9‑Year-Old Henry Thomas Delivers a Remarkable Screen Test for E.T.

in Film | November 3rd, 2021

I can guar­an­tee almost every day I get some­one going, ‘Hey, you’re the guy from E.T.’, usu­al­ly fol­lowed by, ‘What are you doing now?’ And not a day has gone by when some­one hasn’t shout­ed ‘E.T. phone home’ at me.” —  Actor Hen­ry Thomas

Should I ever bump into Hen­ry Thomas, I may exclaim, “Okay, kid, you got the job,” just like direc­tor Steven Spiel­berg does at the end of the remark­able screen test, above.

Thomas, now — brace your­self — 50, was just 9 when Spiel­berg flew him in from Texas to audi­tion for the role of Elliot in E.T. the Extra-Ter­res­tri­al on the strength of his sin­gle screen cred­it, play­ing Sis­sy Spacek’s son in Raggedy Man.

Before we go fur­ther, a cau­tion­ary tale.

Anoth­er young­ster had the part of Elliot all sewn up until screen­writer Melis­sa Math­i­son host­ed a Dun­geons and Drag­on game to get a feel for the chem­istry between the film’s child actors.

“In about three min­utes it became very clear that nobody liked this lit­tle boy,” cast­ing direc­tor Mar­ci Liroff recalls. Ouch.

That would be a heavy bur­den to car­ry through life, know­ing that youth­ful bossi­ness cost you the role of a life­time.

Enter Hen­ry Thomas.

Spielberg’s long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor, pro­duc­er Kath­leen Kennedy, recalled that he was no great shakes read­ing from pre­pared sides of the script, but then came an improv with leg­endary cast­ing direc­tor Mike Fen­ton.

If only every aspi­rant method actor shared Thomas’ knack for emo­tion­al recall. Dur­ing the improv, as the pres­sure to give up the beloved alien crea­ture hid­den in his clos­et mount­ed, he drew on mem­o­ries of his pet ­chi­huahua, Urso, who had been killed by a neighbour’s dog in front of him.

“Poor Urso, it may have won me the role but it was a sad price to pay,” Thomas told The Mir­ror some 30 years lat­er.

His per­for­mance reduced every adult in the room to tears.

It was also remark­able for its sub­tle­ty. As Spiel­berg remarked in a 1982 inter­view with Pre­miere mag­a­zine:

He’s a very con­trolled, method­i­cal per­former who mea­sures what he does and feels what he does and yet broad­casts it in a total­ly sub­tle way. His per­for­mance is so con­trolled, unlike most kid per­form­ers, who seem to be giv­ing you 150 per­cent on every shot. Henry’s per­for­mance is just a bread crumb at a time, but he takes you in a won­der­ful direc­tion to a very, very rous­ing cathar­sis. He’s just a “once in a life­time” kid.

The direc­tor likened Thomas’ tears in the final moments of E.T. to the arrival of the moth­er ship in Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind — “a super-colos­sal spe­cial effect” root­ed in human emo­tion.

By then, Thomas no longer need­ed an assist from Urso:

I couldn’t stop cry­ing because I worked with E.T. every day and he was real to me.

The con­nec­tion was not imme­di­ate. Thomas’ laugh­ing response to his first gan­der at the alien reas­sured Spiel­berg that the child actor could han­dle com­e­dy but Thomas, a huge Raiders of the Lost Ark fan, had been hop­ing for some­thing a bit more swash­buck­ling. As he told Esquire’s Paul Schrodt:

When I saw this alien with the weird feet and the tele­scop­ic neck, I was like, ‘What the hell is this? Where is my lightsaber?’ But I guess I got a fly­ing ­bicy­cle, so I can’t com­plain.

It’s was­n’t exact­ly a Hol­ly­wood end­ing, per­haps because Thomas didn’t stay in Hol­ly­wood, but rather returned to school in San Anto­nio, where he fell prey to kids who resent­ed the overnight sen­sa­tion in their midst.

On the oth­er hand, he has worked steadi­ly as an actor since leav­ing home at 17, and abid­ed by his res­o­lu­tion to avoid drugs and oth­er pit­falls that plague some oth­er child stars. (“I nev­er want­ed to give any­one the sat­is­fac­tion of get­ting that pic­ture of me rob­bing a liquor store.”)

In his inter­view with The Mir­ror, tongue firm­ly in cheek, he spec­u­lat­ed about pos­si­ble E.T. sequels and admit­ted that he’d hate to see some­one oth­er than him­self play­ing Elliott:

It could be like an inter­galac­tic ­reunion with Elliott and E.T. at a beach resort… I don’t think Spiel­berg will touch it, although I’d love to see Elliott and E.T. ­sit­ting at the end of the bar: “How’s it been for you man?” “Good, man, anoth­er beer?”

A few years lat­er, the stars did indeed reunite for a hol­i­day advert that owes a large debt to Peter Pan, and puts its thumb on the scale with a clip of Bing Cros­by croon­ing “White Christ­mas.”

