i­cal change, we still read Dos­to­evsky and see our own inner dark­ness reflect­ed back at us—our hypocrisies, neu­roses, obses­sions, ter­rors, doubts, and even the para­noia and nar­cis­sism we think unique to our inter­net age.

This kind of thing can be unset­tling. Although, like Tol­stoy, Dos­to­evsky embraced a fierce­ly uncom­pro­mis­ing Christianity—one more wracked with painful doubt, per­haps, but no less sincere—his will­ing­ness to descend into the low­est depths of the human psy­che made him seem to Tur­genev like “the nas­ti­est Chris­t­ian I’ve ever met.” I’m not sure if that was meant as a com­pli­ment, but it’s per­haps a fit­ting descrip­tion of the cre­ator of such express­ly vicious char­ac­ters as Crime and Pun­ish­ment’s socio­path­ic Arkady Svidri­gailov, Demons’ cru­el rapist Niko­lai Stavro­gin, and The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov’s psy­cho­path­ic creep Pavel Smerdyakov (a char­ac­ter so nasty he inspired a Mar­vel comics vil­lain).

Next to these dev­ils, Dos­to­evsky places saints: Crime and Pun­ish­ment’s Sonya, Kara­ma­zov broth­er Alyosha the monk, and holy fool Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. His char­ac­ters fre­quent­ly mur­der and redeem each oth­er, but they also work out exis­ten­tial crises, have lengthy the­o­log­i­cal argu­ments, and illus­trate the author’s philo­soph­i­cal ideas about faith and its lack. The genius of Dos­to­evsky lies in his abil­i­ty to explore such heady abstrac­tions while rarely becom­ing didac­tic or turn­ing his char­ac­ters into pup­pets. On the contrary—no fig­ures in mod­ern lit­er­a­ture seem so alive and three-dimen­sion­al as his anguished col­lec­tion of unfor­get­table anar­chists, aris­to­crats, poor folks, crim­i­nals, fla­neurs, and under­ground men.

Should you have missed out on the plea­sure, if it can so be called, of ful­ly immers­ing your­self in Dostoevsky’s world of fear, belief, and madness—or should you desire to refresh your knowl­edge of his dense and mul­ti­fac­eted work—you can find all of his major nov­els and novel­las online in a vari­ety of for­mats. We’ve done you the favor of com­pil­ing them below in ebook for­mat. Where pos­si­ble, we’ve also includ­ed audio books too. (Note: they all per­ma­nent­ly reside in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions.)

Find more of Dostoevsky’s work—including his sketch­es of prison life in Siberia and many of his short sto­ries—at Project Guten­berg. Like his con­tem­po­rary Charles Dick­ens, Dostoevsky’s nov­els were seri­al­ized in peri­od­i­cals, and their plots (and char­ac­ter names) can be wind­ing, con­vo­lut­ed, and dif­fi­cult to fol­low. For a com­pre­hen­sive guide through the life and work of the Russ­ian psy­cho­log­i­cal real­ist, see Chris­ti­aan Stange’s “Dos­to­evsky Research Sta­tion,” an online data­base with full text of the author’s work and links to art­work, crit­i­cal essays, bib­li­ogra­phies, quo­ta­tions, study guides and out­lines, and muse­ums and “his­tor­i­cal­ly impor­tant places.” And for even more resources, see FyodorDostoevsky.com, a huge archive of texts, essays, links, pic­tures and more. Enjoy!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dig­i­tal Niet­zsche: Down­load Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks

Watch a Hand-Paint­ed Ani­ma­tion of Dostoevsky’s “The Dream of a Ridicu­lous Man”

Watch Piotr Dumala’s Won­der­ful Ani­ma­tions of Lit­er­ary Works by Kaf­ka and Dos­to­evsky

The His­toric Meet­ing Between Dick­ens and Dos­to­evsky Revealed as a Great Lit­er­ary Hoax

Crime and Pun­ish­ment: Free Audio­Book and eBook

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

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Muhammad Ali Gives a Dramatic Reading of His Poem on the Attica Prison Uprising

in History, Life, Poetry, Sports, Television | December 10th, 2014

In July of 1972, box­er Muham­mad Ali trav­eled to Dublin to fight Alvin ‘Blue’ Lewis, an ex-con from Detroit. In the days lead­ing up to the bout, he amused him­self by bust­ing on Fight of the Cen­tu­ry vic­tor Smokin’ Joe Fra­zier from afar, refer­ring to him on live tele­vi­sion as a “tramp” and a “slave” who lived on a “chick­en plan­ta­tion.”

