Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

in Games, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | November 8th, 2021

As board games are becom­ing increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar with adults, we ask: What’s the rela­tion­ship between a board game’s mechan­ics and its nar­ra­tive? Does the “mes­sage” of a board game mat­ter?

Your host Mark Lin­sen­may­er is joined by game design­er Tom­my Maranges, edu­ca­tor Michelle Par­rinel­lo-Cason, and ex-philoso­pher Al Bak­er to talk about re-skin­ning games, design­ing play­er expe­ri­ences, play styles, game com­plex­i­ty, and more.

Some of the games we men­tion include Puer­to Rico, Monop­oly, Set­tlers of Catan, Sor­ry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Wel­come To…, Code­names, Pan­dem­ic, Occam Hor­ror, Ter­ra Mys­ti­ca, chess, Tick­et to Ride, Splen­dor, Pho­to­syn­the­sis, Spir­it Island, Escape from the Dark Cas­tle, and Wingspan.

Some arti­cles that fed our dis­cus­sion includ­ed:

• “The Board Games That Ask You to Reen­act Colo­nial­ism” by Luke Winkie
• “Board Games Are Get­ting Real­ly, Real­ly Pop­u­lar” by Dar­ron Cum­mings
• “8 His­tor­i­cal Board Games, from Diverse Design­ers, That Show Great Promise” by Char­lie Hall
• “How a Board Game About Birds Became a Sur­prise Block­buster” by Dan Kois
• “How Clas­sic Board Games Are Bring­ing Fam­i­lies Clos­er Dur­ing the Pan­dem­ic” by Drew Weisholtz
• “Keep Your Game Night Rolling (At A Safe Dis­tance) With These 3 Online Ser­vices” by Petra May­er

The two games Tom­my cre­at­ed that we bring up are Secret Hitler and Inhu­man Con­di­tions.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

Wunderkind Musician Nandi Bushell Pays Tribute to Charlie Watts, Playing All of the Tracks on “Gimme Shelter”

in Music | November 7th, 2021

We’ve fea­tured 11-year-old Nan­di Bushell here before. Per­haps you’ll recall her epic drum bat­tle with Dave Grohl. Today she’s back, pay­ing trib­ute to Char­lie Watts and per­form­ing the indi­vid­ual tracks on the Stones’ “Gimme Shel­ter.” First comes the gui­tar; then the bass, per­cus­sion and vocals; and next the drums–all the while she’s hav­ing fun. And you will too. Enjoy.

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

The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shel­ter” Played by Musi­cians Around the World

Watch an Epic Drum Bat­tle, Pit­ting a 9‑Year-Old Girl Against Foo Fight­er Dave Grohl

Mick Jag­ger Tells the Sto­ry Behind ‘Gimme Shel­ter’ and Mer­ry Clayton’s Haunt­ing Back­ground Vocals

Mer­ry Clay­ton Tells the Sto­ry of Her Amaz­ing Back­ing Vocal on The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shel­ter”

An Introduction to the Chrysler Building, New York’s Art Deco Masterpiece, by John Malkovich (1994)

in Architecture, Design, Film, History | November 5th, 2021

No old stuff for me, no bes­tial copy­ings of arch­es and columns and cor­nices. Me, I’m new.  
             — archi­tect William Van Alen, design­er of the Chrysler Build­ing

Many peo­ple claim the Chrysler Build­ing as their favorite New York City edi­fice and actor John Malkovich is one such:

It’s so crazy and vig­or­ous in its exe­cu­tion, so breath­tak­ing in its vision, so bril­liant­ly eccen­tric.

Malkovich, who’s not shy about tak­ing pot­shots at the city’s “vio­lence and filth” in the BBC doc­u­men­tary short above, rhap­sodizes over Detroit indus­tri­al­ist Wal­ter P. Chrysler’s “lat­ter day pyra­mid in Man­hat­tan.”

Malkovich’s unmis­tak­able voice, pegged by The Guardian as “waft­ing, whis­pery, and reedy” and which he him­self poo poos as sound­ing like it belongs to some­one who’s “labored under heavy nar­cotics for years,” pairs well with descrip­tions so plum­my, one has to imag­ine he penned them him­self. (No writer is cred­it­ed.)

After show­ing us the open-to-the-pub­lic lobby’s “deli­cious Art Deco fit­tings,” ceil­ing mur­al, and intri­cate, veneered ele­va­tor doors, Malkovich gives us a tour of some off-lim­its upper floors.