As if Hen­ry Thomas needs help mak­ing us cry.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Orig­i­nal Audi­tion Tapes for Break­ing Bad Before the Final Sea­son Debuts

Audrey Hepburn’s Mov­ing Screen Test for Roman Hol­i­day (1953)

Bruce Lee Audi­tions for The Green Hor­net (1964)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­maol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Behold 84 Great Novels Reinterpreted as Modernist Postage Stamps

in Design, Education, K-12, Literature, Music | November 2nd, 2021

Ali John­son and Jim Quail of Liv­er­pool-based design stu­dio Dorothy had a hit with their music-based graph­ics, which recast sem­i­nal alter­na­tive, psy­che­del­ic, elec­tron­ic, and post-punk albums as over­sized postage stamps.

Now, they’ve turned their atten­tion and knack for high­ly con­densed visu­al respons­es to the realms of lit­er­a­ture.

Their Mod­ern Clas­sics col­lec­tion, above, syn­the­sizes 42 titles into some­thing emblem­at­ic and essen­tial.

How many have you read?

How many would you be able to iden­ti­fy based on image alone?

It’s easy to grasp why the hori­zon fig­ures promi­nent­ly in On The Road, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Road.

And under­stand­ably, the eyes have it when it comes to 1984, A Clock­work Orange, and Slaugh­ter­house-Five.

Else­where, the visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions cre­ate con­nec­tions that may take read­ers by sur­prise.

(Stay tuned for a mas­ter’s the­sis that teas­es out the­mat­ic par­al­lels between The Col­or Purple’s quilts and Hold­en Caulfield’s red hunt­ing hat in The Catch­er in the Rye.)

Accord­ing to John­son, she and Quail, avid read­ers both, fell out sev­er­al times over which titles to include (and, by exten­sion, exclude).

Eng­lish teach­ers at mid­dle and high school lev­el will rejoice at the num­ber of syl­labus favorites that made the cut.

Poten­tial stamp-themed cre­ative assign­ments abound.

The conch may be an obvi­ous choice for Lord of the Flies, but what of The Great Gats­by’s green light?

Why not the eyes of Doc­tor T. J. Eck­le­burg?

A swim­ming pool?

Or one of those beau­ti­ful shirts?

Dis­cuss!

Then make your own stamp!

Stu­dents are far less like­ly to be con­ver­sant in the 42 ear­li­er works com­pris­ing Dorothy’s lit­er­ary Clas­sics stamps, though musi­cal and movie adap­ta­tions of Lit­tle Women, Drac­u­la, and Les Mis­er­ables should pro­vide a toe­hold.

Our igno­rance is such, we may need to reread Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jane Eyre … or at least Google the sig­nif­i­cance of a spoon and all those orange and red tri­an­gles.

(Back in our pre-dig­i­tal youth, Cliff’s Notes were the pre­ferred Philis­tine option…)

Dorothy’s stamp prints of Clas­sics and Mod­ern Clas­sics are avail­able for pur­chase on their web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Good Movies as Old Books: 100 Films Reimag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers

157 Ani­mat­ed Min­i­mal­ist Mid-Cen­tu­ry Book Cov­ers

Clas­sic Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers Dur­ing Our Trou­bled Times: “Under Pres­sure,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” “Shel­ter from the Storm” & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­maol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The 10 Paradoxical Traits of Creative People, According to Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (RIP)

in Creativity, Psychology | November 1st, 2021

Despite decades of research, sci­en­tists still know lit­tle about the source of cre­ativ­i­ty. Nonethe­less, humans con­tin­ue to cre­ate things. Or, at least, we con­tin­ue to be fas­ci­nat­ed by cre­ativ­i­ty; now more than ever, it seems. There may be as many best-sell­ing books on cre­ativ­i­ty as there are on diet­ing or rela­tion­ships. The cur­rent focus on cre­ativ­i­ty isn’t always a net pos­i­tive. Any­one who does cre­ative work may be labeled a “Cre­ative” (used as a noun) at some point in their career. The term lumps all work­ing artists togeth­er, as though their work were inter­change­able deliv­er­ables mea­sured in bill­able hours. The word sug­gests that those who don’t work as “Cre­atives” have no busi­ness in the area of cre­ativ­i­ty. As psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi put it:

Not so long ago, it was accept­able to be an ama­teur poet…. Nowa­days if one does not make some mon­ey (how­ev­er piti­ful­ly lit­tle) out of writ­ing, it’s con­sid­ered to be a waste of time. It is tak­en as down­right shame­ful for a man past twen­ty to indulge in ver­si­fi­ca­tion unless he receives a check to show for it.

Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi, who passed away this month, deplored the instru­men­tal­iza­tion of cre­ativ­i­ty. He wrote, Austin Kleon notes, “about the joys of being an ama­teur” — which, in its lit­er­al sense, means being a devot­ed lover. Like Carl Jung, Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi believed that cre­ation pro­ceeds, in a sense, from falling in love with an activ­i­ty and los­ing our­selves in a state beyond our pre­oc­cu­pa­tions with self, oth­ers, or the past and future. He called this state “flow” and wrote a nation­al best­seller about it while found­ing the dis­ci­pline of pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy and co-direct­ing the Qual­i­ty of Life Research Cen­ter at Clare­mont Grad­u­ate Uni­ver­si­ty .

