Acclaimed Ruth Bader Ginsburg Documentary, RBG, Airing Tonight on CNN

in Film, Law | September 9th, 2018

Although still play­ing in cin­e­mas through­out the coun­try, the new Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg documentary–simply called RBG–will air tonight (Sun­day) on CNN. Tune in at 8 p.m. Here’s a quick syn­op­sis:

At the age of 84, U.S. Supreme Court Jus­tice Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg has devel­oped a breath­tak­ing legal lega­cy while becom­ing an unex­pect­ed pop cul­ture icon. But with­out a defin­i­tive Gins­burg biog­ra­phy, the unique per­son­al jour­ney of this diminu­tive, qui­et war­rior’s rise to the nation’s high­est court has been large­ly unknown, even to some of her biggest fans – until now. RBG is a rev­e­la­to­ry doc­u­men­tary explor­ing Gins­burg ‘s excep­tion­al life and career from Bet­sy West and Julie Cohen.

Writ­ing in the New York Times, film crit­ic A.O. Scott observes that the “movie’s touch is light and its spir­it buoy­ant, but there is no mis­tak­ing its seri­ous­ness or its pas­sion. Those qual­i­ties res­onate pow­er­ful­ly in the dis­sents that may prove to be Jus­tice Ginsburg’s most endur­ing lega­cy, and RBG is, above all, a trib­ute to her voice.” Watch it tonight…

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

When Vladimir Nabokov Taught Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg, His Most Famous Stu­dent, To Care Deeply About Writ­ing

Google Puts Supreme Court Opin­ions Online

Free Online Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Cours­es

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Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” Slowed Down to 33RPM Sounds Great and Takes on New, Unexpected Meanings

in Gender, Life, Music, Technology | September 7th, 2018

The Wal­rus is… Dol­ly Par­ton?

Not every record yields gold when played back­wards or spun more slow­ly than rec­om­mend­ed, but a 45 of Parton’s 1973 hit “Jolene” played at 33RPM not only sounds won­der­ful, it also man­ages to reframe the nar­ra­tive.

As Andrea Den­Hoed notes in The New York­er, “Slow Ass Jolene,” above, trans­forms Parton’s “baby-high sopra­no” into some­thing deep, soul­ful and seem­ing­ly, male.

In its orig­i­nal ver­sion, the much-cov­ered “Jolene” is a straight up woman-to-woman chest-bar­ing. Our nar­ra­tor knows her man is obsessed with the sexy, auburn-haired Jolene, to the point where he talks about her in his sleep.

Appar­ent­ly she also knows bet­ter than to raise the sub­ject with him. Instead, she appeals to Jolene’s sense of mer­cy:

You could have your choice of men

But I could nev­er love again

He’s the only one for me, Jolene

The song is some­what auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, though the sit­u­a­tion was nowhere near as dire as lis­ten­ers might assume. In an inter­view with NPR, Par­ton recalled a red-haired bank teller who devel­oped a big crush on her hus­band when she was a young bride:

And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much atten­tion. It was kin­da like a run­ning joke between us — when I was say­ing, ‘Hell, you’re spend­ing a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of mon­ey.’ So it’s real­ly an inno­cent song all around, but sounds like a dread­ful one. 

For the record, the teller’s name wasn’t Jolene.

Jolene was a pret­ty lit­tle girl who attend­ed an ear­ly Par­ton con­cert. Par­ton was so tak­en with the child, and her unusu­al name, that she resolved to write a song about her.

Yes, the kid had red hair and green eyes.

Wouldn’t it be wild if she grew up to be a bank teller?

I digress…

In the orig­i­nal ver­sion, the irre­sistible cho­rus where­in the soon-to-be-spurned par­ty invokes Jolene’s name again and again is plain­tive and fierce.

In the slow ass ver­sion, it’s plain­tive and sad.

The pain is the same, but the sit­u­a­tion in much less straight­for­ward, thanks to blur­ri­er gen­der lines.

Par­ton told NPR that women are “always threat­ened by oth­er women, peri­od.”

Jolene’s prodi­gious fem­i­nine assets could also prove wor­ri­some to a gay man whose bisex­u­al lover’s eye is prone to wan­der.

Or maybe the singer and his man live in a place where same sex unions are frowned on. Per­haps the singer’s man craves the com­fort of a more social­ly accept­able domes­tic sit­u­a­tion.

Or per­haps Jolene is one hot female-iden­ti­fied toma­to, and as far as the singer’s man’s con­cerned, his pas­tor and his granny can go to hell! Jolene’s the only one for him.

Or, as one wag­gish Youtube com­menter suc­cinct­ly put it, “Jolene bet­ter stay the hell away from Roy Orbi­son’s man!”