Unlike the Empire State Build­ing, which best­ed the Chrysler Building’s brief record as the world’s tallest build­ing (1046 feet, 77 sto­ries), you can’t pur­chase tick­ets to admire the view from the top.

But Malkovich has the star pow­er to gain access to Celes­tial, the sev­en­ty-first floor obser­va­to­ry that has been closed to the pub­lic since 1945 and is cur­rent­ly occu­pied by a pri­vate firm.

He also has a wan­der around the bar­ren Cloud Club, a sup­per club and speakeasy for gen­tle­man one per­centers. Its mish­mash of styles rep­re­sent­ed a con­ces­sion on archi­tect Van Alen’s part. The build­ing’s exte­ri­or was an ele­gant mod­ernist homage to Chrysler’s hub­caps and hood orna­ments, but between the 66th and 68th floor, the Cloud Club catered to the promis­cu­ous tastes of the rich and pow­er­ful — Tudor, Olde Eng­lish, Neo-Clas­si­cal…

The New York Times reports that it boast­ed what “was reput­ed to be the grand­est men’s room in all of New York.”

A Duke Elling­ton sound­track and vin­tage footage fea­tur­ing Van Alen cos­tumed to resem­ble his famous cre­ation sup­ply a taste of the excite­ment that her­ald­ed the building’s 1930 open­ing, even if those with a fear of heights may swoon at the sight of pret­ty young things reclin­ing on high beams and per­form­ing oth­er feats of der­ring-do.

Malkovich, ever the cool cus­tomer, dis­plays his lack of ver­ti­go by casu­al­ly prop­ping a foot on the rooftop’s edge to com­mune with the icon­ic eagle-head­ed gar­goyles.

The building’s unique flour­ish­es caused a sen­sa­tion, but not every­one was a fan.

Malkovich clear­ly savors his swipe at crit­ics who decried the new build­ing as too shiny:

For­tu­nate­ly these crit­ics are long dead so we can’t even call their offices and taunt them as they should be taunt­ed.

He’s more tem­per­ate when it comes to author and social philoso­pher Lewis Mum­ford, whose beef with the sky­scraper is under­stand­able, giv­en the his­toric con­text — the stock mar­ket crashed the day after the secret­ly con­struct­ed spire was riv­et­ed into place:

Such build­ings show one of the real dan­gers of a plu­toc­ra­cy: it gives the mas­ters of our civ­i­liza­tion an unusu­al oppor­tu­ni­ty to exhib­it their bar­barous egos, with no sense of restraint or shame.

Near­ly one hun­dred years lat­er, bar­barous egos con­tin­ue to erect sky­scrap­ing tem­ples to their own van­i­ty, but as Malkovich points out, they’re far bland­er, if taller.

The Chrysler Build­ing is now wide­ly rec­og­nized as one of New York City’s most mag­nif­i­cent jew­els, and the Land­marks Preser­va­tion Com­mis­sion recent­ly approved plans to con­struct a pub­lic obser­va­tion deck on the Chrysler Building’s 61st floor, just above its icon­ic Art Deco eagles, though it’s too ear­ly to tell if it will be ready in time for a cen­ten­ni­al cel­e­bra­tion.

Until then, the gen­er­al pub­lic must con­tent itself with explor­ing the Chrysler Building’s lob­by dur­ing week­day busi­ness hours.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

Famous Archi­tects Dress as Their Famous New York City Build­ings (1931)

A New Inter­ac­tive Map Shows All Four Mil­lion Build­ings That Exist­ed in New York City from 1939 to 1941

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

Michelangelo Entered a Competition to Put a Missing Arm Back on Laocoön and His Sons — and Lost

in Art, History | November 4th, 2021

Not many ancient stat­ues are as well-known as Lao­coön and His Sons. Mas­ter­ful­ly sculpt­ed some time between the first cen­tu­ry BC and the first cen­tu­ry AD, it depicts the epony­mous Tro­jan priest in an ago­niz­ing strug­gle with the ser­pents that will kill one or both of his sons. The details of the tale vary depend­ing on the teller: Vir­gil describes Lao­coön as a priest of Posei­don who dared to attempt expos­ing the famous Tro­jan Horse ruse, and Sopho­cles describes him as a priest of Apol­lo who vio­lat­ed his vow of celiba­cy. Whichev­er ver­sion of the sto­ry he heard, the sculp­tor clear­ly drew from it pow­er­ful enough inspi­ra­tion to impress Pliny the Elder, in whose Nat­ur­al His­to­ry the piece fig­ures.

