Has Science Refuted Religion? Sean Carroll and Michael Shermer vs. Dinesh D’Souza and Ian Hutchinson

in Religion, Science | July 26th, 2012

Just yes­ter­day, I sat across from a fel­low wear­ing a t‑shirt embla­zoned with the image of a gun-wield­ing Jesus blow­ing away Charles Dar­win above the words “EVOLVE THIS!” At first I assumed he wore it to emphat­i­cal­ly sig­nal his belief that reli­gion, specif­i­cal­ly Chris­tian­i­ty, refutes sci­ence, specif­i­cal­ly bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion. Then, remem­ber­ing that Jesus prob­a­bly would­n’t have used a hand­gun even had they been avail­able in his day, I took the shirt as a mock­ery of the blunter vari­eties of cre­ation­ist rhetoric. Look­ing it up lat­er, I found out that the shirt comes from the movie Paul, so the wear­er prob­a­bly meant noth­ing more than to express his appre­ci­a­tion for what I under­stand to be one of 2011’s most under­rat­ed come­dies. Yet the ques­tion lingers: has sci­ence refut­ed reli­gion, or is it the oth­er way around? The inter­net age pro­vides us access to a vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed num­ber of these debates, although you’ll often search in vain for match­es of cogent, well-artic­u­lat­ed argu­ments. Just take a look at the sci­ence-reli­gion squab­bles cur­rent­ly roil­ing in YouTube com­ment sec­tions. Keep out of the com­ments, then, and stick to the videos, such as the debate above. In two hours com­pris­ing short seg­ments of argu­ment, rebut­tal, cross-exam­i­na­tion, and audi­ence ques­tions, the pro­gram pits Skep­tic mag­a­zine pub­lish­er Michael Sher­mer and Cal­tech cos­mol­o­gist Sean Car­roll against MIT physi­cist Ian Hutchin­son and King’s Col­lege pres­i­dent Dinesh D’Souza. In an unusu­al­ly order­ly, well-dis­ci­plined debate of this type, all four weigh in on one cen­tral propo­si­tion: “Has sci­ence refut­ed reli­gion?” Car­roll says that sci­ence, a “real­i­ty check” on human bias­es, offers the only expla­na­tions that work. Hutchin­son blames not sci­ence but some­thing he calls “sci­en­tism,” a belief in the absolute suprema­cy of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge, for a vari­ety of social and intel­lec­tu­al ills. Sher­mer describes reli­gious belief as an evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly deter­mined char­ac­ter­is­tic of human beings, and an increas­ing­ly use­less one at that. D’Souza upbraids sci­ence for fail­ing not only to find answers to ques­tions about human pur­pose and life’s mean­ing, but for throw­ing up its hands when pre­sent­ed them. All this offers a good bit of human dra­ma as well, but in good fun; when I inter­viewed Sher­mer, a habitué of such debates, he men­tioned often enjoy­ing tak­ing his osten­si­bly sworn intel­lec­tu­al ene­mies to beers and piz­za after­ward. Relat­ed Con­tent: Richard Dawkins & John Lennox Debate Sci­ence & Athe­ism Does God Exist? Christo­pher Hitchens Debates Chris­t­ian Philoso­pher William Lane Craig Ani­mat­ed: Stephen Fry & Ann Wid­de­combe Debate the Catholic Church Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Bob Egan, Detective Extraordinaire, Finds the Real Locations of Iconic Album Covers

in Music | July 24th, 2012

By day, Bob Egan is a mild-man­nered com­mer­cial real estate agent in New York City. By night, and on week­ends, he trans­forms him­self into some­thing of a pop cul­ture detec­tive, search­ing out the loca­tions of famous record album cov­ers and oth­er famous pop images. About a year ago he start­ed a Web site, PopSpot­sNYC, to share his find­ings, and the site has been grow­ing in pop­u­lar­i­ty ever since.