It was a career defin­ing encounter for inter­view­er Cathal O’Shan­non, who praised Ali’s deft­ness in that area and not­ed that the champ said things “he would not have been able to say in Amer­i­ca.”

It’s doubt­ful that O’Shannon was refer­ring to the name call­ing, part of Ali’s cam­paign to draw Fra­zier back into the ring. (The champ got his wish less than two years lat­er, when he defeat­ed Fra­zier at Madi­son Square Gar­den in the sec­ond of their three fights.)

What’s more like­ly is that O’Shannon was allud­ing to the orig­i­nal poem Ali recites from mem­o­ry, one minute into clip above, after ori­ent­ing Irish view­ers to the pre­vi­ous fall’s Atti­ca Prison upris­ing, still the dead­liest in U.S. his­to­ry.

Ali imag­ines him­self in the shoes of a black pris­on­er, respond­ing to the white war­den issu­ing a final ulti­ma­tum. His reply, which could be tak­en as a call to arms , but which Ali touch­ing­ly calls a “poet­ic poem,” takes the form of a dozen ter­cets:

Bet­ter far from all I see

To die fight­ing to be free

What more fit­ting end could be?

Bet­ter sure­ly than in some bed

Where in bro­ken health I’m led

Lin­ger­ing until I’m dead

Bet­ter than with prayers and pleas

Or in the clutch of some dis­ease

Wast­ing slow­ly  by degrees

Bet­ter than of heart attack 

Or some dose of drug I lack 

Let me die by being Black 

Bet­ter far that I should go 

Stand­ing here against the foe 

Is the sweet­er death to know 

Bet­ter than the bloody stain 

On some high­way where I’m lain 

Torn by fly­ing glass and pane 

Bet­ter call­ing death to come

Than to die anoth­er dumb

Mut­ed vic­tim in the slum

Bet­ter than of this prison rot

If there’s any choice I’ve got

Kill me here on the spot

Bet­ter far my fight to wage

Now while my blood boils with rage

Lest it cool with ancient age

Bet­ter vow­ing for us to die

Than to Uncle Tom and try

Mak­ing peace just to live a lie

Bet­ter now that I say my sooth

I’m gonna die demand­ing truth

While I’m still akin to youth

Bet­ter now than lat­er on

Now that fear of death is gone

Nev­er mind anoth­er dawn.

The poem draws to a close with an inex­pert but heart­felt sound effect.

The poet — whose mater­nal great-grand­fa­ther was born in Coun­ty Clare — went on to knock out his oppo­nent in the 11th round.

The trail­er for the doc­u­men­tary, When Ali Came to Ire­land, fea­tur­ing Cathal O’Shan­non, is below.

More poet­ry read­ings can be found in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Muham­mad Ali Plans to Fight on Mars in Lost 1966 Inter­view

Mal­colm X, Debat­ing at Oxford, Quotes Shakespeare’s Ham­let (1964)

Mail­er on the Ali-Fore­man Clas­sic

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, home­school­er, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Animated Introductions to Quantum Mechanics: From Schrödinger’s Cat to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

in Animation, Physics | December 9th, 2014

If you nev­er quite got a hang of quan­tum mechan­ics, you can take anoth­er run at it by watch­ing four ani­mat­ed Ted-Ed primers, cre­at­ed by Chad Orzel, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Physics and Astron­o­my at Union Col­lege. He’s also the author of How to Teach Quan­tum Physics to Your Dog. In Par­ti­cles and waves: The cen­tral mys­tery of quan­tum mechan­ics (above), Orzel briefly traces the con­cep­tu­al devel­op­ment of quan­tum mechan­ics, high­light­ing the con­tri­bu­tions of physi­cists like Max Planck, Niels Bohr and Louis de Broglie.

