How Eric Clapton Created the Classic Song “Layla”

in Music | September 13th, 2019

The sto­ry of Eric Clap­ton and “Lay­la” has always both­ered me because to under­stand it is to under­stand how fal­li­ble and crazed any of us can be when it comes to love. We under­stand that our rock gods are human, but there’s some­thing about Clap­ton falling in love with the wife (Pat­tie Boyd) of one of his best mates (George Har­ri­son, a freakin’ Bea­t­le, man!) and then writ­ing a whole album about it, that is just unset­tling. Is this some­thing tawdry writ epic? Or is this some­thing epic that has the waft­ing aro­ma of taw­dri­ness?

Poly­phon­ic takes on the behind the scenes sto­ry of this rock mas­ter­piece and rewinds sev­er­al cen­turies to the source of Layla’s name: “Lay­la and Maj­nun,” a roman­tic poem from 12th cen­tu­ry Per­sian poet Niẓā­mi Gan­javi based on an actu­al woman from the 6th Cen­tu­ry who drove her poet para­mour mad. Lord Byron called the trag­ic poem “The Romeo and Juli­et of the East,” as unre­quit­ed love leaves both Maj­nun and Lay­la dead after the latter’s father for­bids her to be with the poet.

Eric Clap­ton heard of the poem from his Sufi friend Abdalqadir as-Sufi (for­mer­ly Ian Dal­las), and so when he wrote a slow bal­lad about his unre­quit­ed love for Pat­ti, “Lay­la” made per­fect sense as a name.

The song might have stayed a ballad–think of Clapton’s slowed down ver­sion from his MTV “Unplugged” special–if it wasn’t for Duane All­man of the All­man Broth­ers. The two had yet to meet, but were aware of each oth­er. All­man had grabbed Clapton’s atten­tion with his fiery solo work at the end of Wil­son Pickett’s cov­er of “Hey Jude”:

When Clap­ton and All­man did meet, the two set to jam­ming and All­man made the his­to­ry-chang­ing deci­sion to speed up Clapton’s bal­lad and use a riff tak­en from Albert King. “Lay­la” was born. Allman’s bot­tle­neck slide style met Clapton’s string bend­ing, and the track is a con­ver­sa­tion between the two, where no words are need­ed.

“It’s in the tip of their fin­gers,” says engi­neer Tom Dowd, lis­ten­ing to the iso­lat­ed tracks in the video below. “It’s not in a knob, it’s not in how loud they play, it’s touch.”

Over this, Clap­ton deliv­ers his des­per­ate lyrics, sung by a man at his wits end, much like Maj­nun of the poem.

And then, that coda, which takes up half the song. Drum­mer Jim Gor­don was work­ing on the piano piece for a solo album in secret. When Clap­ton dis­cov­ered Gor­don was record­ing on the sly, he wasn’t angry. Instead he insist­ed it be added to the end of the rock­ing first half. The song is a per­fect bal­ance between fran­tic rock and roman­tic bal­lad.

But in the real world, “Lay­la” didn’t do the job. Clap­ton played the album for Pat­tie Boyd three weeks lat­er, and though she under­stood its beau­ty, Boyd was embar­rassed by its mes­sage.

“I couldn’t believe I was the inspi­ra­tion for putting this togeth­er,” she said in an inter­view. “I didn’t want this to hap­pen.” She was also mor­ti­fied think­ing that every­body would know exact­ly who “Lay­la” was about.

“It didn’t work,” Clap­ton recalled. “It was all for noth­ing.”

The song was a flop in the charts, espe­cial­ly as it was cut in half for the sin­gle. It would find its audi­ence three years lat­er when the full ver­sion appeared on both a Clap­ton anthol­o­gy and a best of col­lec­tion of Duane Allman’s work. Final­ly it rock­et­ed up the charts, and it’s kind of stayed in clas­sic rock playlists ever since.

And as for Boyd, she actu­al­ly did leave George Har­ri­son in 1974 to mar­ry Clap­ton in 1979, a mar­riage that last­ed 10 years. Not all mar­riages last. The orig­i­nal flame dies out. It’s just that, in “Lay­la“ ‘s case, the flame is there every time the nee­dle drops into the groove.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

23-Year-Old Eric Clap­ton Demon­strates the Ele­ments of His Gui­tar Sound (1968)

Hear Eric Clapton’s Iso­lat­ed Gui­tar Track From the Bea­t­les’ ‘While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps’ (1968)

Eric Clap­ton Tries Out Gui­tars at Home and Talks About the Bea­t­les, Cream, and His Musi­cal Roots

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.

