A Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in 100 Celebrity Voices

in Comedy, K-12, Poetry | September 22nd, 2017

For every august per­son­age who’s tak­en a crack Edgar Allan Poe’s ever­green poem, “The Raven,” there are thou­sands more who haven’t.

Humorist Jor­dan Mon­sell is doing what he can to close that gap, pro­vid­ing a sam­pling of 100 most­ly male, most­ly white, most­ly human celebri­ty voic­es. It’s a solo recita­tion, but vocal­ly a col­lab­o­ra­tive one, with a fair num­ber of ani­mat­ed char­ac­ters mak­ing their way into the cred­its, too.

He cer­tain­ly knows how to cast out­side the box. Tra­di­tion­al Poe inter­preters such as Vin­cent Price and John Astin bring some well estab­lished creep cred to the enter­prise. Mon­sell picks Christo­pher Walken and Christo­pher Lee already have exist­ing takes on this clas­sic, and Antho­ny Hop­kins and Willem Dafoe are wel­come addi­tions.

But what to make of Jer­ry Sein­feld, Pee-Wee Her­man, John­ny Cash… and even poet­ry lover Bill Mur­ray? Man­ic and much missed Robin Williams may offer a clue. What good is hav­ing an arse­nal of impres­sions if you’re not will­ing to roll them out in rapid suc­ces­sion?

While some of Mon­sel­l’s imper­son­ations (cough, David Bowie) fall a bit short of the mark, oth­ers will have you regret­ting that no one had the fore­thought to record Don Knotts or JFK recit­ing the poem in its entire­ty.

The titles offer a bit of a mis­nomer. In many instances, it’s not real­ly the per­form­ers but their best known char­ac­ters being aped. While there may not be too great a vocal divide between play­wright Wal­lace Shawn and Vizzi­ni in The Princess Bride, The Dude is not Jeff Bridges, any more than Cap­tain Jack Spar­row is John­ny Depp.

The project seems like­ly to play best with nerdy ado­les­cent boys… which could be good news for teach­ers look­ing to get reluc­tant read­ers onboard. Show it on the class­room Smart Board, and be pre­pared to have mini-teach-ins on Katharine Hep­burn, Wal­ter Matthau, the late great Robert Shaw, and oth­er big names whose day has passed. Shrek, Gol­lum, and Har­ry Potter’s house elf, Dob­by, are on hand to keep the ref­er­ences from feel­ing too moldy.

The specter of Poe gets the cov­et­ed final word, a balm to the ears after the triple assault of Chris­t­ian Bale’s Bat­man, Mad Max’s Tom Hardy, and Heath Ledger’s Jok­er. (It may be a mat­ter of taste. You’ll hear no com­plaint from these quar­ters with regard to Mick­ey Mouse, Bert Lahr’s Cow­ard­ly Lion, or The Simpson’s Krusty the Klown, won­der­ful­ly unc­tu­ous.)

The break­neck audio patch­work approach doesn’t do much for read­ing com­pre­hen­sion, but could lead to a live­ly mid­dle school dis­cus­sion on what con­sti­tutes a suc­cess­ful per­for­mance. Who served the text best? Read­ers?

Fur­ther­more, who’s miss­ing? What voice would you add to the Monsell’s roll call, below?

Mor­gan Free­man

Ker­mit the Frog

John­ny Cash

Ringo Starr

David Bowie

Rick Mora­nis

Gary Old­man

Peter Lorre

Adam San­dler

Don Knotts

William Shat­ner

George Takei

Michael Dorn

Daffy Duck

Ricky Ger­vais

Foghorn Leghorn

Liam Nee­son

Nicholas Cage

John Tra­vol­ta

Antho­ny Hop­kins

Rod Ser­ling

Cook­ie Mon­ster

Jay Baruchel

Jeff Bridges

John­ny Depp

Archer

Dr. Phil

Gol­lum

Mandy Patinkin

Wal­lace Shawn

Bil­ly Crys­tal

Owen Wil­son

Dustin Hoff­man

Krusty the Klown

Apu

Chris­t­ian Bale

Michael Caine

Tom Hardy

Heath Ledger

Mick­ey Mouse

John Wayne

Jer­ry Sein­feld

Phil Hart­man

Goofy

Al Paci­no

Mar­lon Bran­do

Jack Lem­mon

Wal­ter Matthau

Christo­pher Walken

Rowlf the Dog

John Cleese

Robin Williams

Katharine Hep­burn

Woody Allen

Matthew McConaugh­ey

Cow­ard­ly Lion

Jim­my Stew­art

John C. Reil­ly

James Mason

Sylvester Stal­lone

Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger

Stewie

Daniel Day Lewis

Mag­gie Smith

Alan Rick­man

Dob­by

Jack Nichol­son

Christoph Waltz

Bill Mur­ray

Dan Aykroyd

Sean Con­nery

Bill Cos­by

Christo­pher Lloyd

Droopy Dog

Kevin Spacey

Har­ri­son Ford

Ronald Rea­gan

JFK

Bill Clin­ton

Keanu Reeves

Ian McK­ellen

Paul Gia­mat­ti

Sebas­t­ian

Stan Lee

Jeff Gold­blum

Hugh Grant

Ken­neth Branagh

Lar­ry the Cable Guy

Pee-Wee Her­man

Shrek

Don­key

Charl­ton Hes­ton

Michael Keaton

Homer Simp­son

Yoda

Willem Dafoe

Bruce Willis

Robert Shaw

Christo­pher Lee

Edgar Allan Poe

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Clas­sic Read­ings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vin­cent Price, James Earl Jones, Christo­pher Walken, Neil Gaiman, Stan Lee & More

Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven: Watch an Award-Win­ning Short Film That Mod­ern­izes Poe’s Clas­sic Tale

The Grate­ful Dead Pays Trib­ute to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in a 1982 Con­cert: Hear “Raven Space”

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

Who Painted the First Abstract Painting?: Wassily Kandinsky? Hilma af Klint? Or Another Contender?

in Art, History | September 14th, 2017

Kandin­sky, Unti­tled, 1910

Many painters today con­cen­trate on pro­duc­ing abstract work — and a fair few of those have only ever pro­duced abstract work. But look not so very far back in human his­to­ry, and you’ll find that to paint meant to paint rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ly, to repli­cate on can­vas the like­ness­es of the actu­al peo­ple, places, and things out there in the world. Human­i­ty, of course did­n’t evolve with its rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al art skills pre-installed: though some cave paint­ings do rec­og­niz­ably depict men and beasts, many strike us today as what we would call abstract, or at least abstract­ed. So which mod­ern artists can lay claim to hav­ing redis­cov­ered abstrac­tion first?

Kandin­sky, Com­po­si­tion V, 1911

If you’ve stud­ied any art his­to­ry, you might well name the ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Russ­ian painter Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky (whose first abstract water­col­or from 1910 appears at the top of the post). But “while Kandin­sky is today hailed as the father of abstract paint­ing,” writes Art­sy’s Abi­gail Cain, “he was by no means the only play­er in the devel­op­ment of non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al paint­ing,” though “his work Kom­po­si­tion V did, admit­ted­ly, jump­start pub­lic inter­est in abstract paint­ing.”

First exhib­it­ed in Munich in Decem­ber 1911, “this mon­u­men­tal work was just bare­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al” and also “the first such work to be put on dis­play,” inspir­ing the art world not just to take abstrac­tion seri­ous­ly but to see it as the future.

Hilma af Klint, Sva­nen, 1915

Kandin­sky, inspired by Goethe’s The­o­ry of Col­ors, had already giv­en the sub­ject of abstrac­tion no small amount of thought. He’d first writ­ten a man­i­festo defin­ing abstract art a few years ear­li­er, titling it On the Spir­i­tu­al in Art, a title that would have res­onat­ed with Hilma af Klint, a painter who might have actu­al­ly gone abstract first.  “Af Klint, who was born in Stock­holm, showed an ear­ly inter­est in nature, math­e­mat­ics and art, and she began study­ing at the Roy­al Swedish Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in 1882,” writes the New York Times’ Natalia Rach­lin. She made her name as a land­scape and por­trait painter after grad­u­a­tion, but at the same time “also con­tin­ued a more pri­vate pur­suit: she had begun show­ing an inter­est in the occult and attend­ing séances as ear­ly as 1879, at the age of 17.”

Hilma af Klint, ‘Stag­ger­ing’: The Ten Largest, Youth, 1907.

Af Klin­t’s “curios­i­ty about the spir­i­tu­al realm soon devel­oped into a life­long inter­est in spiritism, theos­o­phy and anthro­pos­o­phy,” and dur­ing one séance she heard a spir­it tell her to “make paint­ings that would rep­re­sent the immor­tal aspects of man. This proved to be the turn­ing point in af Klint’s work: from the nat­u­ral­is­tic to the abstract, from por­tray­als of phys­i­cal real­i­ty to con­vey­ing the invis­i­ble.” She went on to pro­duce the 193 abstract Paint­ings for the Tem­ple. The exhi­bi­tions of her rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al work con­tin­ued, but she kept the rest pri­vate, and in her will “even asked that her abstract paint­ings not be shown in pub­lic until at least twen­ty years after her death, not­ing that audi­ences were not yet capa­ble of under­stand­ing her work.”

Fran­cis Picabia, Caoutchouc, 1909.

Both Kandin­sky and Af Klint look like plau­si­ble can­di­dates for the first abstract painter — it just depends on how you define the begin­ning of abstrac­tion — but they’re hard­ly the only ones. Cain also brings up the Czech-born, Paris-based artist Fran­tišek Kup­ka, or his col­league in the French avant-garde Fran­cis Picabia, whose 1909 water­col­or Caoutchouc (Rub­ber), pic­tured just above, came before Kandin­sky had paint­ed an abstract image or even com­plet­ed any writ­ing on the sub­ject. Still, some objec­tors note that “the work still retains some sem­blance of form, rem­i­nis­cent of a bou­quet of flow­ers.” These ques­tions of puri­ty, inno­va­tion, and espe­cial­ly orig­i­nal­i­ty do get com­pli­cat­ed. As Clive James once said, “It’s very hard to be total­ly inven­tive, so I’m not ter­ri­bly inter­est­ed in orig­i­nal­i­ty. Vital­i­ty is all I care about” — a qual­i­ty that all these works exude still today.

via Art­sy/Tate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Helen Mir­ren Tells Us Why Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Is Her Favorite Artist (And What Act­ing & Mod­ern Art Have in Com­mon)

Goethe’s Col­or­ful & Abstract Illus­tra­tions for His 1810 Trea­tise, The­o­ry of Col­ors: Scans of the First Edi­tion

Time Trav­el Back to 1926 and Watch Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Make Art in Some Rare Vin­tage Video

The MoMA Teach­es You How to Paint Like Pol­lock, Rothko, de Koon­ing & Oth­er Abstract Painters

Free Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the Art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hear Classic Readings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vincent Price, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Neil Gaiman, Stan Lee & More

in Audio Books, Literature | September 11th, 2017

It can seem that the writ­ing of lit­er­a­ture and the the­o­ry of lit­er­a­ture occu­py sep­a­rate great hous­es, Game of Thrones-style, or even sep­a­rate coun­tries held apart by a great sea. Per­haps they war with each oth­er, per­haps they stu­dious­ly ignore each oth­er or oblique­ly inter­act at tour­na­ments with acronymic names like MLA and AWP. Like Thomas Pynchon’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the polit­i­cal right and left, schol­ars and writ­ers rep­re­sent oppos­ing poles, the hot­house and the street. That rare beast, the aca­d­e­m­ic poet, can seem like some­thing of a uni­corn, or drag­on.

