How Nicolas Roeg (RIP) Used David Bowie, Mick Jagger & Art Garfunkel in His Mind-Bending Films

in Film, Music | November 27th, 2018

Crit­ics have applaud­ed Bradley Coop­er for the bold move of cast­ing Lady Gaga in his new remake of A Star Is Born, and as its tit­u­lar star at that. As much cin­e­mat­ic dar­ing as it takes to cast a high-pro­file musi­cian in their first star­ring role in the movies, the act has its prece­dents, thanks not least to film­mak­er Nico­las Roeg, who died last week. Hav­ing start­ed out at the bot­tom of the British film indus­try, serv­ing tea at Lon­don’s Maryle­bone Stu­dios the year after World War II end­ed, he became a cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er (not least on David Lean’s Lawrence of Ara­bia) and then a direc­tor in his own-right. That chap­ter of Roeg’s career began with 1970’s Per­for­mance, which he co-direct­ed with Don­ald Cam­mell and in which he cast no less a rock star than Mick Jag­ger in his act­ing debut.

You can see Jag­ger in action in Per­for­mance’s trail­er, which describes the pic­ture as “a film about mad­ness… mad­ness and san­i­ty. A film about fan­ta­sy. This is a film about fan­ta­sy and real­i­ty… and sen­su­al­i­ty. A film about death… and life. This is a film about vice… and ver­sa.”

Those words reflect some­thing real about not just Per­for­mance itself — which crash­es the end of the swing­ing 1960s into grim gang­ster­ism in a man­ner that draws equal­ly from Borges and Bergman — but Roeg’s entire body of work, and also the strug­gle that mar­keters went through to sell it to the pub­lic. But you don’t so much buy a tick­et to see a Nico­las Roeg film as you buy a tick­et to expe­ri­ence it, not least because of the par­tic­u­lar per­for­ma­tive qual­i­ties brought to the table by the music stars Roeg put onscreen.

In 1976 Roeg cast David Bowie as a space alien named Thomas Jerome New­ton in the “shock­ing, mind-stretch­ing expe­ri­ence in sight, in space, in sex” of The Man Who Fell to Earth, arguably the role he was born to play. “I thought of David Bowie when I first was try­ing to fig­ure out who would be Mr. New­ton, some­one who was inside soci­ety and yet awk­ward in it,” Roeg says in the doc­u­men­tary clip above. “David got more than into the char­ac­ter of Mr. New­ton. I think he put much more of him­self than we’d been able to get into the script. It was linked very much to his ideas in his music, and towards the end, I real­ized a big change had hap­pened in his life.” How much Bowie took from the role remains a mat­ter for fans to dis­cuss, though he him­self admits to tak­ing one thing in par­tic­u­lar: the wardrobe. “I lit­er­al­ly walked off with the clothes,” he says, “and I used the same clothes on the Sta­tion to Sta­tion tour.”

Even if step­ping between the con­cert stage and the cin­e­ma screen looks nat­ur­al in ret­ro­spect for the likes of Jag­ger and Bowie, can it work for a low­er-key but nev­er­the­less world-famous per­former? Roeg’s 1980 film Bad Tim­ing cast, in the star­ring role of an Amer­i­can psy­chi­a­trist in Cold War Vien­na who grows obsessed with a young Amer­i­can woman, Art Gar­funkel of Simon and Gar­funkel. (Play­ing the woman, inci­den­tal­ly, is There­sa Rus­sell, who would lat­er show up in Roeg’s Insignif­i­cance in the role of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe.) The clip above shows a bit of how Roeg uses the per­sona of Gar­funkel, sure­ly one of the least Dionysian among all 1960s musi­cal icons, to infuse the char­ac­ter with a cere­bral chill. In Roeg’s New York Times obit­u­ary, Gar­funkel remem­bers — fond­ly — that the direc­tor “brought me to the edge of mad­ness.” Roeg, for his part, had already paid his musi­cian stars their com­pli­ments in that paper decades ear­li­er: “The fact is that Jag­ger, Bowie and Gar­funkel are all extreme­ly bright, intel­li­gent and well edu­cat­ed. A long way from the pub­lic stereo­type.” But will any direc­tor use per­form­ers like them in quite the same way again?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Explains Rel­a­tiv­i­ty to Albert Ein­stein (in a Nico­las Roeg Movie)

Watch David Bowie Star in His First Film Role, a Short Hor­ror Flick Called The Image (1967)

When David Bowie Became Niko­la Tes­la: Watch His Elec­tric Per­for­mance in The Pres­tige (2006)

Mick Jag­ger Acts in The Nightin­gale, a Tele­vised Play from 1983

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In 17th-Century Japan, Creaking Floors Functioned as Security Systems That Warned Palaces & Temples of Approaching Intruders and Assassins

in Architecture, History | November 26th, 2018

Offer a cut­ting-edge secu­ri­ty sys­tem, and you’ll suf­fer no short­age of cus­tomers who want it installed. But before our age of con­cealed cam­eras, motion sen­sors, reti­nal scan­ners, and all the oth­er advanced and often unset­tling tech­nolo­gies known only to indus­try insid­ers, how did own­ers of large, expen­sive, and even roy­al­ty-hous­ing prop­er­ties buy peace of mind? We find one par­tic­u­lar­ly inge­nious answer by look­ing back about 400 years ago, to the wood­en cas­tles and tem­ples of 17th-cen­tu­ry Japan.