American Cities Then & Now: See How New York, Los Angeles & Detroit Look Today, Compared to the 1930s and 1940s

in Architecture, History | September 11th, 2019

Palimpsest has become clichéd as a descrip­tor of cities, but only due to its truth. Repeat­ed­ly eras­ing and rewrit­ing parts of cities over years, decades, and cen­turies has left us with built envi­ron­ments that reflect every peri­od of urban his­to­ry at once. Or at least in an ide­al world they do: we’ve all felt the dull­ness of new cities built whole, or of old cities that have bare­ly changed in liv­ing mem­o­ry, dull­ness that under­scores the val­ue of places in which a vari­ety of forms, styles, and eras all coex­ist. Take New York, which even in the 1930s pre­sent­ed the gen­teel­ly his­tor­i­cal along­side the thor­ough­ly mod­ern. The New York­er video above places dri­ving footage from that era along­side the same places — the Brook­lyn Bridge, Cen­tral Park, Harlem, the West Side High­way— shot in 2017, high­light­ing what has changed, and even more so what has­n’t.

Los Ange­les has under­gone a more dra­mat­ic trans­for­ma­tion, as Kevin McAlester’s side-by-side video of Bunker Hill in the 1940s and 2016 reveals. “An area of rough­ly five square blocks in down­town Los Ange­les,” says The New York­er, Bunker Hill was from 1959 “the sub­ject of a mas­sive urban-renew­al project, in which ‘improve­ment’ was gen­er­al­ly defined by the peo­ple who stood to prof­it from it, as well as their back­ers at City Hall, at the expense of any­one stand­ing in their way.”

The 53-year process turned a neigh­bor­hood of “some of the city’s most ele­gant man­sions and hotels,” lat­er sub­di­vid­ed and “pop­u­lat­ed by a mix of pen­sion­ers, immi­grants, work­ers, and peo­ple look­ing to get lost,” into an attempt­ed acrop­o­lis of works by archi­tec­tur­al super­stars, includ­ing Frank Gehry’s Dis­ney Con­cert Hall, recent Pritzk­er-win­ner Ara­ta Isoza­k­i’s Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art, and John Port­man’s (movie-beloved) Bonaven­ture Hotel.

Above the clas­sic Amer­i­can build­ings of Detroit stands anoth­er of Port­man’s sig­na­ture glass-and-steel cylin­ders: the Renais­sance Cen­ter, com­mis­sioned in the 1970s by Hen­ry Ford II as the cen­ter­piece of the city’s hoped-for revival. Three decades ear­li­er, says The New York­er, “Detroit was the fourth-largest city in Amer­i­ca, draw­ing in work­ers with oppor­tu­ni­ties for sta­ble employ­ment on the assem­bly lines at the Ford, Gen­er­al Motors, and Chrysler plants.” But soon “fac­to­ries closed, and jobs van­ished from the city that had been the cen­ter of the indus­try.” The Motor City’s down­ward slide con­tin­ued until its 2013 bank­rupt­cy, but some auto man­u­fac­tur­ing remains, as shown in this split-screen video of Detroit over the past cen­tu­ry along­side Detroit in 2018. It even includes footage of the QLine, the street­car that opened in the pre­vi­ous year amid the lat­est wave of inter­est in restor­ing Detroit to its for­mer glo­ry. As in any city, the most sol­id future for Detroit must be built, in part, with the mate­ri­als of its past.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lon­don Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Lay­ered Onto Footage from 2013

Paris, New York & Havana Come to Life in Col­orized Films Shot Between 1890 and 1931

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

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

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

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.

Monty Python’s Eric Idle Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

in Film, Television | September 9th, 2019

When I first saw Mon­ty Python’s Fly­ing Cir­cus, late at night on PBS and in degrad­ed VHS videos bor­rowed from friends, I assumed the show’s con­cepts must have come out of bonkers improv ses­sions. But the troupe’s many state­ments since the show’s end, in the form of books, doc­u­men­taries, inter­views, etc., have told us in no uncer­tain terms that Mon­ty Python’s cre­ators always put writ­ing first. “I’m not an actor at all,” says Eric Idle in the GQ video above. “I’m real­ly a writer who just acts occa­sion­al­ly.”

Like­wise, in the PBS series Mon­ty Python’s Per­son­al Best, Idle dis­cuss­es the joy of writ­ing for the show—and com­pares cre­at­ing Mon­ty Python to fish­ing, of all things: “You go to the river­bank every day, you don’t know what you’re going to catch.” This idyl­lic scene may be the last thing you’d asso­ciate with the Pythons, though you may recall their take on fish­ing in the sec­ond sea­son sketch “Fish License,” in which John Cleese’s char­ac­ter, Eric, tries to buy a license for his pet hal­ibut, Eric.

