Celebrate Samuel Beckett’s Birthday with Waiting For Godot (the Film) and Harold Pinter’s Memories

in Film, Literature, Theatre | April 13th, 2012

Today is the 106th anniver­sary of the birth of Samuel Beck­ett, whose pared-down prose and plays are among the great­est achieve­ments of late mod­ernism.

At a young man Beck­ett moved to Paris, where he befriend­ed anoth­er Irish exile, James Joyce. As a writer, Beck­ett real­ized ear­ly on that he would nev­er match Joyce’s “epic, hero­ic” achieve­ment. Where Joyce was a syn­the­siz­er, Beck­ett once said, he was an ana­lyz­er. “I real­ized that my own way was impov­er­ish­ment,” he said, “in lack of knowl­edge and in tak­ing away, sub­tract­ing rather than adding.”

To cel­e­brate Beck­et­t’s birth­day we bring you a pair of videos, includ­ing an excel­lent 2001 film ver­sion (above) of the most famous of his enig­mat­ic cre­ations, Wait­ing for Godot. It’s the cen­ter­piece of Beck­ett on Film, a series of adap­tions of all 19 of Beck­et­t’s plays, orga­nized by Michael Col­gan, artis­tic direc­tor of the Gate The­atre in Dublin. The film fea­tures Bar­ry McGov­ern as Vladimir, John­ny Mur­phy as Estragon, Alan Stan­ford as Poz­zo and Stephen Bren­nan as Lucky. It was direct­ed by Michael Lind­say-Hogg, who describes Wait­ing for Godot as being “like Mozart–too easy for chil­dren, too dif­fi­cult for adults.” He goes on:

The play is what it is about. Samuel Beck­ett would have said it’s about two men wait­ing on the side of the road for some­one to turn up. But you can invest in the impor­tance of who is going to turn up. Is it a local farmer? Is it God? Or is it sim­ply some­one who does­n’t show up? The impor­tant thing is the ambiguity–the fact that it does­n’t real­ly state what it is. That’s why it’s so great for the audi­ence to be part of–they fill in a lot of the blanks. It works in their imag­i­na­tions.

You can order the 19-film boxed set of Beck­ett on Film here, and list­ed to a CBC audio record­ing of Wait­ing for Godot here.

Harold Pin­ter in A Wake for Sam:

In ear­ly 1990, less than two months after Beck­et­t’s death on Decem­ber 22, 1989, the British play­wright Harold Pin­ter paid trib­ute to his friend and hero as part of a BBC series called A Wake for Sam. Pin­ter begins by telling the sto­ry of the night in 1961 when he first met Beck­ett, while in Paris for a per­for­mance of The Care­tak­er:

I’d known his work for many years of course but it had­n’t led me to believe that he’d be such a very fast dri­ver. He drove his lit­tle Cit­roen from bar to bar through­out the whole evening, very quick­ly indeed. We were togeth­er for hours, and final­ly end­ed up in a place in Les Halles eat­ing onion soup at about four o’clock in the morn­ing and I was by this time overcome–through, I think, alco­hol and tobac­co and excitement–with indi­ges­tion and heart­burn, so I lay down on the table. I can still see the place. When I looked up he was gone. As I say, it was about four o’clock in the morn­ing. I had no idea where he’d gone and he remained away and I thought, “Per­haps this has all been a dream.”

The con­clu­sion of Pin­ter’s sto­ry (you’ll have to watch the video) reveals some­thing of Beck­et­t’s char­ac­ter. Pin­ter then goes on to read an elo­quent, oft-quot­ed pas­sage from a let­ter he wrote to a friend as a young man, in 1954, assess­ing Beck­et­t’s pow­er as a writer:

The far­ther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philoso­phies, tracts, dog­mas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, noth­ing from the bar­gain base­ment. He is the most coura­geous, remorse­less writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grate­ful to him. He’s not fuck­ing me about, he’s not lead­ing me up any gar­den path, he’s not slip­ping me a wink, he’s not flog­ging me a rem­e­dy or a path or a rev­e­la­tion or a bas­in­ful of bread­crumbs, he’s not sell­ing me any­thing I don’t want to buy–he does­n’t give a bol­lock whether I buy or not–he has­n’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no mag­got lone­ly. He brings forth a body of beau­ty. His work is beau­ti­ful.

