You know what I say when someone tells me they “can’t” draw?
Pshaw.
Even those who’ve yet to discover the transformative effects of Lynda Barry’s wonderfully corrective Picture This know how to draw something. Very few children make it to adulthood without picking up some simple geometric formula by which a series of ovals, rectangles and lines can be configured to resemble a doggie head or a brave astride his cantering pony.
A couple thousand renderings later, such magic still satisfies, but you might want to consider branching out. May I recommend the teachings of artist and visual storyteller,Karl Gude? This laid-back former Director of Information Graphics at Newsweek can — and will! — teach you how to draw “great butts” with just five lines.
Gude’s command of posterior essentials is downright heady. (I say this as a former artist’s model whose rear end has been misrepresented on paper more times than I’d care to mention.) Who knew that capturing this part of human anatomy could prove so simple? Gude’s easygoing online instruction style may be traceable to some sort of adult beverage (I’m not casting stones…), but his methods are easy enough for a child to master.
Speaking of which, if you want to make a friend for life, share the above video with an actual child, preferably one who claims he or she “can’t” draw. Put a Sharpie in his or her paw, and within five minutes, Gude will have the little twerp cranking out butts of all shapes and sizes. After which, pride of accomplishment may well lead to some of Gude’s more advanced tutorials, like the detailed human eye seen below.
If that proves too challenging, there’s no shame in sticking with the glutes. To my way of thinking, the mindset that allows the artist to keep going when his pencil snaps mid-demonstration is lesson enough.
The participants in this seminar will dive into learning basic conversational Italian, Italian culture, and the Mediterranean diet. Each class is based on the preparation of a delicious dish and on the bite-sized acquisition of parts of the Italian language and culture. A good diet is not based on recipes only, it is also rooted in healthy habits and in culture. At the end of the seminar the participants will be able to cook some healthy and tasty recipes and to understand and speak basic Italian.
As Rebusco explains in a short video, this course has the advantage of making the language lessons a little less abstract. It gives students a chance to apply what they’ve learned (new vocabulary words, pronunciations, etc.) in a fun, practical context.
Maria Callas’s short and storied opera career first took off in Italy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. From there, her distinctive voice — some would call it “ugly,” others, magical — carried the soprano to London, Paris and New York. She’s remembered for her performances in La traviata, Norma and Tosca as much as for her rapid personal and professional decline. By the mid 1950s, her voice began to lose its warmth “becoming thin and acidulous,” some would say. At 40, her singing career was basically over. Then, at 53, she died of a heart attack in Paris, alone and unhappy. Above, we have Callas performing at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on November 4, 1962, basically toward the end of her brief but spectacular career. She was a surprise participant in a gala concert broadcast on British television. Callas would have turned 90 today, an occasion marked by this Google doodle.
Like most of the Nouvelle Vague directors who remain interesting today, Jean-Luc Godard has played the role of film critic as often as he has the role of film director. While his cinematic compatriot François Truffaut got his start reviewing movies before he decided to make them, Godard never quite underwent the full conversion; his nonfiction works for the screen include the four-and-a-half-hour Histoire(s) du cinéma, a thoroughly idiosyncratic take on exactly the subject you would think it covers, and even most of his feature films turn back on their medium and “interrogate” it — to use, I suppose, an academic term fallen slightly out of fashion. Then agan, Godard himself has also gone somewhat out of style, not that it drains any of the fascination out of his filmography, and certainly not that it makes his opinons less relevant to fellow cinephiles.
You’ll find a collection of these Godardian judgments in the back pages of Cahiers du cinema, the journal that bred the lion’s share of these French New-Wave critics-turned-filmmakers. On a page of critics’ favorites lists maintained by a certain Eric C. Jonshson, you’ll find Godard’s top-ten rankings, as published by Cahiers du cinema for the years 1956 through 1965.
