On Vimeo, James Cary describes his video creation:
A few years ago, knowing I absolutely adored the John Coltrane album, “A Love Supreme” my wife gave me this incredible book by Ashley Kahn : “A Love Surpreme/The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album.” Reading the book, I discovered something remarkable: the fourth movement, Psalm, was actually John Coltrane playing the ‘words’ of the poem that was included in the original liner notes. Apparently he put the handwritten poem on the music stand in front of him, and ‘played’ it, as if it were music. I immediately played the movement while reading the poem, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was one of the most inspirational and spiritual moments of my life.
I’ve seen some nice versions of this posted on the net, but wanted to make one using his exact handwriting. I also wanted to keep it simple. The music and John’s poem are what’s important. I hope you enjoy this. I hope this inspires you, no matter what ‘God’ you may believe in.
Koko the Gorilla, who celebrates her 43rd birthday today, keeps pretty down-to-earth company for a celebrity. While others court the paparazzi with their public canoodling and high profile Twitter feuds, Koko’s most comfortable hanging with non-marquee-name kittens and palsPenny Patterson and Ron Cohn, the human doctors who’ve headed her caregiving team for the past 41 years.
Her privacy is closely guarded, but there have been a handful of times over the years when her name has been linked to other celebs…
Above, actor William Shatner recalls how, as a younger man, he called upon her in her quarters. He was nervous, approaching submissively, but determined not to retreat. “I love you, Koko,” he told her. “I love you.”
She responded by gripping a part of his anatomy that just happens to be one of the thousand or so words that comprise her American Sign Language vocabulary. One that takes two hands to sign…
Their time was fleeting, but as evidenced below, the connection was intense.
Comedian Robin Williams also claims to have shared “something extraordinary” with Koko. Their flirtation seems innocent enough, despite Williams’ NSFW description of their encounter, below. (He undercuts his credibility by referring to her as a “silverback”.)
Leonardo DiCaprio is yet another famous admirer to be caught on camera with Koko. Is it any wonder that she embodies all of the qualities he claims to look for in a potential love interest: “humility, a sense of humor and not a lot of drama”? No word as to how the Titanic hunk measures up against the qualities Koko looks for in a mate, though footage of their one and only meeting has been known to get fans fantasizing in the comments section: “I wish I was that gorilla ;) lol I looooooooooooooooove u Leo”
From the lady’s perspective, Koko’s sweetest celebrity encounter was almost certainly with her favorite, the late children’s television host, Fred Rogers. She removed his shoes and socks, he studied her lips, love was a primary topic and yet their time together does not invite prurient speculation. I can’t think of another human male as deserving of her affection.
I don’t know about other disciplines, but academic writing in the humanities has become notorious for its jargon-laden wordiness, tangled constructions, and seemingly deliberate vagary and obscurity. A popular demonstration of this comes via the University of Chicago’s academic sentence generator, which allows one to plug in a number of stock phrases, verbs, and “-tion” words to produce corkers like “The reification of post-capitalist hegemony is always already participating in the engendering of print culture” or “The discourse of the gaze gestures toward the linguistic construction of the gendered body”—the point, of course, being that the language of academia has become so meaningless that randomly generated sentences closely resemble and make as much sense as those pulled from the average journal article (a point well made by the so-called “Sokal hoax”).
There are many theories as to why this is so. Some say it’s several generations of scholars poorly imitating famously difficult writers like Hegel and Heidegger, Lacan and Derrida; others blame a host of postmodern ‑isms, with their politicized language games and sectarian schisms. A recent discussion cited scholarly vanity as the cause of incomprehensible academic prose. A more practical explanation holds that the publish or perish grind forces scholars to turn out derivative work at an unreasonable pace simply to keep their jobs, hence stuffing journals with rehashed arguments and fancy-sounding puffery that signifies little. In the above video, Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker offers his own theory, working with examples drawn from academic writing in psychology.