The 13-minute film con­cludes with a dra­mat­ic read­ing by Pin­ter of the final sec­tion of Beck­et­t’s exper­i­men­tal nov­el The Unnam­able, which was com­plet­ed the same year as Wait­ing for Godot, in 1953. The pas­sage builds in a crescen­do of doubt and despair, with a sliv­er of resolve at the end:

Per­haps it’s done already, per­haps they have said me already, per­haps they have car­ried me to the thresh­old of my sto­ry, before the door that opens on my sto­ry, that would sur­prise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll nev­er know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Samuel Beck­ett Speaks

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Technology Can’t Grasp Reality

in Philosophy, Religion, Technology, Television | April 13th, 2012

“The world is a mar­velous sys­tem of wig­gles,” says Alan Watts in a series of lec­tures I keep on my iPod at all times. He means that the world, as it real­ly exists, does not com­prise all the lines, angles, and hard edges that our var­i­ous sys­tems of words, sym­bols, and num­bers do. Were I to dis­till a sin­gle over­ar­ch­ing argu­ment from all I’ve read and heard of the body of work Watts pro­duced on Zen Bud­dhist thought, I would do so as fol­lows: human­i­ty has made astound­ing progress by cre­at­ing and read­ing “maps” of real­i­ty out of lan­guage, num­bers, and images, but we run an ever more dan­ger­ous risk of mis­tak­ing these maps for the land. In this 1971 Nation­al Edu­ca­tion­al Tele­vi­sion pro­gram, A Con­ver­sa­tion With Myself, Watts claims that our com­par­a­tive­ly sim­ple minds and the sim­ple tech­nolo­gies they’ve pro­duced have proven des­per­ate­ly inad­e­quate to han­dle real­i­ty’s actu­al com­plex­i­ty. But what to do about it?

Using an aes­thet­ic now rarely seen on tele­vi­sion, A Con­ver­sa­tion With Myself cap­tures, in only two unbro­ken shots, an infor­mal “lec­ture” deliv­ered by Watts straight to the view­er. Speak­ing first amid the abun­dant green­ery sur­round­ing his Mount Tamal­pais cab­in and then over a cup of cer­e­mo­ni­al Japan­ese green tea (“good on a cold day”), he explains why he thinks we have thus far failed to com­pre­hend the world and our inter­fer­ence with it. In part, we’ve failed because our “one-track” minds oper­at­ing in this “mul­ti-track” world insist on call­ing it inter­fer­ence at all, not real­iz­ing that the bound­aries between us, one anoth­er, our tech­nol­o­gy, and nature don’t actu­al­ly exist. They’re only arti­facts of the meth­ods we’ve used to look at the world, just like the dis­tor­tions you get when dig­i­tiz­ing a piece of ana­log sight or sound. Like ear­ly dig­i­ti­za­tion sys­tems, the crude tools we’ve been think­ing with have, in Watts’ view, forced all of real­i­ty’s “wig­gles” into unhelp­ful “lines and rows.” He sums up the prob­lem with a mem­o­rable dash of Bud­dha-by-way-of-Britain wit: “You’re try­ing to straight­en out a wig­gly world, and now you’re real­ly in trou­ble.”

(If you’d like a side of irony, pon­der for a moment the impli­ca­tions of absorb­ing all this not only through human lan­guage, but through tech­nol­o­gy like iPods and Google Video!)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy (1960)

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

Damien Hirst Takes Us Through His New Exhibition at Tate Modern

in Art | April 13th, 2012

From April 4 through Sep­tem­ber 9, the Tate Mod­ern will stage the first seri­ous UK exhi­bi­tion of major works by Damien Hirst, one of Britain’s most influ­en­tial, con­tro­ver­sial and wealthy artists. Many of his famous sculp­tures — includ­ing, of course, the famous/infamous shark sus­pend­ed in formalde­hyde — will be on dis­play. It’s our job to get you bet­ter acquaint­ed with the exhib­it. So let’s have Damien Hirst, the artist him­self, take you on a tour of the big affair. The pro­gram above, Damien Hirst — The First Look, orig­i­nal­ly aired on Chan­nel 4 in the UK. You can also watch Hirst wan­der through the exhi­bi­tion with cura­tor Ann Gal­lagher right here. Final­ly, you might want to spend a few min­utes with a review by Oliv­er Walling­ton, an artist who won­ders whether the emper­or of art “has no clothes.” Or scan the review at The Guardian, which qui­et­ly rais­es eye­brows of its own.