Egan’s fas­ci­na­tion with album cov­er loca­tions began in 1977, when he moved to his first apart­ment in Green­wich Vil­lage and dis­cov­ered he was only a block away from the place on Jones Street where The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan cov­er pho­to­graph was shot in 1963, which showed Dylan walk­ing arm-in-arm with his girl­friend, Suze Roto­lo, on a cold Feb­ru­ary day.

“Liv­ing in Green­wich Vil­lage in the late 70s,” Egan told Open Cul­ture, “I was sur­round­ed by sites I had read about in col­lege: Bleeck­er and Mac­dou­gal, The Bot­tom Line, the Mudd Club, CBG­B’s, etc. I was soak­ing up infor­ma­tion for years lat­er, I guess, because it was­n’t until the mid 90s that I first went into Bleeck­er Bob’s and asked if they knew where the cov­er of Blonde on Blonde was shot. When they did­n’t know, I said, Well why not find out myself?”

The Blonde on Blonde loca­tion remains a mys­tery, but Egan has tracked down a num­ber of oth­er Dylan cov­er loca­tions, includ­ing High­way 61 Revis­it­ed (the front steps of a town house on Gramer­cy Park West), Anoth­er Side of Bob Dylan (the cor­ner of 52nd Street and Broad­way), and the sin­gle “I Want You” (a ware­house dis­trict on Jacob Street that was torn down long ago).

The Jacob Street loca­tion, also the site of a July 30, 1966 Sat­ur­day Evening Post cov­er of Dylan, was one of the hard­est to find. “I searched through every curved street in New York and final­ly found it online in an old pho­to from the library,” Egan said. “The entire street, which was next to the Brook­lyn Bridge, had been demol­ished 50 years ago, but I final­ly clicked on a library image and found myself star­ing straight into the exact spot Dylan was in the pho­to. I let out a whoop!”

Egan has found the exact loca­tions of record albums and oth­er famous images of a num­ber of artists, includ­ing Bruce Spring­steen, Neil Young, The Who, and Simon & Gar­funkel. The choic­es reflect his taste in music. “I grew up dur­ing the clas­sic rock era,” Egan said. “My ‘musi­cal com­fort food’ is Dylan, Van Mor­ri­son, Lou Reed, and The Grate­ful Dead.”

Even though the Grate­ful Dead was a West Coast group, Egan makes use of online tools like Google Street View and Bing Bird’s Eye to explore loca­tions from his New York home. The 1970 album “Work­ing­man’s Dead” is one of Egan’s cur­rent projects. “The Dead pho­to was sup­pos­ed­ly tak­en next to a bus stop in the Mis­sion Dis­trict of San Fran­cis­co,” said Egan. “I bought a vin­tage map of the bus route from 1969 from the San Fran­cis­co tran­sit muse­um and searched all the bus routes through the Mis­sion with Street View, but still haven’t found it.”

When we asked Egan what dri­ves his obses­sion, he said, “I think of it like this: If I went to Eng­land and some­one asked me if I want­ed to see West­min­ster Abbey or Abbey Road, I’d take Abbey Road.”

Below are sev­er­al exam­ples of Egan’s detec­tive work. To see more, and to read the sto­ry behind each loca­tion, vis­it PopSpotsNYC.com.

The album cov­er that start­ed it all for Egan was The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan, fea­tur­ing Don Hun­stein’s pho­to of Dylan and his girl­friend Suze Roto­lo walk­ing through snow at the north end of Jones Street, in Green­wich Vil­lage. 

The loca­tion of the cov­er pho­to of Dylan’s 1965 album High­way 61 Revis­it­ed posed a chal­lenge. Egan always assumed that Daniel Kramer’s pho­to of Dylan was tak­en indoors, but he even­tu­al­ly tracked it down to the front steps of a town house on Gramer­cy Park West that was the home of Dylan’s man­ag­er, Albert Gross­man. The per­son stand­ing behind Dylan in the pho­to, hold­ing a cam­era by its strap, is the singer’s friend Bob Neuwirth.

What could be more British than the 1979 cov­er of The Kids Are Alright, by The Who? Actu­al­ly, Art Kane’s pho­to was tak­en in Amer­i­ca, at the lit­tle-known Carl Schurz Mon­u­ment in the Morn­ing­side Heights area of New York City. Egan gives direc­tions on how to find the place at his Web site.