Even among the more artis­ti­cal­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed behold­ers of the Renais­sance, Lao­coön and His Sons proved a cap­ti­vat­ing piece of work. Unearthed from a Roman vine­yard in 1506, it looked to have weath­ered the inter­ven­ing mil­len­ni­um and half with much less wear and tear than most large arti­facts from antiq­ui­ty — though Lao­coön him­self was, con­spic­u­ous­ly, miss­ing an arm. Com­mis­sioned by Pope Julius II, Vat­i­can archi­tect Dona­to Bra­mante “held a con­test to see who could come up with the best ver­sion of the arm restora­tion,” writes Kaushik Pato­wary at Amus­ing Plan­et. “Michelan­ge­lo sug­gest­ed that Laocoön’s miss­ing arm should be bent back as if the Tro­jan priest was try­ing to rip the ser­pent off his back.”

Michelan­ge­lo was­n’t the only Renais­sance man in com­pe­ti­tion: “Raphael, who was a dis­tant rel­a­tive of Bra­mante, favored an extend­ed arm. In the end, Jacopo Sanso­vi­no was declared the win­ner, whose ver­sion with an out­stretched arm aligned with Raphael’s own vision of how the stat­ue should look.” Lao­coön was thus even­tu­al­ly restored with his arm out­streched, and kept that way until, “in a strange twist of fate, an antique back­ward-bent arm was dis­cov­ered in a Roman work­shop in 1906, a few hun­dred meters from where the stat­ue group had been found four hun­dred years ear­li­er.” Posi­tioned just as Michelan­ge­lo had sug­gest­ed, this dis­em­bod­ied mar­ble limb turned out unmis­tak­ably to have come from Lao­coön and His Sons — but about three and a half cen­turies too late, alas, for Michelan­ge­lo to lord it over Raphael.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Creepy 19th Cen­tu­ry Re-Cre­ation of the Famous Ancient Roman Stat­ue, Lao­coön and His Sons

Michelangelo’s David: The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry Behind the Renais­sance Mar­ble Cre­ation

New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculp­tures

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

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 Nine Greatest Films You’ve Never Seen

in Film | November 4th, 2021

Whether we know it or not, we have all absorbed a cin­e­mat­ic vocab­u­lary and set of film his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences through the film and tele­vi­sion we’ve watched through­out our lives. We can leave it to the film­mak­ers, crit­ics, and cinephiles to mem­o­rize glos­saries of tech­niques. It’s enough that we under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing on screen because hun­dreds of visu­al nar­ra­tives have been con­struct­ed in more or less the same way. This lan­guage did not come out of a pri­mor­dial soup but took shape over the last 120 years or so: from the Lumière Broth­ers and Georges Méliès to Wes Ander­son and Denis Vil­leneuve and so on — each stage along the way absorb­ing influ­ences and ideas from the most inno­v­a­tive films.

Take, for exam­ple, My Din­ner with Andre, an intense­ly philo­soph­i­cal film that con­sists of only two main char­ac­ters, one set­ting, and no real plot to speak of. Instead, the film exploits the tech­niques of shot/reverse shot to their fullest, cre­at­ing extra­or­di­nary inti­ma­cy between two char­ac­ters, and the view­er, with the cam­era. Louis Malle’s 1981 film became a stan­dard for filmed exis­ten­tial con­ver­sa­tions. Yet behind it stands an even more icon­ic con­ver­sa­tion, one lit­er­al­ly con­cerned with life and Death. Ing­mar Bergman’s The Sev­enth Seal is a cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ence for count­less movies, and a film that undoubt­ed­ly expand­ed the ways film­mak­ers could tell sto­ries.

But there is anoth­er film we should see, says the Cin­e­mat­ic Car­tog­ra­phy above, if we want to know where else the philo­soph­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion in film might go: Hun­gar­i­an direc­tor Zoltán Fábri’s 1976 The Fifth Seal, a grim moral­i­ty play set in Nazi-occu­pied Hun­gary in which four friends in a bar pro­pose a thought exper­i­ment that becomes ter­ri­fy­ing­ly real. The film cuts between the con­ver­sa­tion on screen and scenes of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights. “All through the film,” one crit­ic writes, “an intel­li­gent view­er will note the char­ac­ters in the film con­stant­ly reassess their philo­soph­i­cal stance or points of view, accord­ing to cir­cum­stances.”