Idle’s protes­ta­tions notwith­stand­ing, none of the show’s writ­ing would have worked as well as it did onscreen with­out the con­sid­er­able act­ing tal­ents of all five per­form­ers. (Idle mod­est­ly ascribes his own abil­i­ty to being “lift­ed up” by the oth­ers.) Above, he talks about the most icon­ic char­ac­ters he embod­ied on the show, begin­ning with the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?” guy: a char­ac­ter, we learn, based on Vivian Stan­shall of the Bon­zo Dog Doo-Dah Band crossed with a reg­u­lar from Idle’s local pub named Mon­ty, from whom the troupe took their first name.

We also learn that the char­ac­ter was so pop­u­lar in the States that “Elvis called every­body ‘squire’ because of that f*cking sketch!” Pres­ley’s’ pen­chant for doing Mon­ty Python mate­r­i­al while in bed with his girl­friend (“if only there was footage”) is but one of the many fas­ci­nat­ing anec­dotes Idle casu­al­ly toss­es off in his com­men­tary on char­ac­ters like the Aus­tralian Bruces, who went on to sing “The Philosopher’s Song”; Mr. Smoke­toomuch, who deliv­ers a ten-minute mono­logue writ­ten by John Cleese and Gra­ham Chap­man; and Idle’s char­ac­ters in the non-Python moc­u­men­tary All You Need Is Cash, which he cre­at­ed and co-wrote, about a par­o­dy Bea­t­les band called The Rut­les.

Idle is stead­fast in his descrip­tion of him­self as a com­pe­tent “car­i­ca­tur­ist,” and not a “com­ic actor.” But his song and dance rou­tines, sly sub­tle wit and broad ges­tures, and for­ev­er fun­ny turn as cow­ard­ly Sir Robin in Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail should leave his fans with lit­tle doubt about his skill in front of the cam­era.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mon­ty Python’s Best Phi­los­o­phy Sketch­es: “The Philoso­phers’ Foot­ball Match,” “Philosopher’s Drink­ing Song” & More

Ter­ry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Mon­ty Python Ani­ma­tions: A 1974 How-To Guide

The Mon­ty Python Phi­los­o­phy Foot­ball Match: The Ancient Greeks Ver­sus the Ger­mans

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

Hear the Very Moment When World War I Came to an End

in History | September 5th, 2019

Robert Graves’ poem “Armistice Day, 1918” begins with a riot of sound in a town in North East Eng­land. “What’s all this hub­bub and yelling, / Com­mo­tion and scam­per of feet,” he writes, “With ear-split­ting clat­ter of ket­tles and cans, / Wild laugh­ter down Mafek­ing Street?” The poem grows somber, then embit­tered, end­ing in a chill­ing silence for the “boys who were killed in the trench­es, / Who fought with no rage and no rant.” It’s a famil­iar con­trast from much World War I poetry—the hoot­ing civil­ian crowds and the grim, silent sol­diers count­ing their loss­es.

One project, cre­at­ed as part of the 100th anniver­sary of the Armistice last year, gave us a dif­fer­ent take on this WWI theme of sound and silence —using inno­v­a­tive tech­niques from 1918 that turned the final shelling of the war into visu­al data, then trans­lat­ing that data back into sound a cen­tu­ry lat­er. Rather than cel­e­bra­tion, the “ear-split­ting clat­ter” is the sound of mass death, and the silence, though sure­ly “uneasy,” as Matt Novak writes, must also have been rev­e­la­to­ry.

In the “graph­ic record” of the Armistice, just below, we can “see” the deaf­en­ing sounds of war and the first three silent sec­onds of its end, at 11 A.M. Novem­ber 11th, 1918. The film strip records six sec­onds of vibra­tion from six dif­fer­ent sources, as the graph­ic, from the Army Corps of Engi­neers, informs us. “The bro­ken char­ac­ter of the records on the left indi­cates great artillery activ­i­ty; the lack of irreg­u­lar­i­ties on the right indi­cates almost com­plete ces­sa­tion of fir­ing.”