You can see an ani­mat­ed sum­ma­ry of Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow: The Psy­chol­o­gy of Opti­mal Expe­ri­ence above (includ­ing a pro­nun­ci­a­tion of Csikszentmihalyi’s name). Cre­ativ­i­ty should not only refer to skills we sell to our employ­ers. It is the prac­tice of doing things that make us hap­py, not the things that make us mon­ey, whether or not those two things are the same. This is a sub­ject close to Austin Kleon’s heart. The writer and design­er has been offer­ing tips for train­ing and hon­ing cre­ativ­i­ty for years, in books like Show Your Work, a guide “not just for ‘cre­atives’!” but for any­one who wants to cre­ate. Like Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi, he refutes the idea that there’s such a thing as a “cre­ative type.”

Instead, in his book Cre­ativ­i­ty: Flow and the Psy­chol­o­gy of Dis­cov­ery and Inven­tion, Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi notes that peo­ple who spend their time cre­at­ing exhib­it a list of 10 “para­dox­i­cal traits.”

1. Cre­ative peo­ple have a great deal of phys­i­cal ener­gy, but they’re also often qui­et and at rest.
2. Cre­ative peo­ple tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
3. Cre­ative peo­ple com­bine play­ful­ness and dis­ci­pline, or respon­si­bil­i­ty and irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty.
4. Cre­ative peo­ple alter­nate between imag­i­na­tion and fan­ta­sy, and a root­ed sense of real­i­ty.
5. Cre­ative peo­ple tend to be both extro­vert­ed and intro­vert­ed.
6. Cre­ative peo­ple are hum­ble and proud at the same time.
7. Cre­ative peo­ple, to an extent, escape rigid gen­der role stereo­typ­ing.
8. Cre­ative peo­ple are both rebel­lious and con­ser­v­a­tive.
9. Most cre­ative peo­ple are very pas­sion­ate about their work, yet they can be extreme­ly objec­tive about it as well.
10. Cre­ative people’s open­ness and sen­si­tiv­i­ty often expos­es them to suf­fer­ing and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoy­ment.

We may well be remind­ed of Walt Whitman’s “Do I con­tra­dict myself? Very well then I con­tra­dict myself,” and per­haps it is to Whit­man we should turn to resolve the para­dox. Cre­ativ­i­ty involves the will­ing­ness and courage to become “large,” the poet wrote, to get weird and messy and “con­tain mul­ti­tudes.” Maybe the best way to become a more cre­ative per­son, to lose one­self ful­ly in the act of mak­ing, is to heed Bertrand Russell’s guid­ance for fac­ing death:

[M]ake your inter­ests grad­u­al­ly wider and more imper­son­al, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increas­ing­ly merged in the uni­ver­sal life. An indi­vid­ual human exis­tence should be like a riv­er: small at first, nar­row­ly con­tained with­in its banks, and rush­ing pas­sion­ate­ly past rocks and over water­falls. Grad­u­al­ly the riv­er grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more qui­et­ly, and in the end, with­out any vis­i­ble break, they become merged in the sea… 

This elo­quent pas­sage — Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi might have agreed — express­es the very essence of cre­ative “flow.”

via Austin Kleon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

Albert Ein­stein Tells His Son The Key to Learn­ing & Hap­pi­ness is Los­ing Your­self in Cre­ativ­i­ty (or “Find­ing Flow”)

Slavoj Žižek: What Full­fils You Cre­ative­ly Isn’t What Makes You Hap­py

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

Scenes of New York City in 1945 Colorized & Revived with Artificial Intelligence

in Film, History, Travel | October 28th, 2021

Are you irked when a movie or video you’re attempt­ing to enjoy is con­stant­ly inter­rupt­ed by the com­men­tary of a chat­ty fel­low audi­ence mem­ber?

If so, don’t watch archivist Rick Prelinger’s 2017 assem­blage, Lost Land­scapes of New York, in the com­pa­ny of a New York­er.

Unlike Open Cul­ture favorite NASS’s five minute sam­ple of Lost Land­scapes of New York, above, which adds col­or and ambi­ent audio to the unvar­nished found footage,  Prelinger — described by the New York Times’ Manohla Dar­gis as a “col­lec­tor extraordinaire…one of the great, under­sung his­to­ri­ans of 20th cen­tu­ry cin­e­ma” — rel­ish­es such mouthi­ness from the audi­ence. His black and white com­pi­la­tions are most­ly silent.

If you are a New York­er, view that as an invi­ta­tion here.

For every­one else, on behalf of New York­ers every­where, we con­cede that our con­fi­dent utter­ances may indeed dri­ve you out of your gourd…

Tourists with just one vis­it to their name can be for­giv­en for flaunt­ing their per­son­al brush­es with such hall of famers as the Brook­lyn Bridge and the Wash­ing­ton Square Arch, but there’s no com­pet­ing with long time res­i­dents’ inti­mate knowl­edge of the city’s geog­ra­phy.

It’s snob­bery of a type, but have pity on us long time res­i­dents, who know we will be viewed as sub­or­di­nates by those who were born with­in the five Bor­oughs.

(We sub­mit that there are lay­ers to this…a native of, say, the Hoosier State, who can remem­ber the orig­i­nal Penn Sta­tion should be con­sid­ered to have at least as much street cred as a mil­len­ni­al whose  birth in Brook­lyn, Harlem or the West Vil­lage con­fers native New York­er sta­tus.)