…Or like the omi­nous talk­ing raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous of poems.

The divide between the­o­ry and prac­tice is a recent devel­op­ment, a prod­uct of state bud­get­ing, polit­i­cal brinks­man­ship, the relent­less pub­lish­ing mills of acad­e­mia that force schol­ars to find a pigeon­hole and stay there.… In days past, poets and scholar/theorists fre­quent­ly occu­pied the same place at the same time—Wal­lace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge, Per­cy Shel­ley, and, of course, Poe, whose peren­ni­al­ly pop­u­lar “The Raven” serves as a point-by-point illus­tra­tion for his the­o­ry of com­po­si­tion just as thor­ough­ly as Eliot’s great works bear out his notion of the “objec­tive cor­rel­a­tive.”

Poe’s object, the tit­u­lar crea­ture, is an “arche­typ­al sym­bol,” writes Dana Gioia, in a poem that aims for what its author calls a “uni­ty of effect.” In his 1846 essay “The Phi­los­o­phy of Com­po­si­tion,” Poe the poet/theorist tells us in great detail how “The Raven” sat­is­fies all of his oth­er cri­te­ria for lit­er­a­ture as well, such as achiev­ing its intent in a sin­gle sit­ting, using a repeat­ed refrain, and so on.

Should we have any doubt about how much Poe want­ed us to see the poem as the delib­er­ate out­come of a con­cep­tu­al scheme, we find him three years lat­er, in 1849, the year of his death, deliv­er­ing a lec­ture on the “Poet­ic Prin­ci­ple,” and con­clud­ing with a read­ing of “The Raven.”

John Mon­cure Daniel of the Rich­mond Semi-Week­ly Exam­in­er remarked after attend­ing one of these talks that “the atten­tion of many in this city is now direct­ed to this sin­gu­lar per­for­mance.” At that point, Poe, who hard­ly made a dime from “The Raven,” had to suf­fer the indig­ni­ty of hav­ing all of his work go out of print dur­ing his brief, unhap­py life­time. Mon­cure and the Exam­in­er there­by fur­nished read­ers “with the only cor­rect copy ever pub­lished,” pre­vi­ous appear­ances, it seems, hav­ing con­tained punc­tu­a­tion errors.

Nonethe­less, for all of Poe’s pedantry and penury, “The Raven“ ‘s first appear­ances made him semi-famous. His read­ings were a sen­sa­tion, and it’s a sure bet that his audi­ences came to hear him read the poem, not deliv­er a lec­ture on its prin­ci­ples. Oh, for some pro­to-Edi­son in the room with an ear­ly record­ing device. What would it be like to hear the mourn­ful, grief-strick­en, alco­holic genius—master of the macabre and inven­tor of the detec­tive story—intone the raven’s enig­mat­ic “Nev­er­more”?

While Poe’s speak­ing voice has reced­ed irre­triev­ably into his­to­ry, his poet­ic voice may live close to for­ev­er. So mes­mer­iz­ing are his meter and dic­tion that many great actors known espe­cial­ly for their voic­es have become pos­sessed by “The Raven.”

Like­ly when we think of the poem, what first comes to the mind’s ear is the voice of Vin­cent Price, or James Earl Jones, Christo­pher Lee, or Christo­pher Walken, all of whom have giv­en “The Raven” its due.

And so have many oth­er nota­bles, such as the great Stan Lee, Poe suc­ces­sor Neil Gaiman, orig­i­nal Gomez Addams actor John Astin, and ven­er­a­ble Beat poet/scholar Anne Wald­man (lis­ten here). You will find those recita­tions here at this round-up of notable “Raven” read­ings, and if this some­how doesn’t sati­ate you, then check out Lou Reed’s take on the poem, the Grate­ful Dead’s musi­cal trib­ute, “Raven Space,” or a read­ing in 100 dif­fer­ent celebri­ty impres­sions.

Final­ly, we would be remiss not to men­tion The Simp­sons’ James Earl Jones-nar­rat­ed par­o­dy, a wor­thy teach­ing tool for dis­tract­ed young visu­al learn­ers. Is it a shame that we now think of “The Raven” as a Hal­loween yarn fit for the Tree­house of Hor­ror or any num­ber of enjoy­able exer­cis­es in spooky oratory—rather than the the­o­ret­i­cal thought exper­i­ment its author seemed to intend? Does Poe rotis­serie in his grave as Homer snores in a wing­back chair? Prob­a­bly. But as the author told us him­self at length, the poem works! It still nev­er fails to excite our mor­bid curios­i­ty, enchant our goth­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty, and maybe send a chill or two down the spine. Maybe we nev­er real­ly need­ed Poe to explain it to us.