While he does use these lists to give the occasional (and well-deserved) prop to a colleague — Jean-Pierre Melville’s Deux Hommes dans Manhattan, Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour, Truffaut’s Les Quatres cent coups, Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins, and Agnes Varda’s Du cote de la Cote come in for honors in 1959 alone — he also pays his respects to the stolid virtues of American filmmaking, especially of the sensational variety: Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin (#1, 1956), Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (#8, 1960), Samuel Fuller’s Schock Corridor (#5, 1965.) He even put together a list of the Ten Best American Sound Films, which runs as follows:
I’ve often thought that it takes someone foreign to most clearly view America, and by the same token, it probably takes an outsider to most clearly view mainstream cinema. In this list, Godard characteristically provides both angles at once.
In 2010, Serbian artist Marina Abramović had the honor of being the subject of a popular retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Throughout the show, Abramović performed a grueling piece entitled “The Artist Is Present,” sitting in the museum’s atrium and inviting the swelling crowds of viewers to sit directly opposite her, in silent dialogue. Abramović was no stranger to challenging performances. By the time that MoMA staged the retrospective, the then 63-year-old artist had engaged in countless taxing exhibitions, earning her self-given title, “the grandmother of performance art.”
In her first performance at 27, Abramović explored the idea of ritual by playing a knife game on camera, stabbing the surface between her splayed fingers with a knife and occasionally hurting herself; she would then watch a video recording of the violence, and attempt to replicate it. Subsequent performances included her explorations of consciousness through the ingestion of pills for catatonia and depression; another comprised a 1974 incarnation of her MoMA performance, where Abramović sat passively before a table littered with objects for six hours, inviting the audience to put them to use on her person (of this piece, Abramović says, “What I learned was that… if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you… I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach…”)
In 1976, Abramović met Ulay, a West German artist who would become her lover and collaborator for the next twelve years. The duo fell into an impersonal abyss, losing their selfhoods and attempting to become a single entity through arresting performances such as Breathing In/Breathing Out, where they locked mouths and breathed each other’s exhaled breath, eventually filling their lungs with carbon monoxide and falling unconscious. By 1988, their romance had run its course; in typically atypical fashion, the pair decided to part by walking from opposing ends of the Great Wall of China until they met in the middle, and then said goodbye.
On the opening night of Abramović’s retrospective in 2010, the erstwhile lovers were reunited. The video above shows Abramović, sitting and steeling herself for her next silent interlocutor. Ulay approaches, and Abramović, a veteran of such difficult performances, looks up to what may have been the single most unexpected sight of the night, jolting her dignified composure. Their reunion is a deeply tender scene.
Back in 2010, we presented an animated video where Slavoj Žižek, our favorite Slovenian theorist, identified a new trend in modern capitalism. Nowadays, marketers have found a crafty way to rework Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic. They tell us we can achieve personal redemption not through hard work and amassing savings, but by consuming the right products. When you buy eco-friendly products, fair trade goods, or products that yield some kind of charitable dividend, you don’t have to think twice about the cost of your consumerism. Not when you’ve done some good and earned yourself some good capitalist karma.
This line of thinking returns in Žižek’s new film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, where, once again, he focuses on one of the world’s most effective marketing operations, Starbucks. This, after having seemingly imbibed a “Venti” or “Trenta” portion of the product.
To drill deeper into Zizek’s thoughts on this subject, see his 30-minute lecture “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.” For more clips from his new film, see our recent posts:
The original scene is absolutely horrifying. There’s a reason this silent film never gets projected on the back walls of pizza parlors for the entertainment of waiting customers. I can also see why it has spooked various governments. The dramatic trampling of children and shooting of young mothers and old ladies definitely could spur citizens to action. (It’s important to note here that the famous scene is not a factual retelling. Eisenstein, the father of montage, combined a number of incidents, setting them in such a memorable location that this massacre easily passes for a matter of historic record.)
This 1920s clip features a score borrowed from Shostakovich. What might be the effect with a soundtrack supplied by the electronic duo Pet Shop Boys? (Can’t wait to find out? Click here.)
I’m not kidding. In 2004, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts invited bandmates Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe to compose a new score to be performed with Dresdner Sinfoniker at a screening in Trafalgar Square. To no one’s surprise, they went with an electro-prog sound. What would the filmmaker, who died in 1948, have made of that?