How­ev­er you slice it, con­sid­er this fair warn­ing that some of us, view­ing Lost Land­scapes of New York in your com­pa­ny, will not be able to stop our­selves from tri­umphant­ly crow­ing, “That’s 8th between 43rd and 44th!”

Again, it’s some­thing Prelinger courts in local live screen­ings of his Lost Land­scapes series. 

The phe­nom­e­non is not lim­it­ed to New York.

Be the set­ting San Fran­cis­co, Los Ange­les, or Detroit, he views audi­ence out­bursts as the sound­tracks to his most­ly silent, non-nar­ra­tive pas­tich­es drawn from his vast archive of vin­tage home movies, gov­ern­ment-pro­duced films, and back­ground footage shot with an eye toward com­posit­ing into a fea­ture film.

In a con­ver­sa­tion with The Essay Review’s Lucy Schiller, he remarked:

I’ve dis­cov­ered that home movies become some­thing else when blown up to the­ater-screen size. The change of scale pro­vokes a role change in the audi­ence, who with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly expect­ing it become more than sim­ple com­men­ta­tors. They turn into ethno­g­ra­phers, notic­ing and often remark­ing on every vis­i­ble detail of kin­ship, word and ges­ture and every inter­per­son­al exchange. They also respond as cul­tur­al geo­g­ra­phers, call­ing out streets and neigh­bor­hoods and build­ings, read­ing signs aloud, repeat­ing trade­names and brands and mark­ing extinct details in the cityscape. If I could cap­ture them (and I gen­er­al­ly can­not, because it is hard to intel­li­gi­bly record the voic­es of hun­dreds of peo­ple in one room), it would play back like an urban research project dis­trib­uted through a crowd of inves­ti­ga­tors. Each suc­cess­ful iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, each nam­ing achieved, is an endor­phin trig­ger.

Prelinger is hap­py to play fast and loose with chrono­log­i­cal order, scram­bling peri­od fash­ions, and col­or and black-and-white stock. This crazy quilt approach is in step with his resis­tance to con­struct­ing nar­ra­tives (“the curse of con­tem­po­rary doc­u­men­tary”) and admi­ra­tion for the way enthu­si­as­tic ama­teurs’ footage ren­ders “caste dis­tinc­tions between ani­mals and humans, between places and their inhab­i­tants” moot:

I am much less inter­est­ed in the minu­ti­ae of local his­to­ry than I am in the process of day­light­ing it, in the rela­tion­ship of his­to­ry and con­tem­po­rary life.

His approach allows those of us who live or have lived here to rev­el in New York City’s long stand­ing capac­i­ty for rein­ven­tion.

Like the anony­mous tide of human­i­ty bustling along our side­walks (and dart­ing into traf­fic, mid-block), the mar­quees, restau­rant names and words on the deliv­ery trucks aren’t fixed. We claim to hate it, but philoso­phers might sug­gest it’s what keeps us engaged.

You won’t find many street ven­dors hawk­ing frumpy cot­ton undies these days, but there are plen­ty of cor­ners where you can buy fruit and veg… and iPhone cas­es, ear­buds, and COVID-19 era face masks.

As excit­ing as it is to suc­cess­ful­ly peg the quin­tes­sen­tial­ly New York things that remain, there’s an equal thrill to rec­og­niz­ing and shout­ing out the things that don’t, espe­cial­ly if there’s a sig­nif­i­cant per­son­al con­nec­tion.

It makes us feel like we’re notable, con­tribut­ing in some way.

You con­tribute, too, by watch­ing Lost Land­scapes of New York (2017) here, while simul­tanous­ly keep­ing your eyes peeled for grat­i­fy­ing­ly well attend­ed, high­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed live screen­ings.

If vin­tage ama­teur footage you’re in pos­ses­sion of is gath­er­ing dust, con­sid­er donat­ing it to expand Prelinger’s archive, already some 60,000 films strong.

Watch Prelinger’s Lost Land­scapes com­pi­la­tions of oth­er cities here and here (see episode 7 of his San Fran­cis­co series above).

Explore his mas­sive archive on the Inter­net Archive.

And if you want to prac­tice sound­ing like a “real New York­er,” head back up to the top of the page, skip to the end, and inform every­one with­in earshot that that build­ing is the old James A. Far­ley Post Office at 32nd and 8th:

“Now it’s Moyni­han Train Hall! It opened on Jan­u­ary 1! It’s part of Penn Sta­tion! Don’t for­get to look up inside the 33rd street entrance, or you’ll miss Kehinde Wiley’s incred­i­ble stained-glass ceil­ing! And if you want a snack for the ride, you should hit H‑Mart on 32nd just east of Gree­ley Square!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son of the Same Streets & Land­marks

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breath­tak­ing Pho­tos of His­toric New York City

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How Radiohead Wrote the Perfect James Bond Theme Song

in Film, Music | October 22nd, 2021

Over the past 59 years, the duty of per­form­ing a James Bond movie theme has fall­en to the likes of Tom Jones, Paul McCart­ney, Car­ly Simon, Bono, Madon­na — and most recent­ly, for the lat­est install­ment, No Time to Die, Bil­lie Eil­ish. But one of the great­est Bond themes ever writ­ten has nev­er been heard in any of the movies. This, in any case, is the con­tention of the video essay above, “How Radio­head Wrote the Per­fect Bond Theme.” Com­mis­sioned for 2015’s Spec­tre, the sec­ond-most recent film in the series, Thom Yorke and com­pa­ny came up with a song that moves Lis­ten­ing In cre­ator Barn­a­by Mar­tin to declare, “This is Bond, but it’s also unmis­tak­ably Radio­head.”