For Pinker, the tendency of academics to use “passives, abstractions, and ‘zombie nouns’” stems not primarily from “nefarious motives” or the desire to “sound sophisticated and recherché and try to bamboozle their readers with high-falutin’ verbiage.” He doesn’t deny that this takes place on occasion, but contra George Orwell’s claim in “Politics and the English Language” that bad writing generally hopes to disguise bad political and economic motives, Pinker defers to evolutionary biology, and refers to “mental habits” and the “mismatch between ordinary thinking and speaking and what we have to do as academics.” He goes on to explain, in some fairly academic terms, his theory of how our primate mind, which did not evolve to think thoughts about sociology or literary criticism, struggles to schematize “learned abstractions” that are not a part of everyday experience. It’s a plausible theory that doesn’t rule out other reasonable alternatives (like the perfectly straightforward claim that clear, concise writing poses a formidable challenge for academics as much as anyone else.)
Pinker’s talk was part of a larger Harvard conference called “Stylish Academic Writing” and sponsored by the Office of Faculty Development & Diversity. The full conference seems designed primarily as professional development for other academics, but layfolks may find much here of interest as well. See more talks from the conference, as well as a number of unrelated videos on good academic writing here. Or, for more amusement at the expense of clunky academic prose, see the results of the Philosophy and Literature bad writing contest, which ran from 1995–98 and turned up some almost shockingly unreadable sentences from a variety of scholarly texts.
Norman Mailer wrote prolifically, but that didn’t mean cranking out insubstantial volumes. The books whose names we all remember always feel, when we take them down off the shelf, somewhat weightier than we remember: Advertisements for Myself at 532 pages, The Naked and the Dead at 731, The Executioner’s Song at 1072. But the ones with titles which don’t come to mind quite so readily can feel even more physically monumental, and deliberately crafted that way. “Mailer liked to think of his books as his children,” wrote Louis Menand in the author’s 2007 New Yorker obituary, “and, when asked which were his favorites, to name the least critically appreciated” — he answered, “Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost, great literary pyramids that no one visits any longer.” Ancient Evenings takes place in Egypt, among the actual pyramids, but if you want to visit the much more labyrinthine landmark of Harlot’s Ghost, you’d best take a map. Conveniently, Mailer drew one up himself, in the form of the outline above.
It would never before have seemed possible to me to reduce Mailer’s 1191-page novel of the CIA in the 1960s — a tale of the Mafia, the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution and Missile Crisis, the JFK assassination, and all those events’ attendant complications both real and imagined — to a single sheet, but here we have it. You can click on the image at the top of the post to enlarge it, and then click on the section you’d like to read in detail. Read Harlot’s Ghost with this outline handy, and perhaps you’ll find yourself not on the side of those (Menand included) who dismissed the book upon its publication in 1991, but of those who consider it Mailer’s masterpiece. Christopher Hitchens took the latter position in his own obituary for Mailer, calling the novel “a historic fictionalizing of the national-security state that came very near to realizing the Balzacian ambition that he had conceived for it. What a shame that it was so dismally received by the critics and that he never delivered the second volume of it that he had promised.” And imagine the size and complexity to which Mailer would have grown that book.
A defining television moment of my generation—Sinead O’Connor’s infamous ripping up of a picture of Pope John Paul II on live television after an a cappella performance of Bob Marley’s “War”—was as baffling to most as it was offensive to many. (O’Connor offered many eloquent explanations for the act—mostly ignored.) Not only did this strange form of protest effectively send O’Connor into semi-obscurity for the next twenty years, but it got her permanently banned from Saturday Night Live by producer Lorne Michaels. Michaels, it seems, didn’t so much object to her desecrating the pope’s picture. In fact, he has said he would have been fine with it… if only he’d known it was coming. He has called the moment both “a serious expression of belief” and “on a certain level, a betrayal.”
Michaels has banned many a performer from the show, for many a reason. But most of all, it seems, Lorne Michaels hates surprises. As we’ve previously noted, 23-year-old Elvis Costello pissed Michaels off when he stopped his band during the intro to “Less Than Zero” and launched into “Radio, Radio” instead (above), a song he’d explicitly been told not to play for its critical take on mass media. Unlike O’Connor, Costello would return to SNL when Michaels cooled down, 12 years later, in 1989.