You can find oth­er lit­er­ary read­ings in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Simp­sons Present Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and Teach­ers Now Use It to Teach Kids the Joys of Lit­er­a­ture

When Charles Dick­ens & Edgar Allan Poe Met, and Dick­ens’ Pet Raven Inspired Poe’s Poem “The Raven”

7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Sto­ries and Poems

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe on His Birth­day

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

Watch Werner Herzog’s Very First Film, Herakles, Made When He Was Only 19-Years-Old (1962)

in Film | September 8th, 2017

Rebel­lious dwarfs, crazed con­quis­ta­dors, delu­sion­al tycoons, wood-carv­ing ski jumpers: Wern­er Her­zog schol­ars who attempt to find a pat­tern in the film­mak­er’s choic­es of sub­ject mat­ter are vir­tu­al­ly guar­an­teed an inter­est­ing search, if an ulti­mate­ly futile one. But they must all start in the same place: Her­zog’s very first film Her­ak­les, which mash­es up the spec­ta­cles of body build­ing, auto rac­ing, and destruc­tion. It does all that in nine min­utes to a sound­track of sax­o­phone jazz, and with fre­quent ref­er­ences to the tit­u­lar hero of myth, whom you may know bet­ter by his Roman name of Her­cules.

“Would he clean the Augean sta­bles?” ask Her­ak­les’ sub­ti­tles over footage of one young Ger­man man show­ing off his well-shaped tor­so. “Would he dis­pose of the Ler­naean Hydra?” they ask of anoth­er as he strikes a pose.

Between clips of these body­builders per­form­ing their labors and ques­tions about whether they could per­form those of Her­cules, we see mil­i­taris­tic march­es, falling bombs, heaps of rub­ble, and a 1955 race­car crash at Le Mans that killed 83 peo­ple. All this jux­ta­po­si­tion tempts us to ask what mes­sage the nine­teen-year-old Her­zog want­ed to deliv­er, but, as in all his sub­se­quent work, he sure­ly want­ed less to make an artic­u­la­ble point than to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties of cin­e­ma itself.

More recent­ly, in Paul Cron­in’s inter­view book Her­zog on Her­zog, the film­mak­er looks back on “my first blun­der, Her­ak­les” and finds it “rather stu­pid and point­less, though at the time it was an impor­tant test for me. It taught me about edit­ing togeth­er very diverse mate­r­i­al that would not nor­mal­ly sit com­fort­ably as a whole,” and in a sense pre­pared him for an entire cin­e­mat­ic career of very diverse mate­r­i­al that would not nor­mal­ly sit com­fort­ably as a whole. “For me it was fas­ci­nat­ing to edit mate­r­i­al togeth­er that had such sep­a­rate and indi­vid­ual lives. The film was some kind of an appren­tice­ship for me. I just felt it would be bet­ter to make a film than go to film school” — of the non-rogue vari­ety, any­way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Teach­es His First Online Course on Film­mak­ing

Wern­er Herzog’s Rogue Film School: Apply & Learn the Art of Gueril­la Film­mak­ing & Lock-Pick­ing

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Top 100 American Films of All Time, According to 62 International Film Critics

in Film | September 7th, 2017

Enter­tain­ment first, and art sec­ond? Has­n’t that always been the Amer­i­can way when it comes to film? And is that how the rest of the world sees it, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing France’s love of Jer­ry Lewis, Germany’s obses­sion with David Has­sel­hoff, and Chi­na tak­ing Nicholas Cage’s career choic­es more seri­ous­ly than he does him­self?

In this list of The 100 Great­est Amer­i­can Films, the BBC polled 62 inter­na­tion­al film crit­ics to see what they thought were the Unit­ed States’ endur­ing con­tri­bu­tions to cin­e­ma cul­ture. The films only need­ed to be fund­ed by Amer­i­can companies—the direc­tors could be from oth­er coun­tries. (If not, about a third of these choic­es would be dis­qual­i­fied. Five are by Hitch­cock alone.)

As for oth­er favorite direc­tors, Spiel­berg gets five (although the high­est entry, Jaws, comes in at 38) and Bil­ly Wilder gets five, with The Apart­ment the high­est ranked at 24. The most pop­u­lar decade for film is the 1970s, the top two being Coppola’s first two God­fa­ther films. (It would be inter­est­ing to know the medi­an age of these 62 crit­ics, just to see if their for­ma­tive years align with the decade.)

Of the 100, here’s the Top 10:

10. The God­fa­ther Part II (Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, 1974)
9. Casablan­ca (Michael Cur­tiz, 1942)
8. Psy­cho (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1960)
7. Sin­gin’ in the Rain (Stan­ley Donen and Gene Kel­ly, 1952)
6. Sun­rise (F.W. Mur­nau, 1927)
5. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stan­ley Kubrick, 1968)
3. Ver­ti­go (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1958)
2. The God­fa­ther (Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, 1972)
1. Cit­i­zen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Com­par­ing this list to BFI’s 2012 list of the Top 100 films of all time, there isn’t much dif­fer­ence in the top spots. And, in the years to come, I sus­pect those top four films will switch places occa­sion­al­ly but nev­er real­ly leave.

Instead, the sur­pris­es come fur­ther down the list. Gone with the Wind used to be con­sid­ered a clas­sic, no doubt bol­stered by its box office suc­cess at the time. But its pol­i­tics have weak­ened its posi­tion, and, along with Birth of a Nation, it might not last anoth­er decade on such lists. On the flip side, black film­mak­ers have four films on the list and women direc­tors only one (Mesh­es of the After­noon one of the best exper­i­men­tal films of all time).