Like many Bond title themes, Radio­head­’s “Spec­tre” is in a minor key with “added blues notes,” work­ing off the dis­tinc­tive chord pro­gres­sion com­pos­er John Bar­ry employed in the series’ orig­i­nal instru­men­tal theme. And while, like most Bond title-theme per­form­ers, Radio­head are pop­u­lar musi­cians, their actu­al work has always refused to align per­fect­ly with straight­for­ward pop-music expec­ta­tions.

“Spec­tre” embod­ies both the band’s “love of rhyth­mi­cal ambi­gu­i­ty” and their “trade­mark har­mon­ic ambi­gu­i­ty.” The “beau­ty and sim­plic­i­ty of the music con­trast painful­ly with the words,” reflect­ing “per­fect­ly that dichoto­my in con­tem­po­rary Bond: a man strug­gling to rec­on­cile love and duty.”

As if that weren’t enough, Radio­head­’s song also includes unex­pect­ed but con­sum­mate­ly Bond-esque com­po­si­tion­al and instru­men­tal moves. “It’s jazzy but dis­cor­dant,” says Mar­tin. “It’s a mod­ern re-imag­in­ing of John Bar­ry’s big-band orches­tra­tions.” In every sec­tion the piece exquis­ite­ly main­tains the ten­sion between Radio­head and Bond, cre­at­ing “an instant­ly com­pelling and dark musi­cal world. Alas, it was ulti­mate­ly replaced, osten­si­bly because the mood of the music and lyrics did­n’t fit prop­er­ly with that of the film: “We had this beau­ti­ful song,” lament­ed direc­tor Sam Mendes, “and we weren’t able to use it.” But that has­n’t stopped Bond afi­ciona­dos from imag­in­ing what could have been, and you can get a sense of it in a fan video, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, that reunites “Spec­tre” with Spec­tre.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radiohead’s “Spec­tre” Played Against the Title Sequence of the 2015 James Bond Film, Spec­tre

Intro­duc­ing The Radio­head Pub­lic Library: Radio­head Makes Their Full Cat­a­logue Avail­able via a Free Online Web Site

James Bond: 50 Years in Film (and a Big Blu-Ray Release)

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Per­forms Songs from His New Sound­track for the Hor­ror Film, Sus­piria

The Secret Rhythm Behind Radiohead’s “Video­tape” Now Final­ly Revealed

Inti­mate Live Per­for­mances of Radio­head, Son­ic Youth, the White Stripes, PJ Har­vey & More: No Host, No Audi­ence, Just Pure Live Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 Hippie Temptation”: An Angst-Ridden CBS TV Show Warns of the Risks of LSD (1976)

in History, Music, Psychology, Television | October 22nd, 2021

To lyser­gic acid diethy­lamide, bet­ter known as LSD, we owe much of what has endured from West­ern pop­u­lar cul­ture of the mid-20th cen­tu­ry: con­sid­er, for instance, the lat­ter half of the Bea­t­les’ oeu­vre. In Rev­o­lu­tion in the Head: The Bea­t­les’ Records and the Six­ties, Ian Mac­Don­ald describes LSD as “a pow­er­ful hal­lu­cino­gen whose func­tion is tem­porar­i­ly to dis­miss the brain’s neur­al concierge, leav­ing the mind to cope as it can with sen­so­ry infor­ma­tion which mean­while enters with­out pri­or arrange­ment — an uncen­sored expe­ri­ence of real­i­ty which pro­found­ly alters one’s out­look on it.”

So pro­found is that alter­ation that some came to believe in a utopia achiev­able through uni­ver­sal inges­tion of the drug: “If there be nec­es­sary rev­o­lu­tion in Amer­i­ca,” declared Allen Gins­berg, “it will come this way.” But most Amer­i­cans did­n’t see it quite the same way. It was for them that CBS made its broad­cast “The Hip­pie Temp­ta­tion.” Aired in August 1967, three months after the release of Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Heart’s Club Band, it con­sti­tutes an exposé of LSD-fueled youth cul­ture as it effer­vesced at the time in and around San Fran­cis­co’s coun­ter­cul­tur­al mec­ca of Haight-Ash­bury.