You might notice a cou­ple lit­tle breaks in one line on the right—likely the result of an exu­ber­ant “dough­boy fir­ing his pis­tol twice close to one of the record­ing micro­phones on the front in cel­e­bra­tion of the dawn of peace.” But this was 1918—field record­ing tech­nol­o­gy bare­ly exist­ed, though a few bat­tle­field attempts were made (at least one sur­vives). The “micro­phones” in ques­tion were actu­al­ly “bar­rels of oil dug into the ground,” notes Jason Daley at Smith­son­ian.

This tech­nique, called “sound rang­ing,” worked by reg­is­ter­ing vibra­tion, sim­i­lar to a seis­mo­graph’s oper­a­tion, and helped spe­cial units locate ene­my fire, using “pho­to­graph­ic film to visu­al­ly record noise inten­si­ty.” The film above was part of the cen­te­nary exhi­bi­tion at London’s Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um, which also com­mis­sioned sound design­ers Coda to Coda to recon­struct the dra­mat­ic moment with an audio inter­pre­ta­tion. At the top of the post, hear what the sec­onds before and after the Armistice like­ly sound­ed like, as record­ed on the Amer­i­can front at the Riv­er Moselle.

Lis­ten­ing to the sec­onds of the war’s end from the bat­tle­field perspective—rather than streets filled with cheer­ing crowds—is rather chill­ing, “a sud­den reprieve from the stac­ca­to of weapons blast­ing,” Novak writes. The “graph­ic record” of the Armistice also shows us “just how hor­rif­i­cal­ly pre­cise and cru­el war can be.” The slaugh­ter could have been stopped in an instant, by the mutu­al decree of world lead­ers, at maybe any time dur­ing those har­row­ing four years.

On Novem­ber 11 at 11 A.M., “the guns fell silent,” writes the Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um, and “a new world began.” But as artists like Graves remind us, for the return­ing maimed and trau­ma­tized sol­diers and the hun­dreds of thou­sands of bereaved fam­i­lies, the war didn’t end when the noise final­ly stopped.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Jackson’s New Film on World War I Fea­tures Incred­i­ble Dig­i­tal­ly-Restored Footage From the Front Lines: Get a Glimpse

Hear the Sounds of World War I: A Gas Attack Record­ed on the Front Line, and the Moment the Armistice End­ed the War

Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

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

Nigerian Teenagers Are Making Slick Sci Fi Films With Their Smartphones

in Creativity, Film, iPhone, Technology | August 26th, 2019

Some­one should real­ly snap up the rights for a movie about The Crit­ics, a col­lec­tive of self-taught teenage film­mak­ers from north­west­ern Nige­ria.

The boys’ ded­i­ca­tion, ambi­tion, and no-bud­get inven­tive­ness calls to mind oth­er film­mak­ing fanat­ics, from the sequestered, home­schooled broth­ers of The Wolf­pack to the fic­tion­al Swed­ing spe­cial­ists of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Be Kind, Rewind.

While smart­phones and free edit­ing apps have def­i­nite­ly made it eas­i­er for aspir­ing film­mak­ers to bring their fan­tasies to fruition, it’s worth not­ing that The Crit­ics saved for a month to buy the green fab­ric for their chro­ma key effects.

Their pro­duc­tions are also plagued with the inter­net and pow­er out­ages that are a fre­quent occur­rence in their home base of Kaduna, slow­ing every­thing from the ren­der­ing process to the Youtube visu­al effects tuto­ri­als that have advanced their craft.

To date they’ve filmed 20 shorts on a smart phone with a smashed screen, mount­ed to a bro­ken micro­phone stand that’s found new life as a home­made tri­pod.

Their sim­ple set up will be com­ing in for an upgrade, how­ev­er, now that Nol­ly­wood direc­tor Kemi Adeti­ba has brought their efforts to the atten­tion of a much wider audi­ence, who donat­ed $5,800 in a fundrais­ing cam­paign.

It’s easy to imag­ine the young male demo­graph­ic flock­ing to a fea­ture-length, big-bud­get expan­sion of Z: The Begin­ning. It’s pos­si­ble even the art house crowd could be lured to a sum­mer block­buster whose set­ting is Nige­ria, thir­ty years into the future, a nov­el­ty for those of us unversed in Nol­ly­wood’s prodi­gious out­put.

The post-apoc­a­lyp­tic short, above, took the crew 7 months to film and edit. The stars also inhab­it­ed a num­ber of off­screen roles: stunt coor­di­na­tor, gaffer, prop mas­ter, com­pos­er, con­ti­nu­ity…

What’s next? Ear­li­er this month, Africa News revealed that the boys are busy with a new film whose plot they aren’t at lib­er­ty to reveal. We’re guess­ing a sequel, to go by a not so sub­tle hint fol­low­ing Z’s final cred­its and a mov­ing ded­i­ca­tion to “the ones we’ve lost.”