Philosophy Bites: Podcasting Ideas From Plato to Singularity Since 2007

in Philosophy, Podcasts | April 12th, 2012

I’ve spent four years writ­ing Podthoughts, a pod­cast review col­umn, for Maximumfun.org. At one pod­cast a week, this means I’ve lis­tened to and writ­ten up well over 200 dif­fer­ent pod­casts. At this point, each and every one that does­n’t con­sist of two guys vol­ley­ing shape­less com­plaints about their least favorite bands, movies, tele­vi­sion shows, and sports teams comes as a drop of water in the desert. Yes, I exag­ger­ate, but the vast cre­ative ter­ri­to­ry offered by a form of media as fresh and open as pod­cast­ing nev­er­the­less remains most­ly unex­plored. None of the blame, how­ev­er, falls upon Open Uni­ver­si­ty lec­tur­er Nigel War­bur­ton and BBC pro­duc­er David Edmonds, whose pod­cast Phi­los­o­phy Bites (iTunes — Lib­syn — Web) pushed the medi­um for­ward very ear­ly in its life­time. Alas, my pre­de­ces­sor in Pod­think­ing beat me to review­ing Phi­los­o­phy Bites, but I lat­er inter­viewed Edmonds on my own show about what it takes to craft a pod­cast with so many top philoso­phers talk­ing about so many philo­soph­i­cal top­ics in such short spans of time, so we’ll call it even.

The Phi­los­o­phy Bites canon now forms a wider-rang­ing, more acces­si­ble phi­los­o­phy cur­ricu­lum than you’ll find in any uni­ver­si­ty — and notably, in these try­ing eco­nom­ic times, an infi­nite­ly cheap­er one. You can pick from a vari­ety of pos­si­ble points of entry, includ­ing clear expla­na­tions of well-known con­cepts like Pla­to’s Cave and free will; philo­soph­i­cal per­spec­tives on such issues of the day as the sin­gu­lar­i­ty and genet­ic enhance­ment in sports; dis­cus­sions of Adam Smith, David Hume, and phi­los­o­phy’s oth­er lumi­nar­ies of old; and con­ver­sa­tions with mod­ern-day philo­soph­i­cal lumi­nar­ies like Alain de Bot­ton and A.C. Grayling. When you’d like to move on to longer-form round­table dis­cus­sions of famous works of phi­los­o­phy, start down­load­ing The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, a pod­cast I did get the chance to Pod­think about. For the ear­bud-equipped and philo­soph­i­cal­ly inclined, these are fruit­ful times indeed.

Note: Phi­los­o­phy Bites recent­ly pub­lished a book based on its pod­cast. And it starts by try­ing to answer the ques­tion. What is Phi­los­o­phy? Brain­Pick­ings has more on their answers.

Relat­ed con­tent:

55 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy… With­out Any Gaps

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

Orson Whales!: Welles Meets Led Zeppelin Meets Melville in Mashup Animation

in Animation, Books | April 12th, 2012

Last week we gave you “ein Stop-Motion” ani­ma­tion of Ernest Hem­ing­way’s lit­tle clas­sic, The Old Man and the Sea, set to “Sail” by AWOLNATION. How can we pos­si­bly con­nect the dots and give you anoth­er mar­itime mashup this week? Easy-peasy. Today, we’re serv­ing up Alex Itin’s ani­ma­tion of Orson Welles read­ing Moby Dick, with images being drawn in the pages of Her­man Melville’s clas­sic, and with Led Zep pro­vid­ing the sound­track and play­ing their ver­sion of “Moby Dick.” Mis­sion accom­plished!