“The hip­pies present a strange prob­lem,” says cor­re­spon­dent Har­ry Rea­son­er, lat­er known as the host of 60 Min­utes. “Our soci­ety has pro­duced them. There they are, in rapid­ly increas­ing num­bers. And yet there seem to be very few def­i­nite ideas behind the super­fi­cial glit­ter of their dress and behav­ior.” In search of the core of the hip­pie ide­ol­o­gy, which seems out­ward­ly to involve “stand­ing apart from soci­ety by means of mutu­al help and love,” Rea­son­er and his col­lab­o­ra­tors delve into the nature of LSD, whose users “may see a wild com­plex­i­ty of images, hear a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of sounds. This is called ‘tak­ing an acid trip.’ ”

Alas, “for many, the price of tak­ing the short­cut to dis­cov­ery the hip­pies put for­ward turns out to be very high.” A young doc­tor from UCLA’s neu­ropsy­chi­atric insti­tute named Duke Fish­er argues that most LSD users “talk about lov­ing human­i­ty in gen­er­al, an all-encom­pass­ing love of the world, but they have a great deal of dif­fi­cul­ty lov­ing one oth­er per­son, or lov­ing that spe­cif­ic thing.” Also includ­ed in “The Hip­pie Temp­ta­tion” are inter­views with young peo­ple (albeit ones clean­er-cut than the aver­age denizen of late-60s Haight-Ash­bury) placed into med­ical facil­i­ties due to hal­lu­cino­gen-relat­ed mishaps, includ­ing sui­cide attempts.

“There is the real dan­ger that more and more young peo­ple may fol­low the call to turn on, tune in, drop out,” Rea­son­er declares, in keep­ing with the broad­cast’s por­ten­tous tone. Even then there were signs of what Mac­Don­ald calls “the hip­pie coun­ter­cul­ture’s incip­i­ent com­mer­cial­iza­tion and impend­ing decline into hard drugs.” But to this day, “that there was indeed some­thing unusu­al in the air can still be heard from many of the records of the peri­od: a light, joy­ous opti­mism with a tan­gi­ble spir­i­tu­al aura and a thrilling­ly fresh infor­mal­i­ty” — a qual­i­ty Mac­Don­ald finds con­cen­trat­ed in the work of not just The Bea­t­les but the Grate­ful Dead, who sit for an inter­view in “The Hip­pie Temp­ta­tion.” LSD may no longer be as tempt­ing as it was half a cen­tu­ry ago, but many of the cre­ations it inspired then still have us hooked today.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

Aldous Hux­ley Trips on Acid; Talks About Cats & the Secret of Life (1962)

Rare Footage Shows US and British Sol­diers Get­ting Dosed with LSD in Gov­ern­ment-Spon­sored Tests (1958 + 1964)

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

New LSD Research Pro­vides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Poten­tial to Pro­mote Cre­ativ­i­ty

When the Grate­ful Dead Per­formed on Hugh Hefner’s Play­boy After Dark & Secret­ly Dosed Every­one With LSD (1969)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

Demystifying Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand,” and How It Was Inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost

in Music | October 21st, 2021

Youtu­ber Poly­phon­ic has done a good job of look­ing at some hoary old clas­sics of ‘60s rock, but he doesn’t always dip his toe in tak­ing on con­tem­po­rary music, or even con­sid­er­ing a mod­ern canon. Pro­nounc­ing what is essen­tial lis­ten­ing of the last few decades is a mine­field, espe­cial­ly among the ranks of Com­men­tus YouTubus.

So their choice to explore Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand” is a deft one. It’s not Cave’s most well-known song—-that would be “The Mer­cy Seat”—-but it’s one that many non-Cave fans know regard­less. Though released in 1994, it’s now best known as the theme song from Peaky Blind­ers, though it also showed up in all three of the first Scream films. It’s been used to sell tequi­la and tourism as well.

Poly­phon­ic first delves into the source of the title—the “Red Right Hand”—as com­ing from Milton’s Par­adise Lost, spo­ken by fall­en angel Belial:

“What if the breath that kin­dled those grim fires,
Awaked, should blow them into sev­en­fold rage,
And plunge us in the flames; or from above
Should inter­mit­ted vengeance arm again
His red right hand to plague us?”

This is the hand of God, and a venge­ful, Old Tes­ta­ment one at that. But that will only get you so far into the lyrics of this creepy song. As Poly­phon­ic peels back the lay­ers of Cave’s vers­es, the man with the red right hand could be God, could be the Dev­il, could be a man, could be a ghost. He could offer you a Faus­t­ian pact, or they could take every­thing away imme­di­ate­ly. It could be gov­ern­ment, or cap­i­tal­ism, or the media, or mate­ri­al­ism.

Cave, to the song’s cred­it, leaves every­thing in a lim­i­nal space (as Poly­phon­ic illus­trates with the kind of cross­roads blues play­ers love to sing about). What’s left is a warn­ing, a sense of unease, a feel­ing that maybe it’s already too late. Maybe we real­ly are just all fall­en angels with no idea how to get back home to par­adise.

That’s why Cave includes it in most of his live sets. He can impro­vise on the lines, adding, as he has been doing, ref­er­ences to Twit­ter and social media. Cave might have left his reli­gious upbring­ing in his youth, but he knows that the best way to express the unease of the mod­ern con­di­tion is to get bib­li­cal. And part of that is mys­tery. Even fel­low Bad Seed Mick Har­vey knows not to go look­ing for answers from his friend about this par­tic­u­lar song.

“I still find it mys­te­ri­ous,” he told the New York Post. “I don’t want to know the details, and I’d nev­er ask Nick. Some­times it’s bet­ter to think ‘What the hell’s that all about?’ It’s bet­ter that it’s unknow­able and spooky.”