In order to make an educated guess, let’s turn to critic and film historian Roger Ebert, who attended a more modest screening in Three Oaks, Michigan, featuring a live, original soundtrack by local band Concrete. (Who knew composing music for this near 90-year-old film would turn out to be such a thing?) Ebert approved of Concrete’s use of “keyboards, half-heard snatches of speech, cries and choral passages, percussion, martial airs and found sounds… played loud, by musicians who saw themselves as Eisenstein’s collaborators, not his meek accompanists.”
After the Rolling Stones’ partly misguided, partly inspired attempt at psychedelia, Their Satanic Majesties Request, the band found its footing again in the familiar territory of the Delta Blues. But with the 1968 recording of Beggar’s Banquet, they also retained some of the previous album’s experimentation, taken in a more sinister direction on the infamous “Sympathy for the Devil.” In the studio, with the band during those recording sessions, was none other than radical French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, who brought his own experimental sensibilities to a project he would call One Plus One, a document of the Stones’ late sixties incarnation—including an increasingly reclusive Brian Jones. Godard punctuates the fascinating studio scenes of the Stones with what Andrew Hussey of The Guardian calls “a series of set pieces—an incoherent stew of Situationism and other Sixties stuff”:
Black Panthers in a disused car park execute white virgins; a bookseller reads aloud from Mein Kampf to Maoist hippies; in the final scene the bloodied corpse of a female urban guerrilla is raised to the Stones’ soundtrack as Godard himself darts about like a demented Jacques Tati waving Red and Black flags. You just don’t find this sort of thing at the local multiplex anymore.
For all of its heavy use of leftist Sixties iconography, its anarchic attempt to fuse “art, power and revolution,” and its fascinating portraiture of rock and roll genius at work, the film crash landed in France, earning the contempt of arch Situationist theorist Guy Debord, who called it “the work of cretins.”
Critics and audiences apparently expected more from Godard in the wake of the abortive May ‘68 student uprising in Paris, and the general neglect of the film meant that Godard missed his chance to, as he put it, “subvert, ruin and destroy all civilised values.”
The film’s producer, Iain Quarrier, also found it disappointing. Without the director’s permission, Quarrier decided to retitleOne Plus One with the more commercially-minded Sympathy for the Devil and tack a completed version of that song to the last reel, a move that provoked Godard to punch Quarrier in the face. But not everyone found Godard’s effort off-putting. In a 1970 review, the New York Times’ Roger Greenspun called it “heavily didactic, even instructional…. [T]he prospective text of some ultimate, infinitely complex collectivism.” Greenspun also decried Quarrier’s unauthorized interventions.
In his retrospective take, Andrew Hussey admits that Godard’s political posturing is “bollocks,” but then concludes that One Plus One is “great stuff: a snapshot of a far-off, lost world where rock music is still a redemptive and revolutionary force.” And it’s both—ridiculous and sublime, a powerful crystallization of a moment in time when all the Western world seemed poised to crack open and release something strange and new. Watch the trailer and scenes from Godard’s film above. You can also pick up a copy of the 2018 restoration of the film here.
If you’ve been with Open Culture since our early days, you might remember I Met the Walrus, a short Oscar-nominated film that recalls the time when John Lennon granted an interview to a 14-year-old Beatles’ fan named Jerry Levitan. The animated film (which we still highly recommend) was the visual creation of Josh Ruskin and James Braithwaite, who have now teamed up to create “Our Public Library,” a short animated film that calls attention to the budget cuts that are undermining Toronto’s great public library system. Toronto’s lawmakers will be making key decisions about the fate of the library soon (something hopefully Mayor Rob Ford won’t be involved with, seeing that he seems prefer the pipe and drink to the book). For information on how to help protect Toronto’s public libraries, please visit the web site Our Public Library.