Egan found the pre­cise loca­tion of Hen­ry Park­er’s cov­er pho­to for Simon & Gar­funkel’s 1965 debut album, Wednes­day Mourn­ing 3 A.M.: the low­er sub­way plat­form at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street, for the out­bound E and F lines.

Leo Fried­man’s cov­er pho­to­graph from the orig­i­nal 1957 cast record­ing of West Side Sto­ry shows char­ac­ters Maria (Car­ol Lawrence) and Tony (Lar­ry Kent) run­ning through the Hel­l’s Kitchen neigh­bor­hood of New York. The loca­tion was actu­al­ly one of Egan’s eas­i­er dis­cov­er­ies. “How did I find it,” he says on his Web site? “Pret­ty sim­ple. If you look close­ly at the garbage can to the left of Maria–the address is right on it! 418 West 56th Street.” (All images cour­tesy Bob Egan/PopSpotsNYC.com)

T.S. Eliot Reads His Modernist Masterpieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

in Audio Books, Literature, Poetry | July 23rd, 2012

Did you know T.S. Eliot’s por­ten­tous and heav­i­ly allu­sive 1922 mas­ter­piece “The Waste Land” was orig­i­nal­ly titled “He Do the Police in Dif­fer­ent Voic­es,” a quote from Charles Dick­ens’ Our Mutu­al Friend? Filled with ref­er­ences to Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness, and James Frazier’s The Gold­en Bough, this most famous of high mod­ernist poems—scourge of mil­lions of col­lege fresh­man each year—was a very dif­fer­ent ani­mal before noto­ri­ous mod­ernist impre­sario Ezra Pound got his hands on it. Pound’s heavy rework­ing is respon­si­ble for the poem you hear above, read by Eliot him­self. The first image in the video shows Pound’s mar­gin­al anno­ta­tions.

In the video above lis­ten to Eliot read his sec­ond-most famous work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with the text of the poem chore­o­graphed by Wor­dook­ie, an open-source ver­sion of Wor­dle.  “Prufrock,” first pub­lished in 1915, is as dense with lit­er­ary allu­sions as “The Waste Land” (and thus as painful for the aver­age under­grad­u­ate). And if Eliot’s reedy alto doesn’t deliv­er “Prufrock“ ‘s grav­i­tas for you, lis­ten to Antho­ny Hop­kins read it here.

You can find these poems cat­a­logued in our col­lec­tion of 700 Free Audio Books and 800 Free eBooks.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare 1959 Audio: Flan­nery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Rare Record­ing: Leo Tol­stoy Reads From His Last Major Work in Four Lan­guages, 1909

Nabokov Reads Loli­ta, Names the Great Books of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

The Rolling Stones First Played 50 Years Ago; Watch Them Explode Into Fame Shortly Thereafter

in History, Music | July 16th, 2012

Just four days ago, the Rolling Stones cel­e­brat­ed the fifti­eth anniver­sary of their first con­cert, which hap­pened on July 12, 1962 at Lon­don’s Mar­quee club. Arti­cles have quot­ed lead singer Mick Jag­ger as describ­ing the crowd that evening as the kind of audi­ence they’d expect­ed as a band: “col­lege stu­dents hav­ing a night out,” an “art-school kind of crowd” who “weren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly demon­stra­tive, but they appre­ci­at­ed and enjoyed the set.” But the Stones’ demo­graph­ic would soon both shift and expand dra­mat­i­cal­ly: “A few months lat­er we were play­ing in front of 11 year olds who were scream­ing at us.” You can wit­ness this very phe­nom­e­non in the 1964 news­reel above; per­haps all of the kids lined up out­side the the­ater aren’t quite that young, but we’re def­i­nite­ly not look­ing at a col­le­giate crowd. Still, what this full house (“in fact,” the nar­ra­tor says, “it could have been filled ten times over”) lacks in matu­ri­ty, they make up for in raw enthu­si­asm.