“For cen­turies, Japan has tak­en pride in the tal­ents of its crafts­men, car­pen­ters and wood­work­ers includ­ed,” writes Sora News 24’s Casey Baseel. “Because of that, you might be sur­prised to find that some Japan­ese cas­tles have extreme­ly creaky wood­en floors that screech and groan with each step. How could such slip­shod con­struc­tion have been con­sid­ered accept­able for some of the most pow­er­ful fig­ures in Japan­ese his­to­ry? The answer is that the sounds weren’t just tol­er­at­ed, but desired, as the noise-pro­duc­ing floors func­tioned as Japan’s ear­li­est auto­mat­ed intrud­er alarm.”

In these spe­cial­ly engi­neered floors, “planks of wood are placed atop a frame­work of sup­port­ing beams, secure­ly enough that they won’t dis­lodge, but still loose­ly enough that there’s a lit­tle bit of play when they’re stepped on.” And when they are stepped on, “their clamps rub against nails attached to the beams, cre­at­ing a shrill chirp­ing noise,” ren­der­ing stealthy move­ment near­ly impos­si­ble and thus mak­ing for an effec­tive “coun­ter­mea­sure against spies, thieves, and assas­sins.”

Accord­ing to Zen-Garden.org, you can still find — and walk on — four such uguisub­ari, or “nightin­gale floors,” in Kyoto: at Daikaku-ji tem­ple, Chio-in tem­ple, Toji-in tem­ple, and Nino­mu­ra Palace.

If you can’t make it out to Kyoto any time soon, you can have a look and a lis­ten to a cou­ple of those nightin­gale floors in the short clips above. Then you’ll under­stand just how dif­fi­cult it would have been to cross one with­out alert­ing any­one to your pres­ence. This sort of thing sends our imag­i­na­tions straight to visions of high­ly trained nin­jas skill­ful­ly out­wit­ting palace guards, but in their day these delib­er­ate­ly squeaky floors floors also car­ried more pleas­ant asso­ci­a­tions than that of immi­nent assas­si­na­tion. As this poem on Zen-Garden.org’s uguisub­ari page says says:

鳥を聞く

歓迎すべき音

鴬張りを渡る

 

A wel­come sound

To hear the birds sing

across the nightin­gale floor

via @12pt9/Sora News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hōshi: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japan­ese Fam­i­ly for 46 Gen­er­a­tions

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Omoshi­roi Blocks: Japan­ese Memo Pads Reveal Intri­cate Build­ings As The Pages Get Used

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Japan’s Inflat­able Con­cert Hall

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Illustrated Version of “Alice’s Restaurant”: Watch Arlo Guthrie’s Thanksgiving Counterculture Classic

in Music, Random | November 22nd, 2018

Alice’s Restau­rant. It’s now a Thanks­giv­ing clas­sic, and some­thing of a tra­di­tion around here. Record­ed in 1967, the 18+ minute coun­ter­cul­ture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, start­ing on Thanks­giv­ing Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hip­pie-bat­ing police offi­cer, by the name of William “Obie” Oban­hein, arrest­ed Arlo for lit­ter­ing. (Cul­tur­al foot­note: Obie pre­vi­ous­ly posed for sev­er­al Nor­man Rock­well paint­ings, includ­ing the well-known paint­ing, “The Run­away,” that graced a 1958 cov­er of The Sat­ur­day Evening Post.) In fair­ly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a mis­de­meanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the sto­ry isn’t over. Not by a long shot. Lat­er, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the pet­ty crime iron­i­cal­ly becomes a basis for dis­qual­i­fy­ing him from mil­i­tary ser­vice in the Viet­nam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bit­ter­ness as the song builds into a satir­i­cal protest against the war: “I’m sit­tin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, hous­es and vil­lages after bein’ a lit­ter­bug.” And then we’re back to the cheery cho­rus again: “You can get any­thing you want, at Alice’s Restau­rant.”

We have fea­tured Guthrie’s clas­sic dur­ing past years. But, for this Thanks­giv­ing, we give you the illus­trat­ed ver­sion. Hap­py Thanks­giv­ing to every­one who plans to cel­e­brate the hol­i­day today.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs Reads His Sar­cas­tic “Thanks­giv­ing Prayer” in a 1988 Film By Gus Van Sant

Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Hand­writ­ten Turkey-and-Stuff­ing Recipe

William Shat­ner Raps About How to Not Kill Your­self Deep Fry­ing a Turkey

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 13 Tips for What to Do with Your Left­over Thanks­giv­ing Turkey

The Making of “Bohemian Rhapsody”: Take a Deep Dive Into the Iconic Song with Queen’s 2002 Mini Documentary

in Music | November 22nd, 2018

Despite being fraught with pro­duc­tion dif­fi­cul­ties, an absent direc­tor, and a crit­i­cal quib­bling over its sex­u­al­i­ty pol­i­tics, Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, the biopic of Fred­die Mer­cury and Queen, has been doing very well at the box office. And though it has thrust Queen’s music back into the spot­light, has it even real­ly gone away?