So far, so classic ‘Mats. But between this song and the next, “Kiss Me on the Bus” (above), it’s said they drank close to their weight in champagne, and by the time they took the stage again—wearing each other’s clothes and stumbling wildly—they were a completely soused parody of themselves. Funny, right? Lorne Michaels was not amused. Singer Paul Westerberg returned to the show as a solo artist, but the band never received another invitation.
Long before stoner-rappers Cypress Hill got the SNL boot for smoking a joint onstage and trashing their equipment in 1993, abrasive punk band Fear was said to have sparked a riot and caused $200,000 worth of damage to the set during their 1981 Halloween show appearance (above—introduced by host Donald Pleasance). Guests of John Belushi, who agreed to make a return cameo on the show on the condition that Fear come with him, their performances featured typical punk show antics, with rowdy audience members smashing into each other and storming the stage. The N.Y. Post published an absurdly sensational description of the band’s appearance, citing the $200,000 figure and quoting an unnamed “NBC technician” as saying, “this was a life threatening situation. They went crazy. It’s amazing that no one was killed.” Billboard later set the record straight, however. Apparently, the extent of the offense consisted of “somebody… yelling obscenities close to an open mike.” Producer Dick Ebersol cut the performance short, and the show received “all of 12 complaints from viewers.” As for all the supposed mayhem, Fear singer Lee Ving said, “all that happened was that a plug got pulled out and a Halloween pumpkin was destroyed.” Nevertheless, Fear would not be invited back. Read more about that Fear appearance and Belushi’s love of punk rock here.
Belushi figures in the performance of another musician banned from the show—Frank Zappa—who served as both musical guest and the show’s host. Zappa’s pompous attitude alienated most of the cast and crew in his first, and last, SNL appearance in 1978. Nerve names Zappa the second worst host in the show’s history, citing his “suffocating air of smugness and unconcealed contempt for what he’d agreed to do.” During the usually chummy closing credits, “the cast members, obliged to join him onstage, clustered near the edge as if fearing his personality might be contagious.” All but Belushi, who also joined Zappa and band onstage as Samurai Futaba during their third number. As the clips above demonstrate, even SNL’s second worst host could still inject a good bit of wit and energy into a show that’s often wanted for both, not to mention the most well-rehearsed band in both avant-rock performance art and live televised sketch comedy.
Before Alfred Hitchcock freaked out audiences everywhere by killing off the protagonist halfway through Psycho, before he was praised as a great master of cinema by a bunch of French critics who would themselves go on to become cinematic masters, before the adjective “Hitchcockian” entered the language, Hitchcock was simply a guy struggling to make a go of it as a director.
He started his career in film when he was barely out of his teens in 1919. Hitchcock soon found himself working in the largest and most influential studio in Europe, Germany’s Universum Film AG (UFA). There he not only watched Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau direct, but he also worked as a writer, art director, assistant director on a number of silent films including The White Shadow (1924) and The Blackguard(1925). Though Hitchcock got his first director’s credit with the 1926 movie The Pleasure Garden, the first movie to truly feel Hitchcockian was The Lodger: A Story of London Fog (1927). You can watch it above.
Based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Lodger opens with a blonde woman screaming in terror. She is the victim of a shadowy Jack the Ripper-like serial killer who leaves a calling card announcing himself as ‘The Avenger.’ Cut to Daisy, a blonde model whose parents are jubilant over finally finding a boarder for their spare room. The guy is handsome, mysterious and has a weird thing for blondes. You think he might have something to do with the murders?
For a film that came out decades before Vertigo and Rear Window, TheLodger has just about all of Hitchcock’s cinematic ticks. A fetishistic obsession with blondes? Check. An unsettling mingling of sex and death? Check. A man wrongly accused? Check. The only thing it really lacks is a national landmark as the backdrop of a showy action set piece.
On the other hand, The Lodger feels decidedly German. The claustrophobic lighting, the grotesque shadows and the generally morbid storyline all would be perfectly at home at Universum Film AG. In fact, The Lodger, in terms of story, tone and looks, feels like a cinematic cousin to Fritz Lang’s 1931 early sound masterpiece M.