Next up, Orzel tack­les the famous thought exper­i­ment known as Schrödinger’s cat, devised, of course, by the Nobel-prize win­ning Aus­tri­an physi­cist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. For anoth­er primer on this top­ic, you should also check out this les­son pre­sent­ed by Six­ty Sym­bols, a web site spe­cial­iz­ing in physics and astron­o­my videos host­ed by The Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham. The two remain­ing videos in Orzel’s series appear below.

Ein­stein’s bril­liant mis­take: Entan­gled states

What is the Heisen­berg Uncer­tain­ty Prin­ci­ple?

via Ted-ED

Relat­ed Con­tent:

64 Free Online Physics Cours­es

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Now Com­plete­ly Online

Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

“Do Sci­en­tists Pray?”: A Young Girl Asks Albert Ein­stein in 1936. Ein­stein Then Responds.

New Archive Puts 1000s of Einstein’s Papers Online, Includ­ing This Great Let­ter to Marie Curie

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Watch Saul Bass’s Trippy, Kitschy Short Film The Quest (1983), Based on a Ray Bradbury Short Story

in Design, Film | December 9th, 2014

Saul Bass was one of the great­est graph­ic design­ers who ever lived. He cre­at­ed the logos for such ubiq­ui­tous orga­ni­za­tions as AT&T, Unit­ed Air­lines and the Girl Scouts of Amer­i­ca. He rev­o­lu­tion­ized the art of movie titles in such films as The Man with the Gold­en Arm, Ver­ti­go and West Side Sto­ry. He may or may not have designed the famous show­er sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho. His design work was always marked by a clean, high­ly graph­ic style that you can pick out a mile away.

Yet when Bass got a chance to actu­al­ly direct, he didn’t make slick movies with sim­ple plots and great visu­als, as you might expect. Instead, he made pro­found­ly trip­py movies with great visu­als. His one and only fea­ture film, Phase IV (1974), is a deeply weird movie about evo­lu­tion. Think of it as a low-bud­get 2001: A Space Odyssey. With ants. The movie was butchered by scared dis­trib­u­tors and con­se­quent­ly, it bombed at the box office. Almost a decade lat­er, Bass, along with his sec­ond wife Elaine, made a short film called Quest, based on Ray Bradbury’s sto­ry “Frost and Fire.” You can watch it here.

The film cen­ters on a tribe of robe-sport­ing peo­ple who live for only a mere eight days. If you’re an infant on a Mon­day, you will be elder­ly by the time the next Mon­day rolls around. At the open­ing, a name­less child is born as his elders ask in hushed tones, “Is this the one?” Of course he is. The rea­son he and his tribe have a short­er shelf life than gro­cery store sushi has some­thing to do with a gate that blocks life sus­tain­ing light. “Beyond the great gate,” intones one elder, “peo­ple live 20,000 days or more.” The prob­lem is that gate is five or so days away by foot.

So after a very brief train­ing mon­tage, the youth sets off across strange and fan­ci­ful land­scapes that recall Yes album cov­ers. Along the way, he faces down a beast that looks like a bear crossed with a lam­prey, plays a video game with a Yeti on top of a zig­gu­rat, and stum­bles across a wiz­ened old man who only the pre­vi­ous week was the tribe’s gold­en boy.

The movie is incred­i­bly, hilar­i­ous­ly dat­ed, so much so that it goes right past kitsch into some­thing close to sub­lime. If you remem­ber watch­ing, and lov­ing, The Dark Crys­tal, Beast Mas­ter, Krull and Tron in your youth, you must check this out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Saul Bass’ Vivid Sto­ry­boards for Kubrick’s Spar­ta­cus (1960)

Who Cre­at­ed the Famous Show­er Scene in Psy­cho? Alfred Hitch­cock or the Leg­endary Design­er Saul Bass?

A Brief Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Saul Bass’ Cel­e­brat­ed Title Designs

Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short Pon­ders Why Man Cre­ates

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

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.