The song itself, the 6 minute epic “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody,” was the top of the UK sin­gles charts for nine weeks upon its release and hasn’t been for­got­ten since. It’s part of our col­lec­tive DNA, but with a cer­tain caveat…it’s noto­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult to cov­er. It is so fine­ly con­struct­ed that it can’t be decon­struct­ed, leav­ing artists to stand in the shad­ow of Mercury’s deliv­ery. Bri­an May, in the above video, gives cred­it to Axl Rose for get­ting close to the pow­er­ful high reg­is­ters of Mer­cury, but even that was a kind of karaoke. And let’s not even talk about Kanye West’s stab at it.

So it’s a good time to check in with this 45 minute-long mini-doc on the mak­ing of the song, which took the band into the stratos­phere. Pro­duced in 2002 for the band’s Great­est Hits DVD, it fea­tures gui­tarist Bri­an May and drum­mer Roger Tay­lor. The first part is on the writ­ing of the song, the sec­ond part on the mak­ing of the music video, and the third, the bulk of the doc, on the pro­duc­tion.

Don’t expect any expla­na­tion of the sub­ject mat­ter of the song–as May says, Mer­cury would have shrugged off any inter­pre­ta­tion and dis­missed any search for depth. And while Mer­cury always took care over his lyrics, the pow­er is all there in the music.

As for the video, that came about from neces­si­ty, as the band want­ed to be on Top of the Pops and tour at the same time. By using their rehearsal stage at Elstree stu­dios for the per­for­mance footage and a side area for the choral/­close-up seg­ments, they made a strange­ly icon­ic video. (Who doesn’t think of Queen’s four mem­bers arranged in a dia­mond when those vocals start up?). The two main effects were a prism lens on the cam­era and video feed­back, all done live.

The last part is fas­ci­nat­ing and a deep dive into the mix. Bri­an May, along­side stu­dio engi­neer Justin Shirley Smith, play just the piano, bass, and drums from the song at first. Mer­cury was a self-taught pianist who played “like a drum­mer,” with a metronome in his head, says May.

The gui­tarist also iso­lates his var­i­ous gui­tar parts, includ­ing the har­mon­ics dur­ing the open­ing bal­lad por­tion, the “shiv­ers down my spine” sound made by scrap­ing the strings, and the famous solo, which he wrote as a coun­ter­point to Mercury’s melody. It’s geek­ery of the high­est order, but it’s for a song that deserves such atten­tion.

Inside The Rhap­sody will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Made Fred­die Mer­cury the Great­est Vocal­ist in Rock His­to­ry? The Secrets Revealed in a Short Video Essay
Hear Fred­die Mer­cury & Queen’s Iso­lat­ed Vocals on Their Endur­ing Clas­sic Song, “We Are The Cham­pi­ons”

Fred­die Mercury’s Final Days: Watch a Poignant Mon­tage That Doc­u­ments the Last Chap­ter of the Singer’s Life

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Watch the First Film Adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1910): It’s Newly Restored by the Library of Congress

in Film | November 19th, 2018

In his Cri­tique of Judg­ment Immanuel Kant made every attempt to sep­a­rate the Sublime—the phe­nom­e­non that inspires rev­er­ence, awe, and imagination—from ter­ror, hor­ror, and mon­stros­i­ty. But as Bar­bara Free­man argues, the dis­tinc­tions fall apart. Nowhere do we see this bet­ter dra­ma­tized, Free­man writes, than in Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, which “can be read almost as a par­o­dy of the Cri­tique of Judg­ment, for in it every­thing Kant iden­ti­fies with or as sub­lime… yield pre­cise­ly what Kant pro­hibits: ter­ror, mon­stros­i­ty, pas­sion, and fanati­cism.”

Rea­son, even that as care­ful as Kan­t’s, begets mon­sters, Shel­ley sug­gests. It’s a theme that has become so com­mon­place in writ­ing about Franken­stein and its numer­ous prog­e­ny that it seems hard­ly worth repeat­ing. And yet, Shelley’s dark vision, like that of her con­tem­po­rary Fran­cis­co Goya, came at a time when elec­tric­i­ty was a new force in the world (one that her hus­band Per­cy used to con­duct exper­i­ments on him­self)… a time when Kant’s phi­los­o­phy had seem­ing­ly val­i­dat­ed empir­i­cal real­ism and the pri­ma­cy of abstract rea­son.