“Hor­ror, com­e­dy, sci-fi, action, we do all,” The Crit­ics’ pro­claim on their Youtube chan­nel, care­ful­ly cat­e­go­riz­ing their work as “films not skits.” (Their films’ length has thus far been dic­tat­ed by the unpre­dictabil­i­ty of their wifi sit­u­a­tion—Chase, below, is five min­utes long and took two days to ren­der.

“One of the tar­gets we aim for in the years to come is to make the biggest film in Nige­ria and prob­a­bly beyond,” God­win Josi­ah, Z’s 19-year-old writer-direc­tor told Chan­nels Tele­vi­sion, Lagos’ 24-hour news chan­nel:

We want to do some­thing crazy, we want to do some­thing great, some­thing that has not been done before, and from what has been going on now, we believe quite well that it is going to hap­pen soon enough.

Watch The Crit­ics’ films and mak­ing-ofs on their Youtube chan­nel.

Sup­port their work with a pledge to their recent­ly launched Patre­on.

via Kot­tke/Africa News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Strange and Won­der­ful Movie Posters from Ghana: The Matrix, Alien & More

High School Kids Stage Alien: The Play and You Can Now Watch It Online

Direc­tor Robert Rodriguez Teach­es The Basics of Film­mak­ing in Under 10 Min­utes

Hear Kevin Smith’s Three Tips For Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers (NSFW)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Where Zombies Come From: A Video Essay on the Origin of the Horrifying, Satirical Monsters

in Film | August 22nd, 2019

Will zom­bies ever die? To zom­bie enthu­si­asts, of course, that ques­tion makes no sense: zom­bies are already dead, drained of life and rean­i­mat­ed by some mag­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal, or even tech­no­log­i­cal force. Most of us have nev­er known a world with­out zom­bies, in the sense of zom­bies as a pres­ence in film, tele­vi­sion, lit­er­a­ture, and video games. In the video essay “Where Zom­bies Come From,” video essay­ist Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, goes back to the dawn of these dead fig­ures to pin­point the ori­gin of this robust “mod­ern myth.”

The first men­tion of zom­bies appears in 1929’s The Mag­ic Island, a book on Haiti by “jour­nal­ist, occultist, and gen­er­al­ly eccen­tric minor celebri­ty” William Seabrook. “The zom­bie, they say, is a soul­less human corpse, still dead, but tak­en from the grave and endowed by sor­cery with a mechan­i­cal sem­blance of life — it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.”

That 90-year-old descrip­tion may sound more or less like the zom­bies that con­tin­ue to scare and amuse us today, but the mod­ern image of the zom­bie did­n’t emerge ful­ly formed; 1932’s Bela Lugosi-star­ring White Zom­bie, the very first zom­bie film, may not strike us today as ful­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the genre it found­ed.

But “in 1968 every­thing changed.” That year, the young film­mak­er George A. Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead (watch it online) laid down the rules for zom­bies: they “devour liv­ing human beings. They hob­ble for­ward awk­ward­ly but relent­less­ly. They’re dumb, able to use objects as blunt-force instru­ments but noth­ing else. They can only be killed by being shot in the head or burned, and if one bites or scratch­es you, you’ll die not long after, then trans­form into one and pur­sue whomev­er is near­by, fam­i­ly or not.” To Puschak’s mind, the film holds up not just as a zom­bie movie, but as a movie: “In its neo­re­al­ist, black-and-white style, it is a smart, tight­ly craft­ed sto­ry made on a shoe­string bud­get with a third act that is absolute­ly bru­tal and pun­ish­ing even now, 50 years lat­er.”

Night of the Liv­ing Dead did­n’t call its zom­bies zom­bies, but its sequel, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, put the label of zom­bie on not just them but us: “The film, which takes place almost entire­ly in a mall, uses zom­bies to cri­tique con­sumerism: as the zom­bies lum­ber through this famil­iar place, we see our own behav­ior as a grotesque reflec­tion. A zom­bie’s thought­less­ness, Romero under­stood, is the per­fect mir­ror for our own.” Dawn of the Dead bol­stered the poten­tial of zom­bies not just as as “cre­ative, pri­mal mon­sters,” but as satir­i­cal devices, and the finest zom­bie movies know how to use them as both at once. (So far I’ve seen that bal­ance no more impres­sive­ly struck than in a Kore­an zom­bie movie, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan.)