“At this post holiday season, the refrigerators of the nation are overstuffed with large masses of turkey, the sight of which is calculated to give an adult an attack of dizziness. It seems, therefore, an appropriate time to give the owners the benefit of my experience as an old gourmet, in using this surplus material.” There writes no less a legend of American letters than F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night (both available in our Free eBooks collection). His words quoted here, from “Turkey Remains and How to Inter Them with Numerous Scarce Recipes,” a column found in the Fitzgerald miscellany collection The Crack-Up, hold just as true this day-after-Thanksgiving as they did during those his lifetime. Lists of Note offers the full piece, which itself offers thirteen potential uses for your leftover bird, some of which, Fitzgerald writes, “have been in my family for generations”:
1. Turkey Cocktail: To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.
2. Turkey à la Francais: Take a large ripe turkey, prepare as for basting and stuff with old watches and chains and monkey meat. Proceed as with cottage pudding.
3. Turkey and Water: Take one turkey and one pan of water. Heat the latter to the boiling point and then put in the refrigerator. When it has jelled, drown the turkey in it. Eat. In preparing this recipe it is best to have a few ham sandwiches around in case things go wrong.
4. Turkey Mongole: Take three butts of salami and a large turkey skeleton, from which the feathers and natural stuffing have been removed. Lay them out on the table and call up some Mongole in the neighborhood to tell you how to proceed from there.
5. Turkey Mousse: Seed a large prone turkey, being careful to remove the bones, flesh, fins, gravy, etc. Blow up with a bicycle pump. Mount in becoming style and hang in the front hall.
6. Stolen Turkey: Walk quickly from the market, and, if accosted, remark with a laugh that it had just flown into your arms and you hadn’t noticed it. Then drop the turkey with the white of one egg—well, anyhow, beat it.
7. Turkey à la Crême: Prepare the crême a day in advance. Deluge the turkey with it and cook for six days over a blast furnace. Wrap in fly paper and serve.
8. Turkey Hash: This is the delight of all connoisseurs of the holiday beast, but few understand how really to prepare it. Like a lobster, it must be plunged alive into boiling water, until it becomes bright red or purple or something, and then before the color fades, placed quickly in a washing machine and allowed to stew in its own gore as it is whirled around. Only then is it ready for hash. To hash, take a large sharp tool like a nail-file or, if none is handy, a bayonet will serve the purpose—and then get at it! Hash it well! Bind the remains with dental floss and serve.
9. Feathered Turkey: To prepare this, a turkey is necessary and a one pounder cannon to compel anyone to eat it. Broil the feathers and stuff with sage-brush, old clothes, almost anything you can dig up. Then sit down and simmer. The feathers are to be eaten like artichokes (and this is not to be confused with the old Roman custom of tickling the throat.)
10. Turkey à la Maryland: Take a plump turkey to a barber’s and have him shaved, or if a female bird, given a facial and a water wave. Then, before killing him, stuff with old newspapers and put him to roost. He can then be served hot or raw, usually with a thick gravy of mineral oil and rubbing alcohol. (Note: This recipe was given me by an old black mammy.)
11. Turkey Remnant: This is one of the most useful recipes for, though not, “chic,” it tells what to do with the turkey after the holiday, and how to extract the most value from it. Take the remants, or, if they have been consumed, take the various plates on which the turkey or its parts have rested and stew them for two hours in milk of magnesia. Stuff with moth-balls.
12. Turkey with Whiskey Sauce: This recipe is for a party of four. Obtain a gallon of whiskey, and allow it to age for several hours. Then serve, allowing one quart for each guest. The next day the turkey should be added, little by little, constantly stirring and basting.
13. For Weddings or Funerals: Obtain a gross of small white boxes such as are used for bride’s cake. Cut the turkey into small squares, roast, stuff, kill, boil, bake and allow to skewer. Now we are ready to begin. Fill each box with a quantity of soup stock and pile in a handy place. As the liquid elapses, the prepared turkey is added until the guests arrive. The boxes delicately tied with white ribbons are then placed in the handbags of the ladies, or in the men’s side pockets.