Oth­er inter­est­ing choic­es include The Lion King (the only ani­mat­ed film on the list), Sternberg’s The Shang­hai Ges­ture, and Minnelli’s The Band Wag­on (one of two musi­cals by the direc­tor on the list). What films would you like to see added or tak­en away? Is this a fair assess­ment of America’s worth? Let us know in the com­ments.

Above, you can watch a some­what idio­syn­crat­ic pre­sen­ta­tions of the films on the BBC list.

Relat­ed Con­tent:
The 100 Fun­ni­est Films of All Time, Accord­ing to 253 Film Crit­ics from 52 Coun­tries

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 358 Film­mak­ers

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Addams Family Dance to The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”

in Random | September 7th, 2017

In the spir­it of Andrew Sul­li­van’s Men­tal Health Break, we give you this: The Addams Fam­i­ly Danc­ing to The Ramones’ 1976 track, “Blitzkrieg Bop.” For a brief moment, for­get the hur­ri­canes, the threat of nuclear war, the fires burn­ing in LA, Mon­tana, Wash­ing­ton, DC and the hearts of white suprema­cists. Breathe in. Breathe out. And repeat after me. “Hey Ho.…..Let’s go!”

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:

John Astin, From The Addams Fam­i­ly, Recites “The Raven” as Edgar Allan Poe

Talk­ing Heads Per­form The Ramones’ “I Wan­na Be Your Boyfriend” Live in 1977 (and How the Bands Got Their Start Togeth­er)

The Ramones’ First Press Release: We’re Part Musi­cians, Den­tists & Degen­er­ates (1975)

Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapt­ed from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Watch John Lennon’s Last Live Performance (1975): “Imagine,” “Stand By Me” & More

in Music | September 7th, 2017

After each heart­break­ing loss of a musi­cal icon this past year and a half, we have turned to their great­est moments onstage, not nec­es­sar­i­ly their last, because their final shows weren’t always all that mem­o­rable. Declin­ing health, bad record­ings… and not every gig is a good one even in the best of times and with the best of per­form­ers. But when it comes to John Lennon’s last pub­lic appear­ance, I like to think he might have left the stage exact­ly the way he want­ed to, as a rock­er, a provo­ca­teur, and a pis­stak­er in a can­dy-apple red jump­suit, backed by a nine-piece mim­ing band of bald men in black leather with masks paint­ed on the back of their heads.

Cred­it­ed as “John Lennon, Etc.,” the band’s true name, giv­en to them by Lennon him­self, is abbre­vi­at­ed on their bass drum: B.O.M.F., or “Broth­ers of Moth­er Fuck­ers.” It was Lennon’s send off to his own career as much as it was a Salute to Sir Lew, as the pro­gram was called. Just a few months lat­er Sean was born, and Lennon declared he would retire to raise his son. At the time of his trag­ic death five years lat­er, he had begun record­ing again, releas­ing Dou­ble Fan­ta­sy and plan­ning a sec­ond dou­ble album, Milk and Hon­ey. But we nev­er got to see him per­form those songs.

The hon­oree for Lennon’s last gig was Sir Lew Grade, “a pow­er­ful media mogul,” notes Dan­ger­ous Minds, “with roots in cabaret and vari­ety shows.” A man known as much for his ruth­less­ness in busi­ness as for his Charleston, which he per­formed on table­tops when­ev­er the mood struck him. In 1969 Grade bought up the rights to over a hun­dred Lennon and McCart­ney songs, after some very tense nego­ti­a­tions. Lennon sued Grade in 1974 and set­tled out of court, and Grade remained the co-pub­lish­er of all of his new songs.

As part of the set­tle­ment, Lennon record­ed his album of cov­ers of clas­sic rock ‘n’ roll songs, appro­pri­ate­ly titled Rock ‘n’ Roll. When he appeared at the trib­ute con­cert for Sir Lew at the Hilton Hotel in New York—on the bill with Julie Andrews, Tom Jones, and Peter Sellers—he played Lit­tle Richard’s “Slip­pin’ and Slidin,” and Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” for “a “who’s who of the old Hol­ly­wood elite,” includ­ing Lau­ren Bacall, Kirk Dou­glas, Gene Kel­ly, and Orson Welles. The show, record­ed for TV broad­cast, cut his ren­di­tion of “Stand by Me” (hear the audio above), but they did air his final song, “Imag­ine,” which turned out to be the last song he ever sang live onstage (top).

Lennon is in very good form, and seem­ing­ly in good spir­its. The year pre­vi­ous, he’d scored a num­ber one hit with “What­ev­er Gets You Thru the Night.” Accord­ing at least to Paul McCart­ney and Lennon’s girl­friend May Pang, he had even con­sid­ered reunit­ing the Bea­t­les. In Novem­ber of 1974, Lennon joined Elton John onstage at Madi­son Square Gar­den for rol­lick­ing ver­sions of “I Saw Her Stand­ing There,” “Lucy in the Sky with Dia­monds,” and “What­ev­er Gets You Thru the Night” on which Elton had played in the stu­dio. You can see a recre­ation of that per­for­mance above. It was tech­ni­cal­ly Lennon’s last live con­cert appear­ance.