Over the past half-cen­tu­ry, post-Night of the Liv­ing Dead zom­bie sto­ries have made all man­ner of tweaks on and vari­a­tions to the stan­dard zom­bie for­mu­la. Dan­ny Boyle’s 28 Days Lat­er, for exam­ple, pop­u­lar­ized the fast-mov­ing zom­bie, and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead pio­neered the full-on zom­bie com­e­dy. Most recent­ly, no less astute an observ­er of Amer­i­can cul­ture and re-ani­ma­tor of seem­ing­ly dead cin­e­mat­ic tropes than Jim Jar­musch has offered us his own entry into the zom­bie canon, The Dead Don’t Die. Jar­muschi­an zom­bies sham­ble com­pul­sive­ly toward that which they desired in life: cof­fee, wi-fi, chardon­nay, Xanax. As long as we can still see these our­selves in these both fun­ny and ter­ri­fy­ing crea­tures, the zom­bie apoc­a­lypse will always seem dead ahead.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Night of the Liv­ing Dead, the Sem­i­nal Zom­bie Movie, Free Online

How to Sur­vive the Com­ing Zom­bie Apoc­a­lypse: An Online Course by Michi­gan State

Decay: Zom­bies Invade the Large Hadron Col­lid­er in Movie Made by Ph.D. Stu­dents

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

What Makes a Good Hor­ror Movie? The Answer Revealed with a Jour­ney Through Clas­sic Hor­ror Films Clips

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.

Philip K. Dick Tarot Cards: A Tarot Deck Modeled After the Visionary Sci-Fi Writer’s Inner World

in Literature, Sci Fi | August 14th, 2019

What does Philip K. Dick have in com­mon with Jorge Luis Borges, Her­mann Hesse, and John Cage? Fans of all three twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry vision­ar­ies will have much to say on the mat­ter of what deep res­o­nances exist between their bod­ies of work and the world­views that pro­duced them. But they can’t over­look the fact that Dick, Borges, Hesse, and Cage all, at one time or anoth­er, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly con­sult­ed the ancient Chi­nese div­ina­tion text known as the I Ching. Also known as The Book of Changes, it became a must-have coun­ter­cul­tur­al vol­ume in the 1960s, and the words of guid­ance it pro­vid­ed, in all their open­ness to inter­pre­ta­tion, sure­ly influ­enced no small num­ber of deci­sions made in that era.

What the I Ching had to say cer­tain­ly influ­enced the deci­sions of Philip K. Dick, in life as well as in writ­ing. Not only did he use the book to write The Man in the High Cas­tle, his 1962 nov­el por­tray­ing a world in which the Axis pow­ers won World War II, he also includ­ed it as a plot ele­ment in the sto­ry itself.

And speak­ing of alter­nate his­to­ries, we might ask: could Dick have writ­ten The Man in the High Cas­tle with­out the I Ching? Or could he have writ­ten it using anoth­er div­ina­tion tool, per­haps one from the West rather than the East? What would the nov­el have looked like if writ­ten while har­ness­ing the per­cep­tive pow­er of tarot, the 15th-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean card game whose decks also have a long his­to­ry as win­dows onto human des­tiny?

Recent­ly the world of tarot, the world of the I Ching, and the world of Philip K. Dick col­lid­ed, result­ing in The Fool’s Jour­ney of Philip K. Dick, a tarot deck pub­lished by Wide Books. “PKD schol­ar Ted Hand and tarot artist Christo­pher Wilkey have brought togeth­er a new vision of tarot and the great works of Philip K. Dick,” says Wide Books’ site. “Ide­al for advanced stu­dents of tarot as well as novices to the I Ching,” the deck “takes the seek­er through an ini­ti­a­tion into the life and writ­ings of one of the great­est writ­ers of recent times.” In addi­tion to its 80 cards, each draw­ing from some ele­ment of Dick­’s body of work, the deck includes “four rule cards for two I Ching inspired card games and an eight-sided fold­ing book­let about tarot as Gnos­tic Alle­go­ry, with begin­ning exer­cis­es con­trast­ing tarot to the I Ching.”