This short film comes from British Pathé, then known as Pathé News, a pro­duc­er of news­reels from the very ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry right up to the sev­en­ties. They cap­tured the Stones per­form­ing in 1964, after they had already racked up a con­sid­er­able degree of fame, espe­cial­ly in their own coun­try. The show itself takes place in Kingston upon Hull, a medi­um-sided city in the north­east of Eng­land. Sum­mon­ing the sur­pris­ing sense of fun that mid-six­ties Eng­lish media some­times could when cov­er­ing pop­u­lar cul­ture, this news­reel, called Rolling Stones Gath­er Moss, opens with Jag­ger, Kei­th Richards, Bri­an Jones, Char­lie Watts, and Bill Wyman try­ing to hitch a ride along­side the grassy road to the venue. “Lit­tle do they know, they’re hav­ing their legs pulled,” the announc­er says of the unhesi­tat­ing motorists, “because these appar­ent hitch­hik­ers, so bland­ly ignored, are five of the most famous young men in show busi­ness, the Rolling Stones. Some of these motorists will be kick­ing them­selves when they learn they missed the chance of a life­time of get­ting to know them.” But the his­tor­i­cal moment remains cap­tured on film, as do count­less oth­ers, among the 90,000 clips in Pathé’s online archive.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Rolling Stones Sing Jin­gle for Rice Krispies Com­mer­cial (1964)

Jean-Luc Godard Films The Rolling Stones Record­ing “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il” (1968)

The Rolling Stones Jam With Their Idol, Mud­dy Waters

John Lennon and The Rolling Stones Sing Bud­dy Hol­ly

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Henry Rollins Remembers the Life-Changing Decision That Brought Him From Häagen-Dazs to Black Flag

in Life, Music | July 13th, 2012

Metafil­ter recent­ly fea­tured this Big Think clip of Hen­ry Rollins telling the sto­ry of his most life-chang­ing deci­sion. This choice, of course, was the one that brought him to the front of punk rock band Black Flag. Before he made it, he could call him­self only a col­lege dropout assis­tant-man­ag­ing a Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Häa­gen-Dazs. In 1981, after catch­ing one of Black Flag’s New York shows — dur­ing which he hap­pened to climb onstage and sing a song with them — he decid­ed to try out to become the group’s actu­al singer. When Rollins ditched the ice cream game for the day (a for­feit, he recalls, of no more than $21) to audi­tion, Black Flag went from his favorite band to his band. Think­ing back, he real­izes he had lit­tle to lose: if he did­n’t give it a shot, he’d find him­self look­ing down the bar­rel of a long, hard exis­tence on his feet, answer­ing to cus­tomers all day, every day. If he gave it a shot and did­n’t make it, he’d at worst feel humil­i­at­ed, but, as he puts it, “humil­i­a­tion and young peo­ple kind of go togeth­er.”

“I don’t have tal­ent,” Rollins insists. “I have tenac­i­ty. I have dis­ci­pline. There was no choice for me but to work real­ly hard.” You may recall him mak­ing a sim­i­lar point in his pre­vi­ous Big Think video we fea­tured, in which he rec­om­mend­ed going at one’s pur­suits with a “monas­tic obses­sion.” But this time, he adds a note of fear. He talks about com­ing to under­stand that, with­out rely­ing on his four pil­lars of “appli­ca­tion, dis­ci­pline, focus, rep­e­ti­tion,” an enti­ty he calls “the Amer­i­ca” would have got­ten the bet­ter of him. This term seems to refer to the con­stant threat of crush­ing medi­oc­rity he feels in the Unit­ed States. “Every moment I am alive is because I have not been mur­dered by the Amer­i­ca,” he says in anoth­er inter­view. “The tasks I set out for myself are what I do to beat the per­fect point­less­ness of life.” Even if you don’t con­ceive of your own sit­u­a­tion quite so grim­ly, Rollins offers a per­spec­tive worth con­sid­er­ing. Per­haps his recruit­ment into Black Flag strikes you as a lucky break; he cer­tain­ly con­sid­ers it one. But as Bri­an Eno, anoth­er cul­tur­al fig­ure as well known for his point of view as his music, once said, “Luck is being ready.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hen­ry Rollins Tells Young Peo­ple to Avoid Resent­ment and to Pur­sue Suc­cess with a “Monas­tic Obses­sion”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Does God Exist? Christopher Hitchens Debates Christian Philosopher William Lane Craig (2009)