Steeped in the lat­est sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy, and liv­ing on the oth­er side of the French Rev­o­lu­tion, Shel­ley saw the return of what Kant had sought to ban­ish. The mon­ster arrives as an omi­nous por­tent of atroc­i­ty. As Steven J. Kraftchick points out in a recent anthol­o­gy of Franken­stein essays pub­lished for the novel’s 200th anniver­sary, “the Eng­lish term ‘mon­ster’ (by way of French) like­ly derives from the Latin words mon­trare ‘to demon­strate’ and mon­ere ‘to warn.’” The mon­ster comes to show “the lim­its of the ordi­nary… expand­ing or con­tract­ing.”

As a being intend­ed to show us some­thing, it seems apt that Vic­tor Frankenstein’s cre­ation became ubiq­ui­tous in film and tele­vi­sion, first arriv­ing on screen in 1910 at the dawn­ing of film as a pop­u­lar medi­um. The first Franken­stein adap­ta­tion pre­dates the tech­no­log­i­cal hor­rors of the 20th cen­tu­ry (them­selves, of course, well doc­u­ment­ed on film). Rather than tak­ing tech­nol­o­gy to task direct­ly, this orig­i­nal cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion, direct­ed by J. Sear­le Daw­ley for Thomas Edison’s stu­dios, vague­ly illus­trates, as Rich Drees writes, “the dan­gers of tam­per­ing in God’s realm.”

It was a trite mes­sage tai­lored for cen­so­ri­ous moral reform­ers who had tak­en aim at the mov­ing image’s sup­pos­ed­ly cor­rupt­ing effect on impres­sion­able minds. And yet the film does more than inau­gu­rate a cin­e­mat­ic tra­di­tion of bet­ter Franken­stein adap­ta­tions, both faith­ful and lib­er­al­ly mod­ern­ized. The cre­ation of the mon­ster in the 13-minute short is some­what terrifying—and cer­tain­ly would have unset­tled audi­ences at the time. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, it takes place in giant black box, with a small win­dow through which Vic­tor peers as the spe­cial effects unfold.

The scene is not unlike a film direc­tor look­ing through a colos­sal camera’s lens, fur­ther sug­gest­ing the dan­ger­ous influ­ence of film, its abil­i­ty to pro­duce and cap­ture mon­strosi­ties. The Library of Congress’s Mike Mashon describes the Edi­son pro­duc­tion of Franken­stein as not “all that rev­e­la­to­ry.” Maybe with the ben­e­fit of 108 years of hind­sight, it is not. But as a cri­tique of the very tech­nol­o­gy that pro­duced it, we can see it updat­ing Shelley’s anx­i­eties, antic­i­pat­ing the ways in which Franken­stein-like sto­ries have come to tele­graph fears of com­put­er intel­li­gence, in films increas­ing­ly cre­at­ed by intel­li­gent machines.

This 1910 Franken­stein film has been restored by the Library of Con­gress, and Mashon’s sto­ry of how the only nitrate print was acquired by the library’s Packard Cam­pus for Audio Visu­al Con­ser­va­tion may be, he writes, “more inter­est­ing than the film itself.” Or it may not, depend­ing on your lev­el of inter­est in the twists and turns of library acqui­si­tions. But the film, which you can see in its restored glo­ry at the top, rewards view­ing as more than a cin­e­ma-his­tor­i­cal arti­fact. Its effects are crude, its sim­pli­fied sto­ry moral­is­tic, but this trun­cat­ed ver­sion can­ni­ly rec­og­nizes the hor­rif­ic crea­ture not as the exclud­ed oth­er but as the mon­strous mir­ror image of its cre­ator.

via Indiewire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Very First Film Adap­ta­tion of Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, a Thomas Edi­son Pro­duc­tion (1910)

Mary Shelley’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­scripts of Franken­stein Now Online for the First Time

The First Hor­ror Film, George Méliès’ The Manor of the Dev­il (1896)

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

Marxism by Raymond Geuss: A Free Course

in | November 15th, 2018

This course taught by Ray­mond Geuss was orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty in 2013. All 8 lec­tures can be streamed above, or on YouTube here. “Marx­ism” has been added to our col­lec­tion of 170 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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!

7 Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

in Literature, Writing | November 14th, 2018

Image by Lloyd Arnold via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fish­er­man, Ernest Hem­ing­way was a crafts­man who would rise very ear­ly in the morn­ing and write. His best sto­ries are mas­ter­pieces of the mod­ern era, and his prose style is one of the most influ­en­tial of the 20th cen­tu­ry.

Hem­ing­way nev­er wrote a trea­tise on the art of writ­ing fic­tion.  He did, how­ev­er, leave behind a great many pas­sages in let­ters, arti­cles and books with opin­ions and advice on writ­ing. Some of the best of those were assem­bled in 1984 by Lar­ry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hem­ing­way on Writ­ing.

We’ve select­ed sev­en of our favorite quo­ta­tions from the book and placed them, along with our own com­men­tary, on this page. We hope you will all–writers and read­ers alike–find them fas­ci­nat­ing.