The entire move­ment of the film turns on a sin­gle ques­tion, a stark restate­ment of the Hegelian master/slave dialec­tic. Rather than a philo­soph­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion between two sta­ble points of view, The Fifth Seal shows us per­spec­tives that shift accord­ing to the char­ac­ters’ self-per­cep­tions, our per­cep­tions of them,  and the influ­ence of Bosch on what we see, adding lay­ers of dra­mat­ic irony and extra-diegetic ten­sion. Influ­en­tial in its own way, if The Fifth Seal had been as wide­ly seen as The Sev­enth Seal, we might have seen cin­e­ma take a dif­fer­ent turn in the last few decades. Such is the case with all nine films dis­cussed. See them list­ed below, learn about them in brief in “The Great­est Films You Don’t Know,” above, and imag­ine the direc­tions cin­e­ma might go if it took more cues from these under­val­ued clas­sics.

0:00 Intro­duc­tion (Ash­es and Snow, A Time to Live A Time to Die, Strangers In Good Com­pa­ny, Borom Sarat, Dead Man’s Let­ter’s, Killer of Sheep, Napoleon, Still Life)
1:50 The Fifth Seal — Az ötödik pec­sét (Dir: Zoltán Fábri)
7:29 The House Is Black — خانه سیاه است (Dir: For­ough Far­rokhzad)
9:57 Tie Xi Qu: West of The Tracks — 铁西区 (Dir: Wang Bing)
14:12 As I Was Mov­ing Ahead Occa­sion­al­ly I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beau­ty (Dir: Jonas Mekas)
18:37 The Enclosed Val­ley — La val­lée close (Dir: Jean-Claude Rousseau)
19:37 Pas­toral: To Die in the Coun­try — 田園に死す (Dir: Shūji Ter­aya­ma)
23:44 Pun­ish­ment Park (Dir: Peter Watkins)
28:03 The Cre­ma­tor — Spalo­vač mrtvol (Dir: Juraj Herz) 30:28 O Pagador de Promes­sas (Dir: Ansel­mo Duarte)
31:39 Con­clu­sion (Lucifer Ris­ing, An Ele­phant Sit­ting Still, Mar­ke­ta Lazaro­va, White Noise, Plat­form, The Burmese Harp)

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: 

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films for a Young Film­mak­er

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

Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the His­to­ry of Movies: From the First Mov­ing Pic­tures to the Rise of Mul­ti­plex­es & Net­flix

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

The Awe-Inspiring But Tragic Story of Africa’s Festival In The Desert (2001–2012)

in Music | November 3rd, 2021

“Mali’s gifts to the world of music are lav­ish and leg­endary,” Nenad Georgievs­ki writes at All About Jazz, though the world knew lit­tle about Malian music until Amer­i­can musi­cians began part­ner­ing with play­ers from West Africa. In the 1980s, Ste­vie Won­der began tour­ing with Amadou and Mari­am, help­ing to pop­u­lar­ize their form of Malian blues. In 1994, Ry Cood­er record­ed and released Talk­ing Tim­buk­tu with Malian gui­tarist Ali Far­ka Touré, whose “desert blues… was uncon­cerned with bound­aries,” freely mix­ing lan­guages and instru­men­ta­tion with play­ing that drew com­par­isons to John Lee Hook­er.

While audi­ences around the world encoun­tered West African music as “world music” on the fes­ti­val cir­cuit, fans on the con­ti­nent knew it as home­grown tra­di­tion­al sounds and con­tem­po­rary African rock and pop. In 2001 they got the chance to gath­er for the first annu­al “Fes­ti­val in the Desert” (Fes­ti­val au désert) in Tin Essako, a rur­al vil­lage miles from the high­way, as the Band­splain­ing video above tells it. This brief explain­er of the Festival’s impact and its trag­ic end in 2012 begins with ref­er­ences to Bono. But his role in the sto­ry is rather small.

More cen­tral are the Tuareg, or Kel Tamashek, nomadic peo­ple of Berber ori­gin spread across sev­er­al West African coun­tries whose musi­cians have refined the sound of desert rock and turned it into rebel music. The sound was born in strug­gle, notes World of Music, in refugee camps and bat­tle­grounds. The band Tinari­wen — who formed in 1979 and have become “glob­al musi­cal nomads” since the first Fes­ti­val —  met in “mil­i­tary camps set up in Libya by Colonel Ghaddafi to train young Tamashek men how to fight. Dur­ing the [Tuareg] rebel­lion Tinari­wen became the pied pipers of the rebel move­ment, and their songs gal­va­nized the young dis­pos­sessed Tamashek youth.” Then they turned to seek­ing peace at the Fes­ti­val in 2001.