What, you expected recipes more… followable than these? And perhaps recipes with less alcohol involved? These all make much more sense if you bear in mind Fitzgerald’s formidable creativity, his even more formidable penchant for the drink, and his mordant sense of humor about it all. “I guess that’s enough turkey talk,” concludes this literary icon of my Thanksgiving-celebrating nation. “I hope I’ll never see or hear of another until—well, until next year.” If you haven’t had enough, and indeed feel like getting the jump on next year, see also the Airship’s list of twelve Thanksgiving recipes from favorite authors, including Jonathan Franzen’s pasta with kale, Alice Munro’s rosemary bread pudding, and Ralph Ellison’s sweet yams.
We’ve written recently about that most common occurrence in the life of every artist—the rejection letter. Most rejections are uncomplicated affairs, ostensibly reflecting matters of taste among editors, producers, and curators. In 1944, in his capacity as an editorial director at Faber & Faber, T.S. Eliot wrote a letter to George Orwell rejecting the latter’s satirical allegoryAnimal Farm. The letter is remarkable for its candid admission of the politics involved in the decision.
From the very start of the letter, Eliot betrays a personal familiarity with Orwell, in the informal salutation “Dear Orwell.” The two were in fact acquainted, and Orwell two years earlier had published a penetrating review of the first three of Eliot’s Four Quartets, writing “I know a respectable quantity of Eliot’s earlier work by heart. I did not sit down and learn it, it simply stuck in my mind as any passage of verse is liable to do when it has really rung the bell.”
Eliot’s apologetic rejection of Orwell’s fable begins with similarly high praise for its author, comparing the book to “Gulliver” in what may have been to Orwell a flattering reference to Jonathan Swift. A mutual admiration for each other’s artistry may have been the only thing Eliot and Orwell had in common. “On the other hand,” begins the second paragraph, and then cites the reasons for Faber & Faber’s passing on the novel, the principle one being a dismissal of Orwell’s “unconvincing” “Trotskyite” views. The rejection also may have stemmed from something a little more craven—the desire to appease a wartime ally. As the Encyclopaedia Brittanica blog puts it:
Eliot, that Tory of Tories, did not want to upset the Soviets in those fraught years of World War II. Besides, he opined, the pigs, being the smartest of the critters on the farm in question, were best qualified to run the place.
The decision was probably not Eliot’s alone, and Eliot parenthetically disowns the opinions personally, writing “what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.” Indeed. The full text of Eliot’s letter is below.
13 July 1944
Dear Orwell,
I know that you wanted a quick decision about Animal Farm: but minimum is two directors’ opinions, and that can’t be done under a week. But for the importance of speed, I should have asked the Chairman to look at it as well. But the other director is in agreement with me on the main points. We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skilfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane—and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver.
On the other hand, we have no conviction (and I am sure none of other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time. It is certainly the duty of any publishing firm which pretends to other interests and motives than mere commercial prosperity, to publish books which go against current of the moment: but in each instance that demands that at least one member of the firm should have the conviction that this is the thing that needs saying at the moment. I can’t see any reason of prudence or caution to prevent anybody from publishing this book—if he believed in what it stands for.
Now I think my own dissatisfaction with this apologue is that the effect is simply one of negation. It ought to excite some sympathy with what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something: and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing. I think you split your vote, without getting any compensating stronger adhesion from either party—i.e. those who criticise Russian tendencies from the point of view of a purer communism, and those who, from a very different point of view, are alarmed about the future of small nations. And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.
I am very sorry, because whoever publishes this, will naturally have the opportunity of publishing your future work: and I have a regard for your work, because it is good writing of fundamental integrity.
Miss Sheldon will be sending you the script under separate cover.
Yours sincerely,
T. S. Eliot
After four rejections in total, Orwell’s novel eventually saw publication in 1945. Five years later, a Russian émigré in West Germany, Vladimir Gorachek, published a small print run of the novel in Russian for free distribution to readers behind the Iron Curtain. And in 1954, the CIA funded the animated adaptation of Animal Farm by John Halas and Joy Batchelor (see the full film here). Yet another strange twist in the life of a book that could make discerning anti-communists as uncomfortable as it could the staunchest defenders of the Soviet system. You can find Animal Farm listed in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.
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