in Philosophy, Religion | July 12th, 2012

When we talk about reli­gion around here, we often end up talk­ing about some­thing that falls between agnos­ti­cism and athe­ism. That’s because pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als who com­ment on reli­gion fre­quent­ly fall into those camps. Here and there, the­ists polite­ly call us on it. They ask us to con­sid­er show­ing The Four Horse­men (Hitchens/Dawkins/Dennett/Harris) in mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tion with reli­gious thinkers. It would be a step toward cre­at­ing some bal­ance, they say. We’ve done some of that before. But it has been a while. So we’re bring­ing you today the 2009 debate between Hitchens and William Lane Craig, a Chris­t­ian philoso­pher. It was held at Bio­la Col­lege, a school that offers a “Bib­li­cal­ly Cen­tered Edu­ca­tion,” which puts Craig on the home court.

The basic ques­tion fram­ing the debate is “Does God Exist?,” and the answers are all ground­ed in phi­los­o­phy, though that did­n’t stop the con­ver­sa­tion from veer­ing into biol­o­gy, physics, cos­mol­o­gy, and moral the­o­ry. You might be sur­prised that Hitchens does­n’t take the stri­dent athe­ist posi­tion that would have let more sparks fly. No, he ends up in a more agnos­tic place, and there’s a kind of a humil­i­ty to his posi­tion, an accep­tance that we just can’t know the answers to the big ques­tions, at least not yet. That speaks to me intel­lec­tu­al­ly. But I’m sure oth­ers will see things dif­fer­ent­ly.

If you’re hun­ger­ing for more, you can watch Craig debate Sam Har­ris here. We thank Tay­lor for send­ing these videos along.

Jon Stewart’s William & Mary Commencement Address: The Entire World is an Elective

in Comedy, Graduation Speech, Life, Television | July 4th, 2012

In 1984, Jon Stew­art grad­u­at­ed from The Col­lege of William & Mary. In 1999, he began host­ing Com­e­dy Cen­tral’s news pro­gram The Dai­ly Show. In 2004, he returned to his alma mater, immea­sur­ably more influ­en­tial than he’d left it, to give its com­mence­ment address. Despite a dat­ed crack or two — this was the hey­day of George W. Bush, the Pres­i­dent who arguably gave Stew­art’s Dai­ly Show per­sona both its foil and rai­son d’être — the speech’s core remains sound. You, Stew­art tells the massed grad­u­ates, have the pow­er to become the next “great­est gen­er­a­tion,” though the chance appears espe­cial­ly clear and present because of how the last gen­er­a­tion “broke” the world. “It just kind of  got away from us,” he half-jokes, his grin com­pressed by seri­ous­ness. That admis­sion fol­lows a stream of self-dep­re­ca­tion hit­ting every­thing from his ten­den­cy toward pro­fan­i­ty to his unusu­al­ly large head as an under­grad­u­ate to how his pres­ence onstage deval­ues William & Mary’s very rep­u­ta­tion.

Whether or not you find the world bro­ken, or whether or not you believe that a gen­er­a­tion could break or fix it, Stew­art still packs a num­ber of worth­while obser­va­tions about the place into fif­teen min­utes. He per­haps deliv­ers his most valu­able words to these excit­ed, anx­ious school-leavers when he con­trasts the world to the aca­d­e­m­ic envi­ron­ment they’ve just left: “There is no core cur­ricu­lum. The entire place is an elec­tive.” Stew­art com­mu­ni­cates, as many com­mence­ment speak­ers try to but few do so clear­ly, that you can’t plan your way direct­ly to suc­cess in life, what­ev­er “suc­cess” might mean to you. He cer­tain­ly did­n’t. “If you had been to William and Mary while I was here and found out that I would be the com­mence­ment speak­er 20 years lat­er, you would be some­what sur­prised,” he admits. “And prob­a­bly some­what angry.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Conan O’Brien Kills It at Dart­mouth Grad­u­a­tion