Put togeth­er by Tuareg orga­niz­er Man­ny Ansar, the Fes­ti­val was “based on a cen­turies-old tra­di­tion,” notes Pea­cePrints, “a meet­ing where the Tuareg tribes of the region meet once a year to play and share music.” By con­trast, the mod­ern Fes­ti­val includ­ed eth­nic and trib­al groups from all over the coun­try, and the world, and “focused on bridg­ing the gap between tra­di­tion and moder­ni­ty and also between local cus­tom and inter­na­tion­al come­to­geth­er.” It was the only fes­ti­val of its kind in Africa and attract­ed thou­sands of African atten­dees and a few hun­dred vis­i­tors each year.

Trag­i­cal­ly, the fes­ti­val came to an end in 2012 when Tuareg rebels took con­trol of North­ern Mali, renam­ing it Aza­wad, and were over­run by Islam­ic sep­a­ratist groups. The coun­try was placed under Shari­ah Law, and Ansar was exiled to Burk­i­na Faso for a time. Out­side of his own coun­try, he con­tin­ued to pro­mote peace by co-found­ing a trav­el­ing fes­ti­val called Car­a­van cul­turelle pour la paix.

The artists rep­re­sent­ed at Fes­ti­val in the Desert tell sto­ries of the fusion of tra­di­tion and moder­ni­ty, of bru­tal con­flict and the hope for peace through the shar­ing and fus­ing of cul­tures. Mali may be one of the poor­est coun­tries in the world when it comes to mate­r­i­al resources, but it is one of the most musi­cal­ly rich. “Mali has many peo­ple, liv­ing in their dis­tricts,” say one musi­cian in the trail­er above for the doc­u­men­tary film The Last Song Before the War, “but every­one comes togeth­er in this fes­ti­val.”

Or, at least, they did until 2012. The film­mak­ers unwit­ting­ly cap­tured the very last Fes­ti­val in the Desert before it was shut down by mil­i­tants who “ruined the mate­r­i­al, plun­dered the stage, burned instru­ments,” says Ansar. “I had to go on.… It was no longer a ques­tion of fes­tiv­i­ty, but about the sur­vival of a cul­ture.” See his state­ment at the time in the “Fes­ti­val in the Desert — In Exile” video fur­ther up. For a total­ly dif­fer­ent view of the Fes­ti­val, read for­mer MTV exec Tom Fre­ston’s account of trav­el­ing there with Jim­my Buf­fett, Chris Black­well (founder of Island Records), and a hand­ful of oth­er indus­try big­wigs scout­ing the next West African sen­sa­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Music of Fela Kuti: Rad­i­cal Niger­ian Band­leader, Polit­i­cal Hero, and Cre­ator of Afrobeat

Zam­rock: An Intro­duc­tion to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psy­che­del­ic Rock Scene

David Byrne Cre­ates a Playlist of Cre­ative Music From Africa & the Caribbean—or What One Name­less Pres­i­dent Has Called “Shit­hole Coun­tries”

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

Watch Wes Anderson’s Animated Music Video for The French Dispatch, Featuring a Track by Jarvis Cocker

in Animation, Film, Music | November 3rd, 2021

The French Dis­patch came out near­ly two weeks ago, after hav­ing been pushed back more than a year by COVID-19. But delay­ing the release of a Wes Ander­son movie sure­ly counts among the least regret­table harms of the pan­dem­ic, which has caused mil­lions of deaths world­wide. Among the lives lost was that of Daniel Bevilac­qua, known in France as the chan­son singer Christophe. Set in that coun­try — and more specif­i­cal­ly, the fic­tion­al city of Ennui-sur-Blasé — in the 1960s, The French Dis­patch fea­tures a rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of Christophe’s 1965 hit “Aline” that now plays as some­thing of a trib­ute to the late pop-cul­tur­al icon. Sung by Pulp front­man Jarvis Cock­er, it comes accom­pa­nied by the Ander­son-direct­ed ani­mat­ed music video above.