Of course, Hitchcock was just a young director in 1927. And like many young filmmakers, he had a hard time with his producers. While the book leaves it ambiguous whether or not the lodger is the killer, the handlers of the movie’s star Ivor Novello couldn’t possibly have the actor play a villain and demanded a change to the ending. When Hitch turned in the final movie, Michael Balcon, the movie’s main producer, was unimpressed and almost shelved the flick, and, with it, Hitchcock’s career. But after a little bit of tinkering, the movie was finally released. And when The Lodger became a huge box office hit, Hitchcock’s career was assured.
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.
MOOCs on the beach? Why not. New MOOCs are getting started, even during the dog days of summer. You can find 45 courses getting going this month. They’re all captured on our complete and frequently-updated list of Massive Open Online Courses. As for me, I think I will be finally checking out this University of Rochester course on The Music of the Beatles. It starts on July 6 and runs 6 weeks.
Mike Hamad, a music writer for The Hartford Courant, has a deep and abiding love for Phish. He also has a talent for drawing “schematics” or maps that turn the experience of listening to music into something visual. Over at his tumblr SetlistSchematics, you can find nearly 200 schematics of songs (usually performed live) by The Grateful Dead, The Dave Matthews Band, Pink Floyd, and mostly Phish. According to a short profile in The New York Times, Hamad “has a master’s degree in music theory and a Ph.D. in musicology” — his dissertation focused on the tonal relationships in Franz Liszt’s songs — and, somewhere along the way, he developed a tendency to translate music into schematics, a flurry of “arrows, descriptive notes, roman numerals and wavy lines.”
The Sonny and Cher Show aired in the years right before I was born. Not only do I have no memory of it, of course, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an entire episode, either in re-runs or on the internet. Nevertheless, I immediately recognized the style of the show’s animator, English artist John David Wilson, when I encountered these music videos Wilson made for the singing comedy duo’s variety hour. Though a much less famous name, Wilson’s work seems to have animated the 70s in the way that R. Crumb’s illustrated the 60s. The opening sequences to iconic productions Grease and The Carol Burnett Show are Wilson’s, as are animations for Laugh In and cheesy Saturday morning kids’ show The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show (best known now, perhaps, because of Hudson brother progeny Kate Hudson). Though Wilson’s career stretches back to the 50s—with work on Mr. Magoo, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp—and into the 90s, with FernGully: The Last Rainforest, he seems to belong to the decade of “I Got You Babe” more so than any other.
Drawn “in a simplistic, funky-looking style” and with goofy sound effects added (probably by the Sonny and Cher producers), Wilson’s animated films for Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (top), Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” (above), and The Kinks “Demon Alcohol” (below, sung by Wayne Carpenter) enhance songs already rich with narrative. This, the blog Media Funhouse points out, was by design: “Wilson was wise to concentrate on the ‘story songs’ of the time, in order to create repeating characters and have the viewer ‘connect’ with the piece in a very short span of time.”
In most cases, Sonny and Cher’s vocals were dubbed over the original tracks, but in many of the animations that surfaced on VHS in the eighties and now appear on Youtube, the original songs have been restored, as in the two above. If you grew up with the show, you’ve surely seen at least a couple of these early music videos, a form Wilson is widely credited with pioneering. Beginning in the second season, Wilson’s company, Fine Arts Films, produced a total of fourteen animated shorts for the show.
The story-songs above of environmental degradation, tough street characters, and the depths of addiction seem so very characteristic of the period, though Wilson certainly animated more lighthearted pop fare, such as Melanie’s “Brand New Key” (sung here by Cher). For more of Wilson’s animated music videos, see Dangerous Minds or Media Funhouse, and for the full range of Wilson’s long career in animation, check out the website of the production company he founded, Fine Arts Films.
Does Wim Wenders, one of my favorite directors, make perfect films? Hardly — and therein, at least for me, lies the appeal. Perfection strikes me as a singularly uninteresting goal for art, and Wenders has made some of the most interesting pieces of motion picture art going for the past thirty years: Wings of Desire; Paris, Texas;Notebook on Cities and Clothes;Tokyo-Ga. Perhaps, it occurs to me, he has achieved his own kind of very specific, inimitable perfection. But if you seek to imitate it nevertheless, have a look at “Wim Wenders’ Rules of Cinema Perfection” above. In this video (actually a kind of spot for Stella Artois, a brand with which the auteur has worked before), we see humorously revealed several of Wenders’ best filmmaking practices: “You need a good title from the beginning,” “Continuity is clearly overrated,” “Try to welcome and incorporate” the unexpected, and “If you like football, don’t shoot during the world championship.”