1: To get start­ed, write one true sen­tence.

Hem­ing­way had a sim­ple trick for over­com­ing writer’s block. In a mem­o­rable pas­sage in A Move­able Feast, he writes:

Some­times when I was start­ing a new sto­ry and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the lit­tle oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sput­ter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not wor­ry. You have always writ­ten before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sen­tence. Write the truest sen­tence that you know.” So final­ly I would write one true sen­tence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sen­tence that I knew or had seen or had heard some­one say. If I start­ed to write elab­o­rate­ly, or like some­one intro­duc­ing or pre­sent­ing some­thing, I found that I could cut that scroll­work or orna­ment out and throw it away and start with the first true sim­ple declar­a­tive sen­tence I had writ­ten.

2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will hap­pen next.

There is a dif­fer­ence between stop­ping and founder­ing. To make steady progress, hav­ing a dai­ly word-count quo­ta was far less impor­tant to Hem­ing­way than mak­ing sure he nev­er emp­tied the well of his imag­i­na­tion. In an Octo­ber 1935 arti­cle in Esquire ( “Mono­logue to the Mae­stro: A High Seas Let­ter”) Hem­ing­way offers this advice to a young writer:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will hap­pen next. If you do that every day when you are writ­ing a nov­el you will nev­er be stuck. That is the most valu­able thing I can tell you so try to remem­ber it.

3: Nev­er think about the sto­ry when you’re not work­ing.

Build­ing on his pre­vi­ous advice, Hem­ing­way says nev­er to think about a sto­ry you are work­ing on before you begin again the next day. “That way your sub­con­scious will work on it all the time,” he writes in the Esquire piece. “But if you think about it con­scious­ly or wor­ry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” He goes into more detail in A Move­able Feast:

When I was writ­ing, it was nec­es­sary for me to read after I had writ­ten. If you kept think­ing about it, you would lose the thing you were writ­ing before you could go on with it the next day. It was nec­es­sary to get exer­cise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was bet­ter than any­thing. But after­wards, when you were emp­ty, it was nec­es­sary to read in order not to think or wor­ry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already nev­er to emp­ty the well of my writ­ing, but always to stop when there was still some­thing there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

4: When it’s time to work again, always start by read­ing what you’ve writ­ten so far.

T0 main­tain con­ti­nu­ity, Hem­ing­way made a habit of read­ing over what he had already writ­ten before going fur­ther. In the 1935 Esquire arti­cle, he writes:

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, cor­rect­ing as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chap­ters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.

5: Don’t describe an emotion–make it.

Close obser­va­tion of life is crit­i­cal to good writ­ing, said Hem­ing­way. The key is to not only watch and lis­ten close­ly to exter­nal events, but to also notice any emo­tion stirred in you by the events and then trace back and iden­ti­fy pre­cise­ly what it was that caused the emo­tion. If you can iden­ti­fy the con­crete action or sen­sa­tion that caused the emo­tion and present it accu­rate­ly and ful­ly round­ed in your sto­ry, your read­ers should feel the same emo­tion. In Death in the After­noon, Hem­ing­way writes about his ear­ly strug­gle to mas­ter this:

I was try­ing to write then and I found the great­est dif­fi­cul­ty, aside from know­ing tru­ly what you real­ly felt, rather than what you were sup­posed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what real­ly hap­pened in action; what the actu­al things were which pro­duced the emo­tion that you expe­ri­enced. In writ­ing for a news­pa­per you told what hap­pened and, with one trick and anoth­er, you com­mu­ni­cat­ed the emo­tion aid­ed by the ele­ment of time­li­ness which gives a cer­tain emo­tion to any account of some­thing that has hap­pened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emo­tion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stat­ed it pure­ly enough, always, was beyond me and I was work­ing very hard to get it.

6: Use a pen­cil.

Hem­ing­way often used a type­writer when com­pos­ing let­ters or mag­a­zine pieces, but for seri­ous work he pre­ferred a pen­cil. In the Esquire arti­cle (which shows signs of hav­ing been writ­ten on a type­writer) Hem­ing­way says:

When you start to write you get all the kick and the read­er gets none. So you might as well use a type­writer because it is that much eas­i­er and you enjoy it that much more. After you learn to write your whole object is to con­vey every­thing, every sen­sa­tion, sight, feel­ing, place and emo­tion to the read­er. To do this you have to work over what you write. If you write with a pen­cil you get three dif­fer­ent sights at it to see if the read­er is get­ting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get anoth­er chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writ­ing it first in pen­cil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good aver­age for a hit­ter. It also keeps it flu­id longer so you can bet­ter it eas­i­er.

7: Be Brief.

Hem­ing­way was con­temp­tu­ous of writ­ers who, as he put it, “nev­er learned how to say no to a type­writer.” In a 1945 let­ter to his edi­tor, Maxwell Perkins, Hem­ing­way writes:

It was­n’t by acci­dent that the Get­tys­burg address was so short. The laws of prose writ­ing are as immutable as those of flight, of math­e­mat­ics, of physics.