Cock­er has worked with Ander­son before. In the direc­tor’s 2009 stop-motion adap­ta­tion of Roald Dahl’s The Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox he pro­vid­ed the voice of a singing farmer named Petey; in The French Dis­patch he does the same for a pop star called Tip-Top, and has even record­ed a full-length album in char­ac­ter.

Released on the very same day as The French Dis­patch, Chan­sons d’En­nui Tip-Top con­tains a dozen cov­ers of songs orig­i­nal­ly pop­u­lar­ized by the likes of Serge Gains­bourg, Brigitte Bar­dot, Jacques Dutronc, and Françoise Hardy. (Atten­tive cinephiles, the core audi­ence for all things Ander­son, will also note the pres­ence on the track list of Claude Channes’ “Mao Mao,” first heard in Jean-Luc Godard­’s La Chi­noise.)

Chan­sons d’En­nui Tip-Top exudes the retro-mind­ed Cock­er’s love of 1960s French pop music, just as The French Dis­patch exudes Ander­son­’s love of… well, every­thing Ander­son loves, much of which appears in the “Aline” music video. Its metic­u­lous­ly hand-drawn look comes from Javi Aznarez, who’d orig­i­nal­ly been hired to apply his art to the sets of the film itself. Fol­low­ing Tip-Top as he dances through an elab­o­rate two-dimen­sion­al ren­di­tion of Ennui-sur-Blasé, it intro­duces not only the set­ting (in a stark cut­away man­ner rem­i­nis­cent of The Life Aquat­ic) but all the major char­ac­ters and the actors who play them. Owen Wil­son, Anjel­i­ca Hus­ton, Edward Nor­ton, Bill Mur­ray: the gang, it seems, is all here — “here” being a cer­tain idea of post­war France best real­ized, per­haps, by imag­i­na­tions like Ander­son and Cock­er’s.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Ander­son Releas­es the Offi­cial Trail­er for His New Film, The French Dis­patch: Watch It Online

Watch the New Trail­er for Wes Anderson’s Stop-Motion Film Isle of Dogs, Inspired by Aki­ra Kuro­sawa

Wes Anderson’s Ani­mat­ed Books

Wes Anderson’s Shorts Films & Com­mer­cials: A Playlist of 8 Short Ander­son­ian Works

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.

Hear Brian Eno’s Contribution to the Soundtrack of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

in Film, Music, Sci Fi | November 2nd, 2021

Though released just a few weeks ago, Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune seems already to have gar­nered more crit­i­cal acclaim than David Lynch’s 1984 adap­ta­tion of the same mate­r­i­al. This com­par­i­son is, of course, unfair: Lynch was work­ing under dif­fer­ent con­di­tions in a dif­fer­ent time, not to men­tion with a marked­ly dif­fer­ent cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty. And in fact, Lynch’s ver­sion of the ambi­tious, saga-launch­ing nov­el by Frank Her­bert does have its fans, or at least view­ers will­ing to praise cer­tain of its aspects. Lovers of 1980s music, for exam­ple, val­ue its score com­posed by the vir­tu­osic rock band Toto — with the excep­tion, that is, of a track from Bri­an Eno, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois.

Bri­an Eno in par­tic­u­lar is cred­it­ed with pop­u­lar­iz­ing ambi­ent music, and “Prophe­cy Theme,” heard on the Dune sound­track album as well as in the film itself, con­jures up an atmos­phere as effec­tive­ly as any oth­er piece of his work in the genre. “David flew me to Los Ange­les to see Dune,” Eno recalls in a New York Times inter­view about his recent­ly released com­pi­la­tion Bri­an Eno (Film Music, 1976–2020), which includes the track.

“It wasn’t fin­ished then. And I don’t know whether his inten­tion or his hope was that I would do the whole sound­track, but I didn’t want to, any­way. It was a huge project, and I just didn’t feel like doing it. But I did feel like mak­ing one piece for it, so that’s what I did.”