If you’ve done your reading on Wenders, you can probably tell that the clip draws from a published list of the director’s “50 Golden Rules of Filmmaking.” Other helpful recommendations include “Before you say ‘cut,’ wait five more seconds,” “A ‘beautiful image’ can very well be the worst thing that can happen to a scene,” and “There are no rules.” Will following these if-n0t-rules-then-guidelines turn you into the next Wim Wenders? Unlikely. Will drinking Stella Artois do it? Certainly not. But it could hurt none of us, whatever our creative endeavor of choice, to emulate his willingness on display here to learn from his mistakes (based on his list, I’d say he’s taken his share of hard knocks hiring couples, adapting novels, and working with animals); to share his wisdom; and (maybe most importantly of all) to learn not to take ourselves too seriously. Sure, his detractors tend to accuse him of pretentiousness, but we true fans (who pay close attention even to his commercial acting gigs) know the truth.
Last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art wrapped up a brilliant, exhaustive exhibition about Stanley Kubrick. It was a veritable cornucopia of Kubrick memorabilia, ranging from grainy black and white photographs he took for Look magazine as a youth, to a creepy plastic Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey,to the blood soaked dresses of those hollow-eyed twins in The Shining. The exhibit was a massive success. It’s hard to imagine any other director, with the possible exception of Alfred Hitchcock, who would not only get an exhibit in a major art museum but also be able to pack the hall week after week.
Part of his allure, no doubt, is Kubrick’s carefully-honed public persona – a reclusive genius who controlled every element of his movies, from the font on the opening titles to the design of the poster. His movies, especially his later ones, are dense, deeply-layered works of such complexity that they continue to unpack themselves after multiple viewings. Heck, there’s an entire documentary, Room 237, that presents nine starkly different interpretations of The Shining.
Kubrick’s movies seem designed to appeal to a certain breed of obsessive film geek. So if you count yourself a member of this tribe (as I do) and you didn’t happen to catch LACMA’s exhibit, you’re in luck. The Chicago design firm Coudal Partners has created a whole online treasure trove of Kubrick ephemera. We’ve culled a few cool things from their site.
Above is a cheesy, behind-the-scenes movie for 2001. The 20-minute promo sets up the movie as if it were an episode of The Outer Limits. “It is the year 2001, you’re on your way to a space station for business,” intones the narrator. “This is but one example of what life would be like in 2001.” What follows is a series of interviews with the scientists, experts, and craftsmen involved in creating Kubrick’s vision of the future with only fleeting footage of the filmmaker himself at around the 18-minute marker. Though it does give you a lot more information on the nuts and bolts of the astronauts’ spacesuits, the short movie, one can’t help but think, is setting up the audience for disappointment. It does little to help viewers understand that the first half of 2001 is about the struggles of ape men on the plains of Africa and does even less to address the psychedelic freakout of the movie’s last reel.
Also found in Coudal’s collection is a site that has compiled all the fonts that Kubrick, a noted typography enthusiast, used in his movies. We’ve posted a couple. He liked Futura and Gothic a lot, apparently. The title card for The Shining was designed by Saul Bass.
And on this site, some genius has created sweaters, ski masks, and doormats from that odd, geometric carpet pattern from The Shining. Pre-orders have sadly closed, but hopefully they’ll start selling them again. I want the cardigan.
“From the first, she was interesting to watch—even in the way she walked in for her interview, casually sat down, walked out. She was cool and non-giggly. She was enigmatic without being dull. She could keep people guessing about how much Lolita knew about life.”
And speaking of photos, here’s a few pictures Kubrick took of the New York subway system back in 1946 for Look magazine. Compare these photos to his earliest movies like Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss. Both his early flicks and these pictures have the same gritty immediacy.
There is much, much more there at the Coudal Partners to keep any film nerd and Kubrick maven occupied. Check it out.
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.
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