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.

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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Feb­ru­ary 2013.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Ernest Hem­ing­way Cre­ates a Read­ing List for a Young Writer (1934)

18 (Free) Books Ernest Hem­ing­way Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time

James Joyce Picked Drunk­en Fights, Then Hid Behind Ernest Hem­ing­way

Find Cours­es on Hem­ing­way and Oth­er Authors in our big list of Free Online Cours­es

How Glenn Gould’s Eccentricities Became Essential to His Playing & Personal Style: From Humming Aloud While Playing to Performing with His Childhood Piano Chair

in Music | November 14th, 2018

The cul­tur­al law that we must indulge, or at least tol­er­ate, the quirks of genius has much less force these days than it once did. Noto­ri­ous­ly per­fec­tion­is­tic Stan­ley Kubrick’s fabled fits of ver­bal abuse, for exam­ple, might skirt a line with actors and audi­ences now, though it’s hard to argue with the results of his process. Many oth­er exam­ples of artists’ bad behav­ior need no fur­ther men­tion, they are now so well-known and right­ly reviled. When it comes to anoth­er leg­en­dar­i­ly demand­ing auteur, Glenn Gould was as devot­ed to his art, and as dogged­ly idio­syn­crat­ic, as it gets.

But the case of Gould presents us with a very dif­fer­ent pic­ture than that of the artist who lash­es out at or abus­es those around him. His eccen­tric­i­ties con­sist­ed main­ly of her­met­ic habits, odd attach­ments, and a ten­den­cy to hum and sing loud­ly while he played Bach, Mozart, Schoen­berg, or any num­ber of oth­er clas­si­cal com­posers whose work he re-inter­pret­ed. While Leonard Bern­stein praised Gould as a “think­ing per­former” (one with whom Bern­stein sharply dis­agreed), he was also a par­tic­u­lar­ly noisy per­former, a fact that bedev­iled record­ing engi­neers.

As music crit­ic Tim Page says in the inter­view clip at the top, the habit of hum­ming also trou­bled Gould, who saw it as a lia­bil­i­ty but could not play at his best with­out doing it. “I would say that Glenn was in sort of an ecsta­t­ic trans­port,” dur­ing a lot of his per­for­mances. “When you look at him, he’s almost auto-erot­ic…. He is clear­ly hav­ing a major and pro­found reac­tion to it as he is also mak­ing it hap­pen.” The trait man­i­fest­ed “from the begin­ning” of Gould’s life, his father Bert once said. “When you’d expect a child to cry, Glenn would always hum.” (He may or may not have had Asperger’s syn­drome.)

“On the warm sum­mer day of the first record­ing ses­sion” of his first record­ing of Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions, writes Edward Roth­stein at The New York Times:

He arrived at the record­ing stu­dio wear­ing a win­ter coat, a beret, a muf­fler and gloves. He car­ried a batch of tow­els, bot­tles of spring water, sev­er­al vari­eties of pills and a 14-inch high piano chair to sit on. He soaked his arms in hot water for 20 min­utes, took sev­er­al med­ica­tions, adjust­ed each leg of his chair, and pro­ceed­ed to play, loud­ly hum­ming and singing along. After a week, he had pro­duced one of the most remark­able per­for­mances of Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions on record.

See a young Gould fur­ther up play J.S. Bach’s Par­ti­ta #2, loud­ly hum­ming and singing expres­sive­ly as though it were an opera. Anoth­er of Gould’s incur­able quirks also threat­ened to be a detri­ment to his per­for­mances, espe­cial­ly after he renounced per­form­ing live and retreat­ed per­ma­nent­ly to the stu­dio. Gould insist­ed on per­form­ing for over 21 years on a “chair that has become an object of rev­er­ence for Gould devo­tees,” explains the pod­cast Lud­wig van Toron­to. Gould was “obsessed” with the chair and “wouldn’t per­form on any­thing else.”

In the video above, you can see Gould defend the diminu­tive chair—built by his father for his child­hood practice—telling a TV pre­sen­ter, “I’ve nev­er giv­en any con­cert in any­thing else.” The chair, he says, is “a mem­ber of the fam­i­ly! It is a boon com­pan­ion, with­out which I do not func­tion, I can­not oper­ate.”

Along with his exact­ly spec­i­fied height for the piano, over which he hov­ered with his chin just inch­es from the mid­dle C, a rug under his feet, and a very warm stu­dio, which he often sat in wear­ing win­ter clothes, Gould’s chair is one of the most dis­tinc­tive of his odd­i­ties. The chair is “one of the most famous musi­cal objects in the his­to­ry of clas­si­cal music,” Kate Shap­ero writes at Gould inter­view site Unheard Notes. But it caused con­sid­er­able con­ster­na­tion in the stu­dio.