His final appear­ance on stage, on the oth­er hand, while it might have been an odd way to say good­bye, whether he meant to do so or not, may not be what we revis­it when we revis­it Lennon. Why did he agree to do a trib­ute con­cert “for a man he had been embroiled in law­suits with?” With a stage show that many have thought was delib­er­ate­ly designed to antag­o­nize the hon­oree? We’ll nev­er know. But I’m grate­ful that his final live song was one that still speaks to us of hope and pos­si­bil­i­ty. Maybe bow­ing to cen­sors, Lennon changes “Imagine”’s con­tro­ver­sial line about reli­gion. Instead, he sings, “Noth­ing to kill or die for, no immi­gra­tion, too,” refer­ring both to his trou­bles with the U.S. immi­gra­tion author­i­ties and to the bor­der­less world the song projects. “Imag­ine there’s no coun­tries… Imag­ine all the peo­ple shar­ing all the world.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Night John Lennon & Yoko Ono Jammed with Frank Zap­pa at the Fill­more East (1971)

Get a Fly-on-the-Wall View of John Lennon Record­ing & Arrang­ing His Clas­sic Song, “Imag­ine” (1971)

John Lennon’s Solo Albums Now Stream­ing for Free on Spo­ti­fy

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

Trigonometry Discovered on a 3700-Year-Old Ancient Babylonian Tablet

in History, Math, Science | September 6th, 2017

One pre­sump­tion of tele­vi­sion shows like Ancient Aliens and books like Char­i­ots of the Gods is that ancient people—particularly non-west­ern people—couldn’t pos­si­bly have con­struct­ed the elab­o­rate infra­struc­ture and mon­u­men­tal archi­tec­ture and stat­u­ary they did with­out the help of extra-ter­res­tri­als. The idea is intrigu­ing, giv­ing us the huge­ly ambi­tious sci-fi fan­tasies woven into Rid­ley Scott’s revived Alien fran­chise. It is also insult­ing in its lev­el of dis­be­lief about the capa­bil­i­ties of ancient Egyp­tians, Mesopotami­ans, South Amer­i­cans, South Sea Islanders, etc.

We assume the Greeks per­fect­ed geom­e­try, for exam­ple, and refer to the Pythagore­an the­o­rem, although this prin­ci­ple was prob­a­bly well-known to ancient Indi­ans. Since at least the 1940s, math­e­mati­cians have also known that the “Pythagore­an triples”—inte­ger solu­tions to the theorem—appeared 1000 years before Pythago­ras on a Baby­lon­ian tablet called Plimp­ton 322. Dat­ing back to some­time between 1822 and 1762 B.C. and dis­cov­ered in south­ern Iraq in the ear­ly 1900s, the tablet has recent­ly been re-exam­ined by math­e­mati­cians Daniel Mans­field and Nor­man Wild­berg­er of Australia’s Uni­ver­si­ty of New South Wales and found to con­tain even more ancient math­e­mat­i­cal wis­dom, “a trigono­met­ric table, which is 3,000 years ahead of its time.”

In a paper pub­lished in His­to­ria Math­e­mat­i­ca the two con­clude that Plimp­ton 322’s Baby­lon­ian cre­ators detailed a “nov­el kind of trigonom­e­try,” 1000 years before Pythago­ras and Greek astronomer Hip­parchus, who has typ­i­cal­ly received cred­it for trigonometry’s dis­cov­ery. In the video above, Mans­field intro­duces the unique prop­er­ties of this “sci­en­tif­ic mar­vel of the ancient world,” an enig­ma that has “puz­zled math­e­mati­cians,” he writes in his arti­cle, “for more than 70 years.” Mans­field is con­fi­dent that his research will fun­da­men­tal­ly change the way we under­stand sci­en­tif­ic his­to­ry. He may be over­ly opti­mistic about the cul­tur­al forces that shape his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives, and he is not with­out his schol­ar­ly crit­ics either.

Eleanor Rob­son, an expert on Mesopotamia at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don has not pub­lished a for­mal cri­tique, but she did take to Twit­ter to reg­is­ter her dis­sent, writ­ing, “for any his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment, you need to be able to read the lan­guage & know the his­tor­i­cal con­text to make sense of it. Maths is no excep­tion.” The trigonom­e­try hypoth­e­sis, she writes in a fol­low-up tweet, is “tedious­ly wrong.” Mans­field and Wild­berg­er may not be experts in ancient Mesopotami­an lan­guage and cul­ture, it’s true, but Rob­son is also not a math­e­mati­cian. “The strongest argu­ment” in the Aus­tralian researchers’ favor, writes Ken­neth Chang at The New York Times, is that “the table works for trigo­nom­ic cal­cu­la­tions.” As Mans­field says, “you don’t make a trigo­nom­ic table by acci­dent.”

Plimp­ton 322 uses ratios rather than angles and cir­cles. “But when you arrange it such a way so that you can use any known ratio of a tri­an­gle to find the oth­er side of a tri­an­gle,” says Mans­field, “then it becomes trigonom­e­try. That’s what we can use this frag­ment for.” As for what the ancient Baby­lo­ni­ans used it for, we can only spec­u­late. Rob­son and oth­ers have pro­posed that the tablet was a teach­ing guide. Mans­field believes “Plimp­ton 322 was a pow­er­ful tool that could have been used for sur­vey­ing fields or mak­ing archi­tec­tur­al cal­cu­la­tions to build palaces, tem­ples or step pyra­mids.”