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Robert Sapolsky Explains the Biological Basis of Religiosity, and What It Shares in Common with OCD, Schizophrenia & Epilepsy

in Biology, Religion, Science | December 9th, 2014

Since the 19th cen­tu­ry, thinkers like Lud­wig Feuer­bach, Friedrich Niet­zsche, and Sig­mund Freud have the­o­rized reli­gion as a strict­ly psy­cho­log­i­cal and anthro­po­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non born of the ten­den­cy of the human mind to project its con­tents out into the heav­ens. The Dar­win­ian rev­o­lu­tion pro­vid­ed anoth­er framework—one ground­ed in exper­i­men­tal science—to explain reli­gion. Social sci­en­tists like Pas­cal Boy­er have inte­grat­ed these par­a­digms in com­pre­hen­sive accounts of the ori­gins of reli­gious belief, and in the­o­ries like E.O. Wilson’s Socio­bi­ol­o­gy, evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy pro­vides an expla­na­tion for all social phe­nom­e­na, of which reli­gion is but one among many human adap­ta­tions. Advances in neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy have fur­thered sci­en­tists’ under­stand­ing of reli­gion as a prod­uct not only of human con­scious­ness, but also of the phys­i­cal struc­ture of the brain. In exper­i­ments like the “God hel­met,” for exam­ple, sci­en­tists can induce reli­gious expe­ri­ences by prod­ding cer­tain areas of sub­jects’ brains.

It is in this con­text of psy­chol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, and evo­lu­tion­ary and neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy that we need to sit­u­ate the lec­ture above from Stan­ford pro­fes­sor Robert Sapol­sky. Where many crit­ics of reli­gion explic­it­ly reject reli­gious author­i­ty and belief, Sapol­sky, though him­self “stri­dent­ly athe­is­tic,” has no such agen­da. As an arti­cle in the Col­orado Springs Inde­pen­dent puts it, “he’s no Christo­pher Hitchens.” Sapol­sky freely admits, as do many scientists—religious and non—that reli­gion has many ben­e­fits: “It makes you feel bet­ter. It tends to decrease anx­i­ety, and it gets you a com­mu­ni­ty.” How­ev­er, he claims, these pos­i­tives are the result of evo­lu­tion­ary adap­ta­tions, not proofs of any super­nat­ur­al realm. In fact, reli­gios­i­ty, Pro­fes­sor Sapol­sky argues above, is bio­log­i­cal­ly based and relat­ed to seem­ing­ly much less adap­tive traits like obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der, schiz­o­phre­nia, and epilep­sy.

Part of a lec­ture course on “Human Behav­ioral Biol­o­gy” at Stan­ford, the reli­gion lec­ture is one Sapol­sky admits he is “most ner­vous for, sim­ply because this one peo­ple wind up hav­ing strong opin­ions about.” As he moves ahead, he presents his case (with occa­sion­al inter­rup­tions from his stu­dents) for reli­gios­i­ty as a result of nat­ur­al selec­tion, con­nect­ing belief to the selec­tion of genes for dis­eases like Tay-Sachs, the exis­tence of which can help to explain dispir­it­ing his­tor­i­cal cas­es like the Euro­pean Pogroms against the Jews in the Mid­dle Ages. Through­out his lec­ture, Sapol­sky makes con­nec­tions between reli­gios­i­ty and biol­o­gy, the­o­riz­ing, for exam­ple, that St. Paul had tem­po­ral-lobe epilep­sy.

At the end of his lec­ture, around the 1:19:30 mark, Sapol­sky issues a dis­claimer about what he’s “not say­ing”: “I’m not say­ing ‘you got­ta be crazy to be reli­gious.’ That would be non­sense. Nor am I say­ing, even, that most peo­ple who are, are psy­chi­atri­cal­ly sus­pect.” What he is say­ing, he con­tin­ues, is that “the same exact traits which in a sec­u­lar con­text are life-destroy­ing” and “sep­a­rate you from the com­mu­ni­ty” are, “at the core of what is pro­tect­ed, what is sanc­tioned, what is reward­ed, what is val­ued in reli­gious set­tings.” What fas­ci­nates Sapol­sky is the “under­ly­ing biol­o­gy” of these traits. Sapol­sky even con­fess­es that he “most regrets” his own break with the Ortho­dox reli­gion of his upbring­ing, but that his athe­ism is some­thing he “appears to be unable to change.” The ques­tions Sapol­sky asks broad­ly cov­er the phys­i­cal deter­min­ism of gain­ing faith, and of los­ing it, which he says, is “just as bio­log­i­cal.” What we are to make of all this is a ques­tion he leaves open.