Dune was indeed a for­mi­da­ble under­tak­ing, and one that ulti­mate­ly proved too big for Lynch. Some fans would argue, even after the suc­cess­ful first install­ment from Vil­leneuve, that it’s too big for any film­mak­er. But the world Her­bert cre­at­ed, one both sweep­ing and uncom­mon­ly detailed, has inspired many a cre­ator to pro­duce impres­sive work for projects both real­ized and unre­al­ized. Per­haps it counts as a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty that the lat­est Dune film, with its appar­ent clean-slate approach to pre­vi­ous attempts at adap­ta­tion, did­n’t com­mis­sion a score from Eno, whose sig­na­ture son­ic tex­tures could nice­ly have com­pli­ment­ed Vil­leneu­ve’s instinct for the sub­lime. But then, a stu­dio can’t go far wrong with Hans Zim­mer either.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Hans Zimmer’s Exper­i­men­tal Score for the New Dune Film

Bri­an Eno Once Com­posed Music for Win­dows 95; Now He Lets You Cre­ate Music with an iPad App

The Glos­sary Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Gave Out to the First Audi­ences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The Dune Col­or­ing & Activ­i­ty Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Cre­at­ed Count­less Hours of Pecu­liar Fun for Kids

A Side-by-Side, Shot-by-Shot Com­par­i­son of Denis Villeneuve’s 2020 Dune and David Lynch’s 1984 Dune

Bri­an Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Sound­tracks

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.

Watch the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” Music Video Re-Enacted by Robots

in Music, Technology | November 1st, 2021

When Microsoft released Win­dows 95, they did­n’t skimp on the pub­lic­i­ty. Their pro­mo­tion­al cam­paign for the oper­at­ing sys­tem even includ­ed tele­vi­sion spots sound­tracked with the Rolling Stones’ hit “Start Me Up.” The lyrics of its cho­rus neat­ly suit­ed the prod­uct, which came with a re-engi­neered inter­face fea­tur­ing a then-nov­el fea­ture called the Start menu. Though hard­ly new even then, the song did also car­ry faint asso­ci­a­tions with inno­va­tion, hav­ing orig­i­nal­ly been released on August 14, 1981, just two weeks after the launch of a cable chan­nel called MTV. Its music video thus received a great deal of air­play, prov­ing to the pub­lic that the Stones could stay on the cut­ting edge.

By the 1980s, rel­e­vance was by no means guar­an­teed to any band formed in the 1960s. More than proven though the point may be today, the Michael Lind­say-Hogg-direct­ed music video for “Start Me Up” demon­strat­ed that even a group of rock­ers in or near their for­ties could per­form with the same uncon­tain­able vital­i­ty they always had.

Even now, forty years after that, the group’s sur­viv­ing mem­bers show no incli­na­tion to retire, and the high­est tech­nol­o­gy has only just begun to catch up to them. I refer, of course, to Spot, the mod­el of robot dog pre­vi­ous­ly seen here on Open Cul­ture moon­walk­ing and twerk­ing to Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.” In the years since then, it seems he’s learned to move like Jag­ger — as well as Richards, Wyman, Wood, and Watts.

In “Spot Me Up,” four Spot mod­els togeth­er repli­cate about a minute of the “Start Me Up” video. That each robot real­ly does seem to con­vey traces of the per­son­al­i­ty of its par­tic­u­lar Stone — even the one tasked with repli­cat­ing a glance from the late Char­lie Watts, a force of sub­tle­ty behind the drum kit for more than half a cen­tu­ry — speaks to the engi­neer­ing skill mar­shaled by Boston Dynam­ics, the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy spin­off where Spot was invent­ed. Not every­one has warmed to the life­like move­ments of their robots, a line­up that also includes the for­mi­da­ble humanoid Atlas. But dance videos like these serve as a form of pub­lic rela­tions for its prod­ucts, which were designed for not the stage but fac­to­ries, mines, and pow­er plants — places where they can do what any fan of the Stones in the 80s would sure­ly call the dirty work.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kei­th Richards Demon­strates His Famous 5‑String Tech­nique (Used on Clas­sic Stones Songs Like “Start Me Up,” “Honky Tonk Women” & More

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine

The Rolling Stones Release a Time­ly Track, “Liv­ing in a Ghost Town”: Their First New Music in Eight Years

The Robots of Your Dystopi­an Future Are Already Here: Two Chill­ing Videos Dri­ve It All Home

Twerk­ing, Moon­walk­ing AI Robots — They’re Now Here

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Per­formed by Ger­man First Graders in Adorable Card­board Robot Out­fits

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.