What­ev­er its ancient use, Mans­field thinks the tablet “has great rel­e­vance for our mod­ern world… prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions in sur­vey­ing, com­put­er graph­ics and edu­ca­tion.” Giv­en the pos­si­bil­i­ties, Plimp­ton 322 might serve as “a rare exam­ple of the ancient world teach­ing us some­thing new,” should we choose to learn it. That knowl­edge prob­a­bly did not orig­i­nate in out­er space.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Mod­ern Math­e­mat­ics: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

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

When Albert Einstein Championed the Creation of a One World Government (1945)

in History, Politics | September 6th, 2017

Image by Fer­di­nand Schmutzer, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The con­cept of one-world gov­ern­ment has long been a sta­ple of vio­lent apoc­a­lyp­tic prophe­cy and con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries involv­ing var­i­ous popes, the UN, FEMA, the Illu­mi­nati, and lizard peo­ple. In the real world, one-world gov­ern­ment has been a goal of the glob­al Com­intern and many of the cor­po­rate oli­garchs who tri­umphed over the Sovi­ets in the Cold War. For good rea­son, perhaps—with the excep­tion of sci-fi utopias like Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek—we gen­er­al­ly tend to think of glob­al gov­ern­ment as a threat­en­ing idea. But that has not always been the case, or least it wasn’t for Albert Ein­stein who pro­posed glob­al gov­er­nance after the drop­ping of atom­ic bombs on Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki.

Einstein’s role in the devel­op­ment of those weapons may have been min­i­mal, accord­ing to the physi­cist him­self (the truth is a lit­tle more com­pli­cat­ed). But he lat­er expressed regret, or at least a total rethink­ing of the issue, in his many inter­views, let­ters, and speech­es. In 1952, for exam­ple, Ein­stein wrote a short essay called “On My Par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Atom Bomb Project” in which he rec­om­mend­ed that all nations “abol­ish war by com­mon action” and referred to the paci­fist exam­ple of Gand­hi, “the great­est polit­i­cal genius of our time.”

Five years ear­li­er, we find Ein­stein in a less than hope­ful mood. In a 1947 open let­ter to the Gen­er­al Assem­bly of the Unit­ed Nations, he laments that “since the vic­to­ry over the Axis pow­ers… no appre­cia­ble progress has been made either toward the pre­ven­tion of war or toward agree­ment in spe­cif­ic fields such as con­trol of atom­ic ener­gy and eco­nom­ic coop­er­a­tion.” The solu­tion as he saw it required a “mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the tra­di­tion­al con­cept of nation­al sov­er­eign­ty.” It’s a clause that might have launched a thou­sand mili­tia man­i­festoes. Ein­stein elab­o­rates:

For as long as atom­ic ener­gy and arma­ments are con­sid­ered a vital part of nation­al secu­ri­ty no nation will give more than lip ser­vice to inter­na­tion­al treaties. Secu­ri­ty is indi­vis­i­ble. It can be reached only when nec­es­sary guar­an­tees of law and enforce­ment obtain every­where, so that mil­i­tary secu­ri­ty is no longer the prob­lem of any sin­gle state. There is no com­pro­mise pos­si­ble between prepa­ra­tion for war, on the one hand, and prepa­ra­tion of a world soci­ety based on law and order on the oth­er.

So far this sounds not sim­ply like a one-world gov­ern­ment but like a one-world police state. But Einstein’s pro­pos­al gets a much more com­pre­hen­sive treat­ment in an ear­li­er Atlantic Month­ly edi­to­r­i­al pub­lished in 1945. Here, he admits that many of his ideas are “abstrac­tions” and lays out a scheme to osten­si­bly pro­tect against glob­al total­i­tar­i­an­ism.

Mem­ber­ship in a supra­na­tion­al secu­ri­ty sys­tem should not, in my opin­ion, be based on any arbi­trary demo­c­ra­t­ic stan­dards. The one require­ment from all should be that the rep­re­sen­ta­tives to supra­na­tion­al organization—assembly and council—must be elect­ed by the peo­ple in each mem­ber coun­try through a secret bal­lot. These rep­re­sen­ta­tives must rep­re­sent the peo­ple rather than any government—which would enhance the pacif­ic nature of the orga­ni­za­tion.

The great­est obsta­cle to a glob­al gov­ern­ment was not, Ein­stein thought, U.S. mis­trust, but Russ­ian unwill­ing­ness. After mak­ing every effort to induce the Sovi­ets to join, he writes in his UN let­ter, oth­er nations should band togeth­er to form a “par­tial world Gov­ern­ment… com­pris­ing at least two-thirds of the major indus­tri­al and eco­nom­ic areas of the world.” This body “should make it clear from the begin­ning that its doors remain wide open to any non-mem­ber.”

Ein­stein cor­re­spond­ed with many peo­ple on the issue of one-world gov­ern­ment, rec­om­mend­ing in one let­ter that a “per­ma­nent world court” be estab­lished to “con­strain the exec­u­tive branch of world gov­ern­ment from over­step­ping its man­date which, in the begin­ning, should be lim­it­ed to the pre­ven­tion of war and war-pro­vok­ing devel­op­ments.” He does not fore­see the prob­lem of an exec­u­tive who seizes pow­er through nefar­i­ous means and ignores insti­tu­tion­al checks on pow­er and priv­i­lege. As for the not-insignif­i­cant mat­ter of the econ­o­my, he writes that “the free­dom of each coun­try to devel­op eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions of its own choice must be guar­an­teed at the out­set.”