You can watch Sapolsky’s full series of lec­tures on Behav­ioral Biol­o­gy here, and for a ful­ly anno­tat­ed sum­ma­ry of his reli­gios­i­ty lec­ture above, see this site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion

Biol­o­gy That Makes Us Tick: Free Stan­ford Course by Robert Sapol­sky

Do Your­self a Favor and Watch Stress: Por­trait of a Killer (with Stan­ford Biol­o­gist Robert Sapol­sky)

Dopamine Jack­pot! Robert Sapol­sky on the Sci­ence of Plea­sure

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

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Hear Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky Read His Strange & Visceral Poetry

in Film, Poetry | December 9th, 2014

mayakovsky

You have to give the Russ­ian Futur­ists this: those guys did­n’t mince words. It was in their 1912 pub­li­ca­tion Пощёчина общественному вкусу, known in Eng­lish as A Slap in the Face of Pub­lic Taste, that poet, play­wright, artist, actor, and film­mak­er Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (pic­tured above in the cen­ter of a group that includes Sergei Eisen­stein, Boris Paster­nak, and his muse Lilya Brik) made his lit­er­ary debut. As his sen­si­bil­i­ty devel­oped through­out the rest of that decade — a time which, of course, includ­ed the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion — Mayakovsky made him­self into an almost anti-poet­ic poet, incor­po­rat­ing the most com­mon vari­eties of lan­guage, engag­ing straight-on with pol­i­tics, and pre­sent­ing him­self as any­thing but a lofty artis­tic fig­ure.

Here, cour­tesy of PennSound, you can hear Mayakovsky him­self read­ing “An Extra­or­di­nary Adven­ture Which Hap­pened to Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky, One Sum­mer in the Coun­try”:

You can read the Russ­ian here, or an Eng­lish trans­la­tion here, and even in the lat­ter ver­sion the poem’s final lines, which Mayakovsky speaks after hav­ing befriend­ed the sun itself, remain mem­o­rably invig­o­rat­ing:

Shine all the time,
for ever shine.
the last days’ depths to plumb,
to shine — !
spite every hell com­bined!
So runs my slo­gan -
and the sun’s!

PennSound also has Mayakovsky’s own read­ing of “And Could You?” [Russ­ian] [Eng­lish], a much short­er but no less strange­ly vis­cer­al work (1913), which runs, in its entire­ty, as fol­lows:

I sud­den­ly smeared the week­day map
splash­ing paint from a glass;
On a plate of aspic
I revealed
the ocean’s slant­ed cheek.
On the scales of a tin fish
I read the sum­mons of new lips.
And you
could you per­form
a noc­turne on a drain­pipe flute?

Mayakovsky, the com­plete col­lec­tion of whose trans­lat­ed poems you can down­load at Ubuweb, lived from 1893 until his sui­cide in 1930 — a span coeval with the devel­op­ment of the motion pic­ture. He took to that art form just as he took to oth­ers like the stage play and the pro­pa­gan­da poster, and it makes sense that the kind of real­i­ty-bend­ing visu­al mind revealed in his poet­ry would fall under the spell of that whol­ly new and dream­like medi­um. In his short life — all in 1918, in fact — Mayakovsky direct­ed and starred in three short films, It Can­not Be Bought for Mon­ey, Shack­led by Film, and The Young Lady and the Hooli­gan. Only the last of them sur­vives today, and you can watch it below. It’s also housed in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More. More poet­ry read by great poets can be found in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Penn Sound: Fan­tas­tic Audio Archive of Mod­ern & Con­tem­po­rary Poets

“PoemTalk” Pod­cast, Where Impre­sario Al Fil­reis Hosts Live­ly Chats on Mod­ern Poet­ry

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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