Hear Hans Zimmer’s Experimental Score for the New Dune Film

in Film, Music | November 1st, 2021

If you have not yet seen the first install­ment of Denis Villeneuve’s reimag­in­ing of Dune, you will find no spoil­ers here, though if you’ve read Frank Herbert’s cult clas­sic nov­el and/or seen David Lynch’s film adap­ta­tion (or even the for­get­table TV minis­eries from 20 years ago), you are famil­iar with the sto­ry. You can, how­ev­er, hear Hans Zim­mer’s com­plete sound­track above. If you love it, and if film crit­ic Mick LaSalle is right, you’re in for a treat: “If you like the music here, you’ll prob­a­bly like the movie,” LaSalle writes in a San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle review. “If you hate it, you can’t pos­si­bly enjoy Dune.”

The film’s music is relent­less and cre­ates a “sense of some­thing strange and unfa­mil­iar,” mak­ing sure “we nev­er for­get we’re watch­ing an entire­ly alien uni­verse.” Vet­er­an block­buster com­pos­er Hans Zim­mer cre­at­ed this son­ic atmos­phere with stu­dio effects and non­tra­di­tion­al instru­men­ta­tion, though one famil­iar ele­ment remains, as he tells Indiewire:

I kept think­ing, wher­ev­er you are in the future, the instru­ments will change due to tech­nol­o­gy, and we could be far more exper­i­men­tal, but the one thing that remains is the human voice, which there is a lot of.

Those voic­es include that of singer Lisa Ger­rard, for­mer­ly of Dead Can Dance, who “came up with this lan­guage that is all her own. It could be from the future, it could be from a dif­fer­ent world.”

Zimmer’s approach almost mir­rors that of his first big break, the score for 1988’s Rain Man, of which he said in 2008, “The Ray­mond char­ac­ter does­n’t actu­al­ly know where he is. The world is so dif­fer­ent to him. He might as well be on Mars. So, why don’t we just invent our own world music for a world that does­n’t real­ly exist?” Villeneuve’s Dune gives us an entire inter­plan­e­tary civ­i­liza­tion for which to invent music that did­n’t exist before. “I felt like there was a free­dom to get away from a West­ern Orches­tra,” Zim­mer told The New York Times, in a major under­state­ment.

One piece of music, played as the Atrei­des fam­i­ly arrives on Arrakis, involved 30 bag­pipers, record­ed togeth­er in Edin­burgh while social­ly dis­tanced. “Along with syn­the­siz­ers,” writes The New York Times’ Dar­ryn King, “you can hear scrap­ing met­al, Indi­an bam­boo flutes, Irish whis­tles, a jud­der­ing drum phrase that Zim­mer calls an ‘anti-groove,’ seis­mic rum­bles of dis­tort­ed gui­tar” and “a war for that is actu­al­ly a cel­lo.” The result “might be one of Zimmer’s most unortho­dox and most provoca­tive” pieces of work, and a far cry from the music that accom­pa­nied David Lynch’s beau­ti­ful fail­ure of a film in 1984.

Zim­mer claims nev­er to have seen Lynch’s film nor heard the sound­track by soft-rock super­stars Toto, unwill­ing to com­pro­mise the Dune he’d been imag­in­ing since he first read the book. “I’ve been think­ing about Dune for near­ly 50 years,” he says. Lynch has been try­ing to for­get his film for almost as long. The dense, com­pli­cat­ed mess of an adap­ta­tion so con­fused film execs and test audi­ences that the stu­dio added intro­duc­to­ry expo­si­tion, above, and hand­ed out glos­saries to audi­ences at the first screen­ings (though not, pre­sum­ably, flash­lights).

The choice of super­stars Toto, of “Africa” fame, brought audi­ences of Lynch’s film a “lux­u­ri­ant and pecu­liar sound­track,” sup­ple­ment­ed by the Vien­na Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra and a com­po­si­tion by Bri­an Eno. But it also inte­grat­ed famil­iar 80’s rock touch­es (as in “Desert Theme,” above), giv­ing the alien world Lynch imag­ined both a famil­iar son­ic tex­ture and a dat­ed sound. Thir­ty-sev­en years lat­er, sci­ence fic­tion films need no such com­fort­ing appa­ra­tus to make them palat­able. As both Vil­leneuve and Zim­mer real­ized in their work on Dune, a film about a total­ly unfa­mil­iar future civ­i­liza­tion — even one filled with humans who look like us — can look and sound as strange as tech­nol­o­gy and imag­i­na­tion will allow.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Glos­sary Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Gave Out to the First Audi­ences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The Dune Graph­ic Nov­el: Expe­ri­ence Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-Fi Saga as You’ve Nev­er Seen It Before

Watch the First Trail­er for Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s Adap­ta­tion of Frank Herbert’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Nov­el

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

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