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

I’m beg­ging of you please don’t take my man

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

Please don’t take him just because you can

Your beau­ty is beyond com­pare

With flam­ing locks of auburn hair

With ivory skin and eyes of emer­ald green

Your smile is like a breath of spring

Your voice is soft like sum­mer rain

And I can­not com­pete with you, Jolene

He talks about you in his sleep

There’s noth­ing I can do to keep

From cry­ing when he calls your name, Jolene

And I can eas­i­ly under­stand

How you could eas­i­ly take my man

But you don’t know what he means to me, Jolene

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

I’m beg­ging of you please don’t take my man

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

Please don’t take him just because you can

You could have your choice of men

But I could nev­er love again

He’s the only one for me, Jolene

I had to have this talk with you

My hap­pi­ness depends on you

And what­ev­er you decide to do, Jolene

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

I’m beg­ging of you please don’t take my man

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

Please don’t take him even though you can

Jolene, Jolene

via @WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Feel Strange­ly Nos­tal­gic as You Hear Clas­sic Songs Reworked to Sound as If They’re Play­ing in an Emp­ty Shop­ping Mall: David Bowie, Toto, Ah-ha & More

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Shift­ed from Minor to Major Key, and Radiohead’s “Creep” Moved from Major to Minor

R.E.M.’s “Los­ing My Reli­gion” Reworked from Minor to Major Scale

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 24 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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When Steve Jobs Taught Andy Warhol to Make Art on the Very First Macintosh (1984)

in Art, History, Technology | September 7th, 2018

When Andy Warhol first became famous, few knew what to make of his art. When Apple first released the Mac­in­tosh — dra­mat­i­cal­ly pro­mot­ed with that Rid­ley Scott Super Bowl com­mer­cial — few knew what to make of it either. The year was 1984, when almost nobody had seen a graph­i­cal user inter­face or even a mouse, let alone used them, and the Mac­in­tosh looked as strange and com­pelling when it entered the com­put­ing scene as Warhol did when he entered the art scene. Both seemed so casu­al­ly to repu­di­ate so many long-held assump­tions, an act that tends to star­tle and con­fuse old­er peo­ple but makes imme­di­ate sense to younger ones. What hap­pened, then, when Warhol and the Mac­in­tosh first crossed paths?

Jour­nal­ist David Sheff, who wrote an ear­ly pro­file of Steve Jobs and con­duct­ed the last in-depth inter­view with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, remem­bers it well. In Octo­ber 1984, he and Jobs attend­ed the ninth-birth­day par­ty thrown by Ono for Sean, her son with Lennon. As a present, Jobs brought along one of his com­pa­ny’s new Mac­in­tosh­es and set it up him­self in young Sean’s bed­room. “Sean took con­trol of the mouse, and rolled the small box along the floor,” Sheff writes. “Steve said, ‘Now hold the but­ton down while you move it and see what hap­pens.’ Sean did, and a thin, jagged, black line, appeared on the screen. Sean, entranced, said, ‘Cool!’ He clicked the mouse but­ton, pushed it around, and on the screen appeared shapes and lines, which he erased, and then he drew a sort of lion-camel and then a fig­ure that he said was Boy George.”

Though Boy George may not have been in atten­dance, the par­ty’s unsur­pris­ing­ly fab­u­lous guest list also includ­ed Andy Warhol (an “eccen­tric uncle” to Sean) and Kei­th Har­ing, both of whom Sheff remem­bers com­ing into the room as part of a crowd want­i­ng to catch a glimpse of Sean’s new toy. It was­n’t long before Warhol, pre­sum­ably com­pelled by the artis­tic impulse as well as by his fas­ci­na­tion for all things new, asked if he could give it a try:

Andy took Sean’s spot in front of the com­put­er and Steve showed him how to maneu­ver and click the mouse. Warhol didn’t get it; he lift­ed and waved the mouse, as if it were a conductor’s baton. Jobs gen­tly explained that the mouse worked when it was pushed along a sur­face. Warhol kept lift­ing it until Steve placed his hand on Warhol’s and guid­ed it along the floor. Final­ly Warhol began draw­ing, star­ing at the “pen­cil” as it drew on the screen.

Warhol was spell­bound – peo­ple who knew him know the way he tuned out every­thing extra­ne­ous when he was entranced by what­ev­er it was – glid­ing the mouse, eyes affixed to the mon­i­tor. Har­ing was bent over watch­ing. Andy, his eyes wide, looked up, stared at Har­ing, and said, “Look! Kei­th! I drew a cir­cle!”

In his diary, Warhol writes of enter­ing Sean’s room to find “a kid there set­ting up the Apple com­put­er that Sean had got­ten as a present, the Mac­in­tosh mod­el. I said that once some man had been call­ing me a lot want­i­ng to give me one, but that I’d nev­er called him back or some­thing, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ ” But Jobs, pos­sessed of as keen a pro­mo­tion­al instinct as Warhol’s own, assured him that the offer was still good, and that he would also give him a les­son in draw­ing on the Mac right then and there. “I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it,” writes Warhol, not­ing that “it only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in col­or.”