Now resid­ing in a glass case at the Nation­al Library of Cana­da, Gould’s chair is so dilap­i­dat­ed that “the only thing that kept it from falling apart,” says Lud­wig van Toron­to, “is some duct tape, screws, and piano wire.” Even before it acquired the noisy hard­ware of the met­al brack­ets hold­ing up its two front legs, Gould’s ani­mat­ed play­ing made the chair rock and creak in dis­tract­ing ways. But while Gould’s unin­ten­tion­al accom­pa­ni­ments turn some peo­ple off, his true fans, and they are mul­ti­tude, either find his vocal­iza­tions charm­ing or com­plete­ly tune them out. (They dis­ap­pear when he begins per­form­ing above.)

Gould’s “singing authen­ti­cates and human­izes his per­for­mances,” com­pos­er Luke Dahn argues. “It reveals a per­former so entire­ly absorbed in the music’s moment and reminds us that this is a per­for­mance, even if with­in the con­fines of the stu­dio.” His unusu­al qual­i­ties “dis­tin­guish his record­ings from those of count­less note-per­fect record­ings avail­able today that take on a fab­ri­cat­ed, ster­ile, and even robot­ic qual­i­ty. (Is per­fec­tion ever very inter­est­ing?)” Like the great­est musi­cal innovators—John Coltrane espe­cial­ly comes to mind—Gould has wide appeal both inside his genre cir­cles and far out­side them.

“I can put him on for hours,” says not­ed Gould devo­tee John Waters, “he’s like nobody else. He was the ulti­mate original—a real out­sider. And he had a great style, the hats and the gloves and so on.” What­ev­er the ori­gins of Gould’s quirks, and what­ev­er his mis­giv­ings about them, Gould lovers per­ceive them not as flaws to be over­looked or tol­er­at­ed but essen­tial qual­i­ties of his pas­sion and utter­ly unique per­son­al style. See him “say some­thing orig­i­nal” about Beethoven above, then deliv­er a tremen­dous per­for­mance, most­ly hum free but total­ly enthralling, of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 17 in D Minor—a piece whose nick­name cap­tures Gould’s musi­cal effect: “The Tem­pest.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glenn Gould Plays Bach on His U.S. TV Debut … After Leonard Bern­stein Explains What Makes His Play­ing So Great (1960)

Hear the Famous­ly Con­tro­ver­sial Con­cert Where Leonard Bern­stein Intro­duces Glenn Gould & His Idio­syn­crat­ic Per­for­mance of Brahms’ First Piano Con­cer­to (1962)

Lis­ten to Glenn Gould’s Shock­ing­ly Exper­i­men­tal Radio Doc­u­men­tary, The Idea of North (1967)

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

R.I.P. Stan Lee: Take His Free Online Course “The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact On Pop Culture”

in Comics/Cartoons, History, Online Courses | November 13th, 2018

“I grew up in an exurb where it took near­ly an hour to walk to the near­est shop, to the near­est place to eat, to the library,” remem­bers writer Adam Cadre. “And the steep hills made it an exhaust­ing walk.  That meant that until I turned six­teen, when school was not in ses­sion I was stuck at home.  This was often not a good place to be stuck. Stan Lee gave me a place to hang out.” Many oth­er for­mer chil­dren of exur­ban Amer­i­ca — as well as every­where else — did much of their grow­ing up there as well, not just in the uni­verse of Mar­vel Comics but in those of the comics and oth­er forms of cul­ture to which it gave rise or influ­enced, most of them either direct­ly or indi­rect­ly shaped by Lee, who died yes­ter­day at the age of 95.

“His crit­ics would say that for me to thank Stan Lee for cre­at­ing the Mar­vel Uni­verse shows that I’ve fall­en for his self-promotion,” Cadre con­tin­ues, “​that it was Jack Kir­by and Steve Ditko and his oth­er col­lab­o­ra­tors who sup­plied the dynam­ic, expres­sive art­work and the epic sto­ry­lines that made the Mar­vel Uni­verse so com­pelling.”

Mar­vel fans will remem­ber that Ditko, co-cre­ator with Lee of Spi­der-Man and Doc­tor Strange, died this past sum­mer. Kir­by, whose count­less achieve­ments in comics include co-cre­at­ing the Fan­tas­tic Four, the X‑Men, and the Hulk with Lee, passed away in 1994. (Kir­by’s death, as I recall, was the first I’d ever heard about on the inter­net.)

Those who take a dim­mer view of Lee’s career see him as hav­ing done lit­tle more artis­tic work than putting dia­logue into the speech bub­bles. But like no small num­ber of oth­er Mar­vel Uni­verse habitués, Cadre “didn’t read super­hero comics for the fights or the cos­tumes or the trips to Asgard and Atti­lan. I read them for fan­ta­sy that read like real­i­ty, for the inter­play of wild­ly dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties — ​and for the wise­cracks.” And what made super­hero sto­ries the right deliv­ery sys­tem for that inter­play of per­son­al­i­ties and those wise­cracks? You’ll find the answer in “The Rise of Super­heroes and Their Impact On Pop Cul­ture,” an online course from the Smith­son­ian, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture and still avail­able to take at your own pace in edX’s archives, cre­at­ed and taught in part by Lee him­self. You can watch the trail­er for the course at the top of the post.