Ide­o­log­i­cal con­flicts over eco­nom­ics seemed to him “quite irra­tional,” as he wrote in his Atlantic edi­to­r­i­al. “Whether the eco­nom­ic life of Amer­i­ca should be dom­i­nat­ed by rel­a­tive­ly few indi­vid­u­als, as it is, or these indi­vid­u­als should be con­trolled by the state, may be impor­tant, but it is not impor­tant enough to jus­ti­fy all the feel­ings that are stirred up over it.” Like any hon­est intel­lec­tu­al, Ein­stein reserved the right to change his mind. By 1949 he had come to see social­ism as a nec­es­sary anti­dote to the “grave evils of cap­i­tal­ism”—the gravest of which, he wrote, is “an oli­garchy of pri­vate cap­i­tal the enor­mous pow­er of which can­not be effec­tive­ly checked even by a demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly orga­nized polit­i­cal society”—even one, pre­sum­ably, with glob­al leg­isla­tive reach.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Ein­stein Writes the 1949 Essay “Why Social­ism?” and Attempts to Find a Solu­tion to the “Grave Evils of Cap­i­tal­ism”

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Albert Ein­stein Explains How Slav­ery Has Crip­pled Everyone’s Abil­i­ty (Even Aristotle’s) to Think Clear­ly About Racism

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

The 38 States of America: Geography Professor Creates a Bold Modern Map of America (1973)

in Maps | September 5th, 2017

Unless you belong to an old­er gen­er­a­tion, you prob­a­bly can’t remem­ber the last time the map of the Unit­ed States under­went any major change. For decades, the bound­aries have remained pret­ty fixed. And yet the map, as we know it, should­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly be con­sid­ered set in stone.

If bil­lion­aire Tim Drap­er has his way, Cal­i­for­nia vot­ers will decide in 2018 whether Cal­i­for­nia, the home to near­ly 40 mil­lion peo­ple, should be divid­ed into three states called “North­ern Cal­i­for­nia,” “South­ern Cal­i­for­nia,” and plain “Cal­i­for­nia.” His argu­ment being that Cal­i­for­nia has become too large to gov­ern, and that pow­er should be moved toward small­er, more local­ly gov­erned enti­ties. Mean­while, on a par­al­lel track, anoth­er group is push­ing for Cal­i­for­nia to leave the union alto­geth­er. Right there, we have two ini­tia­tives that could change the map as we know it.

And then there was the time when, back in 1973, George Etzel Pearcy, a Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty geog­ra­phy pro­fes­sor, pro­posed re-draw­ing the map of the nation, reduc­ing the num­ber of states to 38, and giv­ing each state a dif­fer­ent name. In his cre­ative rework­ing of things, Cal­i­for­nia would be split into two states–“El Dora­do” and “San Gabriel”. Texas would divide into “Alamo” and also “Shawnee” (along with rem­nants of Okla­homa). And the Dako­tas would fuse into one big “Dako­ta.” In case you’re won­der­ing, Pearcy chose the names by polling geog­ra­phy stu­dents.

The log­ic behind the new map was explained in a 1975 edi­tion of The Peo­ple’s Almanac.

Why the need for a new map? Pearcy states that many of the ear­ly sur­veys that drew up our bound­aries were done while the areas were scarce­ly pop­u­lat­ed. Thus, it was con­ve­nient to deter­mine bound­aries by using the land’s phys­i­cal fea­tures, such as rivers and moun­tain ranges, or by using a sim­ple sys­tem of lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude.… The prac­ti­cal­i­ty of old estab­lished State lines is ques­tion­able in light of Amer­i­ca’s ever-grow­ing cities and the increas­ing mobil­i­ty of its cit­i­zens. Met­ro­pol­i­tan New York, for exam­ple, stretch­es into 2 adja­cent States. Oth­er city pop­u­la­tions which cross State lines are Wash­ing­ton, D.C., St. Louis, Chica­go, and Kansas City. The “strad­dling” of State lines caus­es eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal prob­lems. Who should pay for a rapid tran­sit sys­tem in St. Louis? Only those cit­i­zens with­in the bound­aries of Mis­souri, or all res­i­dents of St. Louis’s met­ro­pol­i­tan area, includ­ing those who reach over into the State of Illi­nois?…

When Pearcy realigned the U.S., he gave high pri­or­i­ty to pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty, loca­tion of cities, lines of trans­porta­tion, land relief, and size and shape of indi­vid­ual States.  When­ev­er pos­si­ble lines are locat­ed in less pop­u­lat­ed areas. In the West, the desert, semi­desert, or moun­tain­ous areas pro­vid­ed an easy method for divi­sion. In the East, how­ev­er, where areas of scarce pop­u­la­tion are hard­er to deter­mine, Pearcy drew lines “try­ing to avoid the thick­er clus­ters of set­tle­ment.”  Each major city which fell into the “strad­dling” cat­e­go­ry is neat­ly tucked with­in the bound­aries of a new State. Pearcy tried to place a major met­ro­pol­i­tan area in the cen­ter of each State. St. Louis is in the cen­ter of the State of Osage, Chica­go is cen­tered in the State of Dear­born. When this method proved impos­si­ble, as with coastal Los Ange­les, the city is still locat­ed so as to be eas­i­ly acces­si­ble from all parts of the State…

Accord­ing to Rob Lamm­le, writ­ing in Men­tal Floss, Pearcy ini­tial­ly got sup­port from “econ­o­mists, geo­g­ra­phers, and even a few politi­cians.” But the proposal–mainly out­lined in a book called A 38 State U.S.A.–even­tu­al­ly with­ered in Wash­ing­ton, the place where ideas, both good and bad, go to die.

Below you can watch an ani­ma­tion show­ing how US map has changed in 200 years.

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:

Free: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Lets You Down­load Thou­sands of Maps from the Unit­ed States Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Now Free Online

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use