Two of the games pay trib­ute to par­tic­u­lar Dick nov­els: A Maze of Death and its “domi­no-type game” that “famil­iar­izes play­ers with the tri­grams of which I Ching hexa­grams are com­posed,” and Ubik, which has “play­ers either hop­ing to avoid accu­mu­lat­ing entropy or try­ing to cap­ture all the ener­gy you can from the deck and oth­er play­ers to be the last stand­ing at the end of the game.” If that sounds like a good time to you, you’ll have to reg­is­ter your inter­est in order­ing a copy of The Fool’s Jour­ney of Philip K. Dick on Wide Books’ con­tact form, since the ini­tial run has sold out. That won’t come as a sur­prise to Dick­’s fans, who know the addic­tive pow­er of one glimpse into his inner world, with its rich mix­ture of the super­nat­ur­al, the sci­en­tif­ic, the para­nor­mal, and the para­noid. But what kind of books will they use his tarot deck to write?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the Sola-Bus­ca Tarot Deck, the Ear­li­est Com­plete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Jour­ney into the Occult

The Tarot Card Deck Designed by Sal­vador Dalí

The Thoth Tarot Deck Designed by Famed Occultist Aleis­ter Crow­ley

Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Avail­able as 78-Card Deck

Robert Crumb Illus­trates Philip K. Dick’s Infa­mous, Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Meet­ing with God (1974)

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.

Leonard Cohen’s Cocktail Recipe: Learn How to Make “The Red Needle”

in Food & Drink | August 7th, 2019

Image by Jarkko Arjat­sa­lo, The Leonard Cohen Files

Back in 1975, poet and singer-song­writer Leonard Cohen cre­at­ed a cock­tail that he called The Red Nee­dle. Accord­ing to the web­site, “The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy,” here’s how to make it:

If you’d like to enter­tain your friends with a few Red Nee­dles, and you feel you must have a recipe, here’s some­thing too smooth to go by:

Into one very tall glass about half full of crushed ice pour and drop:

2 oz tequi­la (that’s 2½ Eng­lish mea­sures or about 60ml)
1 slice lemon
enough cran­ber­ry juice to top up the glass

Repeat for each friend.

Serve with Mon­tre­al smoked meat sand­wich­es accom­pa­nied by Leonard Cohen’s Var­i­ous Posi­tions.

If you don’t want to make it at home, you can always vis­it NYC and head to the Jew­ish Muse­um, where, notes the NYTimes, “the drink is being served on Thurs­days in August in the muse­um lob­by.”

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:

F. Scott Fitzger­ald Con­ju­gates “to Cock­tail,” the Ulti­mate Jazz-Age Verb (1928)

Win­ston Churchill Gets a Doctor’s Note to Drink “Unlim­it­ed” Alco­hol in Pro­hi­bi­tion Amer­i­ca (1932)

Drink­ing with William Faulkn­er: The Writer Had a Taste for The Mint Julep & Hot Tod­dy

What the First Movies Really Looked Like: Discover the IMAX Films of the 1890s

in Film, History | August 6th, 2019

Cin­e­mat­ic leg­end has it that, back in the ear­ly days of motion pic­tures, audi­ences would see a train com­ing toward them on the screen and dive out of the way in a pan­ic. “There turns out to be very lit­tle con­fir­ma­tion of that in the actu­al news­pa­per reports of the time,” says crit­ic and Muse­um of Mod­ern Art film cura­tor Dave Kehr in the video above, “but you can still sense the excite­ment in see­ing these gigan­tic, incred­i­bly sharp, life­like images being pro­ject­ed.” But aren’t they only sharp and life­like by the stan­dards of the late-19th cen­tu­ry dawn of cin­e­ma, an era we film­go­ers of the 21st cen­tu­ry, now used to 4K dig­i­tal pro­jec­tion, imag­ine as one of unre­lieved blur­ri­ness, grain­i­ness, and herky-jerk­i­ness?

By no means. The footage show­cased in this video, a MoMA pro­duc­tion on “the IMAX of the 1890s,” was shot on 68-mil­lime­ter film, a greater size and thus a high­er def­i­n­i­tion than the 35-mil­lime­ter prints most of us have watched in the­aters for most of our lives.

Only the most ambi­tious film­mak­ers, like Paul Thomas Ander­son mak­ing The Mas­ter, have used such large-for­mat films in recent years, but 120 years ago an out­fit like the Bio­graph Com­pa­ny could, in Kehr’s words, “send cam­era crews around the world, as the Lumière Com­pa­ny had,” and what those crews cap­tured would end up in movie the­aters: “Sud­den­ly the world was com­ing to you in ways that peo­ple just could not have imag­ined. That you could go to Europe, that you could meet the crowned heads, that you could go to see ele­phants in India…”