Free copies of Moby Dick can be found in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks col­lec­tions. And you can watch orig­i­nal footage of the great Orson Welles read­ing Moby Dick right here.

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!

Yale Introduces Another Seven Free Online Courses, Bringing Total to 42

in Online Courses, Yale | April 11th, 2012

It’s April, which means it’s time for a new batch of Open Cours­es from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. The lat­est release adds anoth­er six cours­es to the mix, bring­ing Yale’s total to 42. We have list­ed the new addi­tions below, and also added them to our ever-grow­ing list of Free Online Cours­es. As always, Yale gives you access to their cours­es in mul­ti­ple for­mats. You can gen­er­al­ly down­load their lec­tures via YouTube, iTunes or Yale’s Open Course web site.

• African Amer­i­can His­to­ry: From Eman­ci­pa­tion to the Present — Web Site — Jonathan Hol­loway
  
• Finan­cial Mar­kets 2011 — YouTube — Robert Shiller
• Fresh­man Organ­ic Chem­istry II — YouTube — iTunes — Web Site — J. Michael McBride
• Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er — YouTube — Wai Chee Dimock
• Phi­los­o­phy and the Sci­ence of Human Nature — YouTube — iTunes Audio — Web Site — Tamar Gendler
• The Atmos­phere, the Ocean, and Envi­ron­men­tal Change — YouTube — iTunes — Web Site — Ronald B. Smith
• The Ear­ly Mid­dle Ages, 284‑1000 — YouTube — iTunes — Web Site — Paul H. Freed­man

Note: Ear­li­er this week, my local NPR sta­tion fea­tured a big con­ver­sa­tion about Dis­rup­tive Inno­va­tion in High­er Edu­ca­tion. Guests includ­ed Salman Khan (Khan Acad­e­my), Sebas­t­ian Thrun (Udac­i­ty), Anant Agar­w­al (MITx) and Ben Nel­son (The Min­er­va Project). You can lis­ten to their wide-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tion here.

‘The Sound of Miles Davis’: Classic 1959 Performance with John Coltrane

in Music, Television | April 11th, 2012

Here’s an amaz­ing time cap­sule from the gold­en age of jazz: Miles Davis and his group–including John Coltrane–performing with the Gil Evans Orches­tra on the CBS pro­gram, The Robert Her­ridge The­ater.

The show was record­ed on April 2, 1959 at Stu­dio 61 in New York. It was a bold depar­ture for The Robert Her­ridge The­ater, a pro­gram nor­mal­ly devot­ed to the dra­mat­ic sto­ry-telling arts. Davis was slat­ed to appear with his full sex­tet, but alto sax­o­phon­ist Julian “Can­non­ball” Adder­ley had a migraine headache that day, accord­ing to the Miles Ahead Web site, so the group was pared down to a quin­tet, with Davis on trum­pet and flugel­horn, Coltrane on tenor and alto sax­o­phone, Wyn­ton Kel­ly on piano, Paul Cham­bers on bass and Jim­my Cobb on drums.

The broad­cast took place halfway through the record­ing of Davis’s land­mark album, Kind of Blue. The 26-minute show (see above) opens with the clas­sic “So What,” record­ed only a month ear­li­er. Davis solos twice on the song to fill in for Adder­ley. The group is then joined by Gil Evans and his orches­tra. Togeth­er they play three num­bers from Davis’s 1957 album, Miles Ahead. Here’s the set list:

1. So What
2. The Duke
3. Blues for Pablo
4. New Rhum­ba
5. So What (reprise)

“There are many ways of telling a sto­ry,” says host and pro­duc­er Robert Her­ridge. “What you’re lis­ten­ing to now, the music of Miles Davis, is one of those ways.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thelo­nious Monk, Bill Evans and More on the Clas­sic Jazz 625 Show