As a bonus, here’s Snoop Dogg’s quizzi­cal cov­er ver­sion where he push­es and is pulled between his own style and Cave’s.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nick Cave’s Online Store: Pen­cils Adorned with Lyrics, Mugs, Polaroids & More

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Ani­mat­ed Sto­ries Writ­ten by Tom Waits, Nick Cave & Oth­er Artists, Read by Dan­ny Devi­to, Zach Gal­i­fi­anakis & More

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

William Shatner in Tears After Becoming the Oldest Person in Space: ‘I’m So Filled with Emotion … I Hope I Never Recover from This”

in Travel | October 14th, 2021

Yes­ter­day Star Trek’s William Shat­ner, now 90 years old, final­ly became a Rock­et Man, tak­ing a trip to space. And upon his return he said: “I hope I nev­er recov­er from this.” “I’m so filled with emo­tion about what just hap­pened. It’s extra­or­di­nary, extra­or­di­nary. It’s so much larg­er than me and life. It hasn’t got any­thing to do with the lit­tle green men and the blue orb. It has to do with the enor­mi­ty and the quick­ness and the sud­den­ness of life and death.” “To see the blue col­or whip by you, and now you’re star­ing into black­ness … every­body in the world needs to do this. Every­body in the world needs to see this.” What. A. Trip.

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

A Cult Clas­sic: William Shat­ner Sings Elton John’s “Rock­et Man” at 1978 Sci­Fi Awards Show

Watch City Out of Time, A Short Trib­ute to Venice, Nar­rat­ed by William Shat­ner in 1959

William Shat­ner Nar­rates Space Shut­tle Doc­u­men­tary

Archaeologists Discover 1300-Year-Old Pair of Skis, the Best-Preserved Ancient Skis in Existence

in History, Sports | October 14th, 2021

Surf­ing is gen­er­al­ly believed to have orig­i­nat­ed in Hawaii and will be for­ev­er asso­ci­at­ed with the Poly­ne­sian islands. Yet anthro­pol­o­gists have found evi­dence of some­thing like surf­ing wher­ev­er humans have encoun­tered a beach — on the coasts of West Africa, in the Caribbean, India, Syr­ia, and Japan. Surf­ing his­to­ri­an Matt War­shaw sums up the prob­lem with locat­ing the ori­gins of this human activ­i­ty: “Rid­ing waves sim­ply for plea­sure most like­ly devel­oped in one form or anoth­er among any coastal peo­ple liv­ing near warm ocean water.” Could one make a sim­i­lar point about ski­ing?

It seems that wher­ev­er humans have set­tled in places cov­ered with snow for much of the year, they’ve impro­vised all kinds of ways to trav­el across it. Who did so with the first skis, and when? Ski-like objects dat­ing from 6300–5000 BC have been found in north­ern Rus­sia. A New York Times arti­cle recent­ly described evi­dence of Stone Age skiers in Chi­na. “If ski­ing, as it seems pos­si­ble,” Nils Larsen writes at the Inter­na­tion­al Ski­ing His­to­ry Asso­ci­a­tion, “dates back 10,000 years or more, iden­ti­fy­ing a point of ori­gin (or ori­gins) will be dif­fi­cult at best.” Such dis­cus­sions tend to get “bogged down in pol­i­tics and nation­al pride,” Larsen writes. For exam­ple, “since the emer­gence of ski­ing in greater Europe in the late 1800s” — as a sport and pure­ly recre­ation­al activ­i­ty — “Nor­way has often been con­sid­ered the birth­place of ski­ing. Nor­way has pro­mot­ed this view and it is a point of nation­al pride.”

Despite its ear­li­est records of ski­ing dat­ing mil­len­nia lat­er than oth­er regions, Nor­way has some claim. The word ski is, after all, Nor­we­gian, derived from Old Norse skíð, mean­ing “cleft wood” or “stick.” And the best-pre­served ancient skis ever found have been dis­cov­ered in a Nor­we­gian ice field. “Even the bind­ings are most­ly intact,” notes Kot­tke. The first ski, believed to be 1300 years old, turned up in 2014, found by the Glac­i­er Arche­ol­o­gy Pro­gram (GAP) in the moun­tains of Inn­lan­det Coun­ty, Nor­way. The archae­ol­o­gists decid­ed to wait, let the ice melt, and see if the oth­er ski would appear. It did, just recent­ly, and in the video above, you can watch the researchers pull it from the ice.

Pho­to: Andreas Christof­fer Nils­son, secretsoftheice.com

“Mea­sur­ing about 74 inch­es long and 7 inch­es wide,” notes Livia Ger­shon at Smith­son­ian, “the sec­ond ski is slight­ly larg­er than its mate. Both fea­ture raised footholds. Leather straps and twist­ed birch bark bind­ings found with the skis would have been attached through holes in the footholds. The new ski shows signs of heavy wear and even­tu­al repairs.” The two skis are not iden­ti­cal, “but we should not expect them to be,” says archae­ol­o­gist Lars Pilø. “The skis are hand­made, not mass-pro­duced. They have a long and indi­vid­ual his­to­ry of wear and repair before an Iron Age ski­er used them togeth­er and they end­ed up in the ice.”