Jon Stew­art: Teach­ers Have it Too Good (Wink)

‘This Is Water’: Com­plete Audio of David Fos­ter Wallace’s Keny­on Grad­u­a­tion Speech (2005)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Rare Color Footage of the 1939 World Series: Yankees v. Reds

in History | June 5th, 2012

The 1939 World Series was­n’t much of a con­test. The Yan­kees, led by Joltin’ Joe DiMag­gio in cen­ter field, had won the last three cham­pi­onships. And they won this con­test rather eas­i­ly too, sweep­ing the Cincin­nati Reds in four straight games. Yes­ter­day, mem­bers of the Red­dit com­mu­ni­ty unearthed some rare col­or footage of the ’39 Series. In it, we catch glimpses of the Old Yan­kee Sta­di­um, the actu­al House That Ruth Built; pitch­ers doing a dif­fer­ent kind of windup; and a reminder that you could once buy five razors for 25 cents. Find more infor­ma­tion on those at the Inter­net Muse­um of Safe­ty Razors.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Prince­ton v. Yale, 1903: The Old­est Col­lege Foot­ball Game on Film

Lou Gehrig, Yan­kee Leg­end, Stars in 1938 West­ern Rawhide

The First Films of Great Directors: Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Tarantino & Truffaut

in Film | May 23rd, 2012

Great direc­tors — unless they’re Orson Welles — rarely start off mak­ing mas­ter­pieces. Their craft evolves, remind­ing us that great film­mak­ing (like every­thing else) takes tal­ent, but also hard work. In case you’re doubt­ful, we’re pre­sent­ing the first films by five icon­ic direc­tors, all fea­tured here before, but nev­er brought togeth­er into one place. Some first films are down­right chop­py; some are work­man­like; some are more refined. But none exact­ly soar to cin­e­mat­ic heights. Above, we start you off with Quentin Taran­ti­no’s 1987 debut film My Best Friend’s Birth­day, a chop­py pro­duc­tion that has some­thing unmis­tak­ably Taran­ti­noesque about it, accord­ing to Col­in Mar­shall.

In some sense, [My Best Friend’s Birth­day] bears an even deep­er imprint of Tarantino’s per­son­al­i­ty than his sub­se­quent films [Pulp Fic­tion, Reser­voir Dogs], since he stars in it as well. To behold the ear­ly-twen­tysome­thing Taran­ti­no por­tray­ing the good-heart­ed and aggres­sive­ly enthu­si­as­tic but jit­tery and dis­tractible rock­a­bil­ly DJ Clarence Poole is to behold the Quentin Taran­ti­no pub­lic per­sona in an embry­on­ic form, a dis­tilled form — or both.

Long before Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la shot Apoc­alpyse Now and The God­fa­ther in the 1970s, he made his real direc­to­r­i­al debut with a 75-minute, black-and-white psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror film called Demen­tia 13 (1963). He had made a cou­ple of small-time nudie films before that. But this was his first main­stream, legit effort.

As Col­in, our res­i­dent film crit­ic has not­ed here, “To watch Demen­tia 13 now is to wit­ness Coppola’s con­trol of ten­sion and dark­ness in its embry­on­ic — but still impres­sive — form. Nobody involved in the pro­duc­tion could have delud­ed them­selves about its goal of shoot­ing a few max­i­mal­ly grue­some axe mur­ders as quick­ly and cheap­ly as pos­si­ble, but even such strait­ened cir­cum­stances allow for pock­ets of artistry to bub­ble through.”