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

Clas­sic Jazz Album Cov­ers Ani­mat­ed, or the Re-Birth of Cool

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

My Best Friend’s Birthday, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

in Comedy, Film | April 10th, 2012

Few­er than 40 min­utes sur­vive of My Best Friend’s Birth­day, the first film direct­ed by Quentin Taran­ti­no. But its brief screen time runs dense with ref­er­ences to Elvis Pres­ley, the Par­tridge Fam­i­ly, A Count­ess from Hong Kong, Rod Stew­art, Deputy Dawg, and That Darn Cat. In between the rapid-fire gab ses­sions, we also wit­ness a slap­stick kung-fu bat­tle and even hear a bit of repur­posed ear­ly-sev­en­ties pop music. Though a fire claimed the sec­ond half of what was pre­sum­ably the pic­ture’s only print, the first half, which you can watch free on YouTube, leaves no doubt as to the iden­ti­ty of its auteur. In some sense, it bears an even deep­er imprint of Taran­ti­no’s per­son­al­i­ty than his sub­se­quent films, 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.

The plot of My Best Friend’s Birth­day, such as it remains, finds Clarence look­ing to give a birth­day present to his pal Mick­ey, who’s been fresh­ly, and harsh­ly, re-reject­ed by an ex-girl­friend. None of Clarence’s ideas — not the cake, not the call girl — work out quite as intend­ed, though now I sup­pose we’ll nev­er know how wrong things real­ly went, or if they man­aged to right them­selves in the end. Yet the trun­cat­ed ver­sion of the film feels some­how more fas­ci­nat­ing — more sat­is­fy­ing, even — than any com­ple­tion I can imag­ine. Both the movie’s hope­less­ly unre­solved sto­ry and its dreamy visu­al qual­i­ty, cour­tesy of a beat­en-up 16-mil­lime­ter print trans­ferred onto what looks like a VHS tape, turn it into the most exper­i­men­tal art Taran­ti­no has ever cre­at­ed. It casts adrift even the direc­tor’s hardi­est fans in a stark south­ern Cal­i­for­nia real­i­ty: long-run­ning argu­ments about mean­ing­less cul­ture, cease­less ele­va­tion of the dis­pos­able, and a vague, loom­ing, but nev­er­the­less con­stant sense of threat. And amid all this, it can still serve up a line like, “What made you inter­est­ed in tack­ling pros­ti­tu­tion as a career goal?”

My Best Friend’s Birth­day appears in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Crack­ing Taran­ti­no

Film­mak­ing Advice from Quentin Taran­ti­no and Sam Rai­mi (NSFW)

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives Sneak Peek of Pulp Fic­tion to Jon Stew­art (1994)

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

Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

in Art, Books, Literature | April 10th, 2012

A cou­ple weeks back, we men­tioned that you can down­load a fine­ly-read audio ver­sion of James Joyce’s Ulysses for free. What that ver­sion does­n’t include — and could­n’t include — are etch­ings by Hen­ri Matisse. Back in the mid-1930s, George Macey, an Amer­i­can pub­lish­er, approached the cel­e­brat­ed painter and asked him how many etch­ings he could pro­vide for $5,000. Although it’s wide­ly believed that Matisse nev­er read Joyce’s sprawl­ing clas­sic (despite being giv­en a French trans­la­tion of the text), he did come back with 26 full-page illus­tra­tions, all of them based on six themes from Home­r’s Odyssey, the epic poem that Ulysses con­scious­ly plays upon. In 1935, an illus­trat­ed edi­tion of Ulysses was print­ed. Matisse signed 1500 copies; Joyce only 250. And today a copy signed by both artists will run you a cool $37k. Buy, hey, the ship­ping is only $6.

Odysseus Blind­ing Polyphe­mus

Odysseus and Nau­si­caa

Odysseus’ Ship

Purdue Sets World Record with Largest Rube Goldberg Machine

in Random, Technology | April 9th, 2012

Hats off to the Pur­due Soci­ety of Pro­fes­sion­al Engi­neers team. This week­end, the team broke its own world record for the Largest Func­tion­al Rube Gold­berg Machine. The con­trap­tion only took 300 steps to do some­thing quite sim­ple — blow up and pop a bal­loon. If you’re a fan of Rube Gold­berg machines and books, then you won’t want to miss one of my favorites — The Page Turn­er cre­at­ed by Joseph Her­sch­er, a New Zealand kinet­ic artist who now resides in Brook­lyn. via i09

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