The new ski answered ques­tions the researchers had about the first dis­cov­ery, such as how the ancient skis might have main­tained for­ward motion uphill. “A fur­row on the under­side along the length of the ski, as you find on oth­er pre­his­toric skis (and on mod­ern cross-coun­try skis), would solve the ques­tion,” they write, and the sec­ond ski con­tained such a fur­row. While they may nev­er prove that Nor­way invent­ed ski­ing, as glac­i­er ice melts and new arti­facts appear each year, the team will learn much more about ancient Nor­we­gian skiers and their way of life. See their cur­rent dis­cov­er­ies and fol­low their future progress at the Secrets of the Ice web­site and on their YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Archae­ol­o­gists Find the Ear­li­est Work of “Abstract Art,” Dat­ing Back 73,000 Years

Watch an Archae­ol­o­gist Play the “Litho­phone,” a Pre­his­toric Instru­ment That Let Ancient Musi­cians Play Real Clas­sic Rock

Medieval Ten­nis: A Short His­to­ry and Demon­stra­tion

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

An Animated History of the Ottoman Empire (1299 — 1922)

in History | October 7th, 2021

His­to­ry is selec­tive. Or, rather, it’s select­ed by those in pow­er for their own uses. Nowhere do we see this more than in nation­al­ist re-imag­in­ings of an impe­r­i­al past, whether it be British, Roman, or, in the case of mod­ern Turkey, Ottoman. “Much has been writ­ten,” notes Time magazine’s Alan Mikhail, “about [Turk­ish pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s attempts to ‘res­ur­rect’ the Ottoman Empire or to style him­self a sul­tan.” Erdogan’s turn to hard­line Islam has been inspired by one par­tic­u­lar sul­tan, Selim I, under whose rule, “the Ottoman Empire grew from a strong region­al pow­er to a gar­gan­tu­an glob­al empire.” Mikhail com­pares Selim to anoth­er his­tor­i­cal fig­ure famed for sin­gle-mind­ed intol­er­ance: Andrew Jack­son, a hero of the for­mer Unit­ed States pres­i­dent.

Erdogan’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the Ottoman Empire some­times seems to have more in com­mon with ear­ly Euro­pean ideas about the empire than its ideas about itself. Euro­pean writ­ers in the 16th and 17th cen­tu­ry linked the Ottomans with Islamist repres­sion, an Ori­en­tal­ist take on Turk­ish pow­er as a dan­ger­ous yet seduc­tive new ene­my. “The glo­ri­ous Empire of the Turkes, the present ter­rour of the world,” wrote Richard Knolles in his 1603 Gen­er­all His­to­rie of the Turkes, “hath amongst oth­er things noth­ing in it more won­der­ful or strange, than the poore begin­ning of itselfe….” These same sen­ti­ments were echoed in 1631 by Eng­lish writer John Speed, who described the “sud­den advance­ment” of the Empire as “a ter­rour to the whole world.” Like­wise, Andrew Moore in 1659 wrote of “this bar­barous Nation, the worlds present ter­rour,” a nation with a “small & obscure begin­ning.”

All empires have small begin­nings. In the case of the Ottomans, the sto­ry begins with Osman I, a trib­al leader of obscure ori­gins who found­ed the Empire in Ana­to­lia some 300 years before the authors above put pen to paper. (The word “Ottoman” derives from his name.) A series of con­quests fol­lowed, the most dra­mat­ic occur­ring in 1453 when Mehmed the Con­quer­er entered Con­stan­tino­ple, effec­tive­ly end­ing the Byzan­tine Empire, an event you can see high­light­ed in the video above, an “entire his­to­ry of the Ottoman Empire” — all 600 years of it — from 1299 to 1922. Such an extend­ed peri­od of con­quest and influ­ence led, of course, to a vari­ety of views about the nature of the Ottomans, not least among the Ottomans them­selves, who saw them­selves not as Mus­lim invaders of Europe but as the right­ful heirs of Rome. Indeed, edu­cat­ed Ottomans referred to them­selves not as “Turks,” a word for the peas­antry, but as Rūmī, “Roman.”

In many ways, the Ottomans — bloody con­quests, slav­ery, geno­cides and all — took after the Romans. “Obvi­ous­ly they saw val­ue in spread­ing reli­gion,” says David Lesch, pro­fes­sor of Mid­dle East his­to­ry at Trin­i­ty Uni­ver­si­ty in San Anto­nio. But they did not share the nar­ra­tive of a “clash of civ­i­liza­tions” favored by Euro­pean writ­ers of the time, and cer­tain revi­sion­ists today. “The Ottoman Empire saw itself as very much, even more so a Euro­pean empire than a Mid­dle East­ern empire. And they took a very tol­er­ant view toward non-Mus­lims since for most of the Ottoman Empire — espe­cial­ly when it was at its largest — most of its pop­u­la­tion was non-Mus­lim. It was in fact Chris­t­ian.” The obser­va­tion brings to mind the cen­tral claim of Turk­ish schol­ar Namık Kemal’s influ­en­tial essay “Europe Knows Noth­ing about the Ori­ent,” in which he writes that Euro­pean schol­ars have failed to under­stand the “true char­ac­ter such as ours, which is so close to them that … it might as well be touch­ing their eye­lash­es.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Down­load Thou­sands of Ottoman-Era Pho­tographs That Have Been Dig­i­tized and Put Online

The Rise and Fall of West­ern Empires Visu­al­ized Through the Art­ful Metaphor of Cell Divi­sion

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Ani­mat­ed Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

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