Thanks to the efforts of film archivists and preser­va­tion­ists, a few of whom appear in this video to show and explain just what degra­da­tion befalls these cin­e­mat­ic time cap­sules with­out the kind of work they do, much of this footage still looks and feels remark­ably life­like. “It’s worth return­ing to these images to remind us that movies used to be ana­log,” Kehr says. “They saw things in front of the cam­era in a one-on-one rela­tion­ship. This was the world. It was an image you could trust. It was an image of phys­i­cal sub­stance, of real­i­ty. Nowa­days we tend not to trust images, because we know how eas­i­ly manip­u­lat­ed they are.” We’ve gained an unfath­omable amount of imagery, in terms of both quan­ti­ty and qual­i­ty, in our dig­i­tal age. But as the sheer “onto­log­i­cal impact” of these old 68-mil­lime­ter clips reminds us, even when felt in stream­ing-video repro­duc­tion, our images have lost some­thing as well.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tents:

The Art of Cre­at­ing Spe­cial Effects in Silent Movies: Inge­nu­ity Before the Age of CGI

Enjoy the Great­est Silent Films Ever Made in Our Col­lec­tion of 101 Free Silent Films Online

Hol­ly­wood, Epic Doc­u­men­tary Chron­i­cles the Ear­ly His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma

100 Years of Cin­e­ma: New Doc­u­men­tary Series Explores the His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma by Ana­lyz­ing One Film Per Year, Start­ing in 1915

The His­to­ry of the Movie Cam­era in Four Min­utes: From the Lumiere Broth­ers to Google Glass

How Cin­e­mas Taught Ear­ly Movie-Goers the Rules & Eti­quette for Watch­ing Films (1912): No Whistling, Stand­ing or Wear­ing Big Hats

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

An Artist Crochets a Life-Size, Anatomically-Correct Skeleton, Complete with Organs

in Art, Biology, Creativity, Science | August 5th, 2019

How to make a life-sized fac­sim­i­le of a human skele­ton:

1. Down­load files pub­lished under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, and arrange to have them 3‑D print­ed.

or

2. Do as artist Shanell Papp did, above, and cro­chet one.

The lat­ter will take con­sid­er­ably more time and atten­tion on your part. Papp gave up all extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties for four months to hook the woolen skele­ton around her work and school sched­ule. Equip­ping it with inter­nal organs ate up anoth­er four.

To ensure accu­ra­cy, Papp armed her­self with anatom­i­cal text­books and an actu­al human skele­ton on loan from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leth­bridge, where she was an under­grad. The brain has gray and white mat­ter, there’s mar­row in the bones, the stom­ach con­tains half-digest­ed wool food, and the intestines can be unspooled to a real­is­tic length.

The gru­el­ing 2006 project did not exhaust her fas­ci­na­tion for the intri­ca­cies of human anato­my. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Saskatchewan grant­ed her open access to draw in the gross anato­my lab while she pur­sued her MFA.

As she told MICE mag­a­zine:

I want­ed this work to illus­trate all of the organs and bones every­one shares and to not high­light dif­fer­ences. Much of anatom­i­cal his­to­ry is about defin­ing dif­fer­ence, by com­par­a­tive analy­sis. This can set up strange tax­onomies and hier­ar­chies. I was­n’t inter­est­ed in par­tic­i­pat­ing in that; I want­ed to expose the frag­ile, com­mon, and unseen things in all of us.  

The fin­ished piece, which is dis­played supine on a gur­ney she nabbed for free dur­ing a mor­tu­ary ren­o­va­tion, incor­po­rates many of Papp’s oth­er abid­ing inter­ests: hor­ror, med­ical his­to­ry, Franken­stein, crime inves­ti­ga­tion, and mor­tu­ary prac­tices.

Papp, who taught her­self how to cro­chet from books as a child, using what­ev­er yarn found its way to her grandma’s junk shop, appre­ci­ates how her cho­sen medi­um adds a lay­er of homey soft­ness and famil­iar­i­ty to the macabre.

It’s also not lost on her that fiber arts, often dis­missed as too “crafty” by the estab­lish­ment, were an impor­tant com­po­nent of 70s-era fem­i­nist art, though in her view, her work is more of a state­ment on the his­to­ry of tex­tile man­u­fac­tur­ing, which is to say the his­to­ry of labor and class strug­gle.

See more of Shanell Papp’s work here.

All images in this post by Shanell Papp.

via design­boom/Mymod­ern­met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold an Anatom­i­cal­ly Cor­rect Repli­ca of the Human Brain, Knit­ted by a Psy­chi­a­trist

The BBC Cre­ates Step-by-Step Instruc­tions for Knit­ting the Icon­ic Dr. Who Scarf: A Doc­u­ment from the Ear­ly 1980s

The Beau­ti­ful Math of Coral & Cro­chet

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.