When you think Cop­po­la, you think Scors­ese too, anoth­er direc­tor who put his stamp on 1970s and 1980s cin­e­ma with Mean Streets, Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, and Good­fel­las. We recent­ly revis­it­ed Scors­ese’s NYU film school days dur­ing the ear­ly 1960s, when he first cut his teeth as a direc­tor. We showed you sev­er­al of his ear­ly shorts (find them all here), but high­light­ed one of his ear­li­est works, What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This (1963). Scors­ese would lat­er describe the film as “nine min­utes of visu­al non­sense,” while also say­ing “it had no depth at all, but it was a lot of fun. And it won me a schol­ar­ship, so my father was able to use it for the tuition for the next year.”

Where­as Mar­tin Scors­ese went to NYU and leisure­ly stud­ied the his­to­ry and aes­thet­ics of cin­e­ma, Stan­ley Kubrick, a poor stu­dent, skipped col­lege, start­ed work­ing as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er for Look mag­a­zine, and even­tu­al­ly began mak­ing movies to eke out a liv­ing. In the ear­ly 1950s, Kubrick start­ed shoot­ing news­reel doc­u­men­taries, hop­ing to turn a tidy prof­it. And here you’ll find his first effort, Day of the Fight, a 1951 noirish doc­u­men­tary on mid­dleweight box­er Wal­ter Carti­er and his match with Bob­by James. It’s a work­man­like film, yes. But not exact­ly an obvi­ous pre­lude to 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clock­work Orange. Mike Springer has more on Kubrick­’s ear­ly doc­u­men­taries here.

The 1957 film, Les Mis­tons (The Brats), was tech­ni­cal­ly François Truf­faut’s sec­ond film but the first that ever sat­is­fied him. Sens­es of Cin­e­ma has else­where called it “the director’s first short film of any real con­se­quence.” Rel­a­tive to the ear­ly efforts of oth­er direc­tors, this short demon­strates a more mature set of film­mak­ing skills, the kind that would be on dis­play two years lat­er when Truf­faut released Les qua­tre cents coups (The 400 Blows), one of the defin­ing films of French New Wave cin­e­ma. Col­in Mar­shall takes a clos­er look at Les Mis­tons right here.

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Neil Gaiman Gives Graduates 10 Essential Tips for Working in the Arts

in Books, Graduation Speech, Life, Literature | May 21st, 2012

Neil Gaiman, con­sid­ered one of the top ten liv­ing post-mod­ern writ­ers, nev­er went to col­lege. He nei­ther start­ed nor fin­ished his advanced stud­ies, but rather put him­self into the world and start­ed writ­ing. And write he did. He’s now the New York Times best­selling author of the nov­els Nev­er­where, Star­dust, and Amer­i­can Gods, among oth­ers, and he’s also the win­ner of the 2009 New­bery Medal and 2010 Carnegie Medal in Lit­er­a­ture. (We have gath­ered free ver­sions of Gaiman’s writ­ing in audio & text here.) This week­end, Gaiman spoke at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the Arts in Philadel­phia and told the grad­u­at­ing class all the things he wish he knew at their age. The talk runs 19 min­utes. The dis­tilled ver­sion appears below.

1. Embrace the fact that you’re young. Accept that you don’t know what you’re doing. And don’t lis­ten to any­one who says there are rules and lim­its.
2. If you know your call­ing, go there. Stay on track. Keep mov­ing towards it, even if the process takes time and requires sac­ri­fice.
3. Learn to accept fail­ure. Know that things will go wrong. Then, when things go right, you’ll prob­a­bly feel like a fraud. It’s nor­mal.
4. Make mis­takes, glo­ri­ous and fan­tas­tic ones. It means that you’re out there doing and try­ing things.
5. When life gets hard, as it inevitably will, make good art. Just make good art.
6. Make your own art, mean­ing the art that reflects your indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and per­son­al vision.
7. Now a prac­ti­cal tip. You get free­lance work if your work is good, if you’re easy to get along with, and if you’re on dead­line. Actu­al­ly you don’t need all three. Just two.
8. Enjoy the ride, don’t fret the whole way. Stephen King gave that piece of advice to Neil years ago.
9. Be wise and accom­plish things in your career. If you have prob­lems get­ting start­ed, pre­tend you’re some­one who is wise, who can get things done. It will help you along.
10. Leave the world more inter­est­ing than it was before.

via Metafil­ter