If you take the course, its pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als promise, you’ll learn the answers to such ques­tions as “Why did super­heroes first arise in 1938 and expe­ri­ence what we refer to as their “Gold­en Age” dur­ing World War II?,” “How have com­ic books, pub­lished week­ly since the mid-1930’s, mir­rored a chang­ing Amer­i­can soci­ety, reflect­ing our mores, slang, fads, bias­es and prej­u­dices?,” and “When and how did com­ic book art­work become accept­ed as a true Amer­i­can art form as indige­nous to this coun­try as jazz?” Whether or not you con­sid­er your­self a “true believ­er,” as Lee would have put it, there could be few bet­ter ways of hon­or­ing an Amer­i­can icon like him than dis­cov­er­ing what makes his work in super­hero comics — the field to which he ded­i­cat­ed his life, and the one which has tak­en more than its fair share of deri­sion over the decades — not just a reflec­tion of the cul­ture but a major influ­ence on it as well.

Enroll in “The Rise of Super­heroes and Their Impact On Pop Cul­ture” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

The Great Stan Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

Stan Lee Reads “The Night Before Christ­mas,” Telling the Tale of San­ta Claus, the Great­est of Super Heroes

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from theCom­ic Book Plus Archive

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hundreds of Wonderful Japanese Firework Designs from the Early-1900s: Digitized and Free to Download

in Books, Design | November 12th, 2018

The Japan­ese term for fire­works, han­abi (花火), com­bines the words for fire, bi (火), and flower, hana (火). If you’ve seen fire­works any­where, that deriva­tion may seem at least vague­ly apt, but if you’ve seen Japan­ese fire­works, it may well strike you as evoca­tive indeed. The tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese way with pre­sent­ing flow­ers, their shapes and col­ors as well as their scents, has some­thing in com­mon with the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese way of putting on a fire­works show.

Not that the pro­duc­tion of fire­crack­ers goes as far back, his­tor­i­cal­ly, as the arrange­ment of flow­ers does, nor that fire­crack­ers them­selves, orig­i­nal­ly a prod­uct of Chi­na, have any­thing essen­tial­ly Japan­ese about them.

But as more recent­ly with cars, com­ic books, con­sumer elec­tron­ics, and Kit-Kats, when­ev­er Japan re-inter­prets a for­eign inven­tion, the project amounts to rad­i­cal re-inven­tion, and often a daz­zling one at that.

These Japan­ese ver­sions of non-Japan­ese things often become high­ly desir­able around the world in their own right. It cer­tain­ly hap­pened with Japan­ese fire­works, here proud­ly dis­played in these ele­gant and vivid­ly col­ored Eng­lish cat­a­logs of Hiraya­ma Fire­works and Yokoi Fire­works, pub­lished in the ear­ly 1900s by C.R. Brock and Com­pa­ny, whose found­ing date of 1698 makes it the old­est fire­work con­cern in the Unit­ed King­dom.

These Brocks cat­a­logs been dig­i­tized by the Yoko­hama Board of Edu­ca­tion and made avail­able online at the Inter­net Archive. Though I’ve nev­er seen a fire­works show in Yoko­hama, that city, dot­ted as it is with impec­ca­bly designed pub­lic gar­dens, cer­tain­ly has its flower-appre­ci­a­tion cre­den­tials in order.

Orga­nized into such cat­e­gories as “Ver­ti­cal Wheels,” “Phan­tom Cir­cles,” and “Col­ored Flo­ral Bomb Shells,” the cat­a­logs present their import­ed Japan­ese wares sim­ply, as var­i­ous pat­terns of col­or against a black or blue back­ground. But sim­plic­i­ty, as even those only dis­tant­ly acquaint­ed with Japan­ese art have seen, sup­ports a few par­tic­u­lar­ly strong and endur­ing branch­es of Japan­ese aes­thet­ics.

No mat­ter where you take in your dis­plays of fire­works, you’ll sure­ly rec­og­nize more than a few of these designs from hav­ing seen them light up the night sky. And as far as where to look for the next fire­work inno­va­tor, I might sug­gest South Korea, where I live: at this past sum­mer’s Seoul Inter­na­tion­al Fire­works fes­ti­val I wit­nessed fire­works explod­ing into the shape of cat faces, whiskers and all. Such elab­o­rate­ness many vio­late the more rig­or­ous ver­sions of the Japan­ese sen­si­bil­i­ty as they apply to han­abi — but then again, just imag­ine what won­ders Japan, one of the most cat-lov­ing coun­tries in the world, could do with that con­cept.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Down­load Clas­sic Japan­ese Wave and Rip­ple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japan­ese Artists from 1903

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

What Hap­pens When a Japan­ese Wood­block Artist Depicts Life in Lon­don in 1866, Despite Nev­er Hav­ing Set Foot There

A Firework’s Point of View

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.