The Mac­in­tosh made an appear­ance in Warhol’s “Ads” series of paint­ings in 1984, the same year he also agreed, accord­ing to Art­sy’s Abi­gail Cain, “to be a spokesper­son for Apple’s rival in the per­son­al com­put­ing sphere — Com­modore. The artist was to pro­mote the company’s new com­put­er, the Ami­ga 1000, and its cut­ting-edge mul­ti­me­dia capa­bil­i­ties” that includ­ed a 4,096-color dis­play. At the machine’s launch, Warhol “used ProPaint to sketch Blondie lead singer Deb­bie Har­ry in front of a crowd of eager tech enthu­si­asts,” which you can see in the video above. Just a few years ago, the efforts of dig­i­tal artist Cory Arcan­gel and spe­cial­ists at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty recov­ered 28 long-lost dig­i­tal paint­ings Warhol made on his Ami­ga. Whether the artist ever made any­thing with or even took deliv­ery of his promised Mac, we don’t know – or at least we don’t know yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recov­ery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art

Andy Warhol Dig­i­tal­ly Paints Deb­bie Har­ry with the Ami­ga 1000 Com­put­er (1985)

Apple’s Guid­ed Tour to Using the First Mac­in­tosh (1984)

Dis­cov­er the Lost Ear­ly Com­put­er Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Pro­to-Inter­net from the 1970s

Japan­ese Com­put­er Artist Makes “Dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans” in 1964: When Giant Main­frame Com­put­ers Were First Used to Cre­ate Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

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Enter an Archive of William Blake’s Fantastical “Illuminated Books”: The Images Are Sublime, and in High Resolution

in Art, Literature | September 7th, 2018

William Blake earned his place as the patron saint of all free­think­ing out­sider artists. One might say he per­fect­ed the role as he per­fect­ed his art—or his arts rather, since his poet­ry inspires as much awe and acclaim as his vision­ary engrav­ings and illus­tra­tions. Stand­ing astride the Neo­clas­si­cal eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry and the Roman­tic era, Blake reject­ed the ratio­nal­ism and clas­si­cism that sur­round­ed him from birth and devel­oped a prophet­ic style drawn from an ear­li­er age.

He “sought to emu­late the exam­ple of artists such as Raphael, Michelan­ge­lo and Dür­er in pro­duc­ing time­less, ‘Goth­ic’ art, infused with Chris­t­ian spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and cre­at­ed with poet­ic genius,” writes the Met’s Eliz­a­beth Bark­er. (“Blake described his paint­ing tech­nique as ‘fres­co.’) But no one would ever mis­take the works of Blake for any­one oth­er than Blake, with their mus­cu­lar, hero­ic fig­ures, vio­lent­ly expres­sive faces, and tor­tured pos­es.

The William Blake Archive gives us access to a huge sam­pling of Blake’s work, from his book illus­tra­tions to his draw­ings and paint­ings, to his man­u­scripts, etc. The images are high res­o­lu­tion scans that users can add to a light­box, rotate, zoom into, view “true size,” or enlarge.

Per­haps most inter­est­ing are the images, like those here, from Blake’s “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books,” a series of philo­soph­i­cal, reli­gious, and mytho­log­i­cal works com­posed from about 1788 to 1822. The archive con­tains dozens of vari­ant print­ings of these end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing hand-let­tered books.

Becom­ing a furi­ous­ly pro­lif­ic, mys­ti­cal­ly inspired artist while liv­ing in pover­ty and near-obscurity—“considered insane and large­ly dis­re­gard­ed by his peers,” as BBC His­to­ry puts it—required for­ti­tude and almost super­hu­man belief in him­self, espe­cial­ly since his belief sys­tem was large­ly self-cre­at­ed. While Blake con­sid­ered the Bible “the great­est work of poet­ry ever writ­ten,” and its themes and nar­ra­tives spoke to him through­out his career, his own reli­gious ten­den­cies took the form of the mythol­o­gy he elab­o­rat­ed through the fan­tas­ti­cal illu­mi­nat­ed books.

“I must Cre­ate a Sys­tem,” he wrote in Jerusalem, com­posed between 1804 and 1820, “or be enslav’d by anoth­er Mans,” and so he did, invent­ing fig­ures like Los, Urizen (the oppres­sive, sup­pres­sive God of the Old Tes­ta­ment), Albion, the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of Eng­land, and his daugh­ters, Bromion, Oothoon, and Theotor­mon. While work­ing on these unortho­dox projects, he bare­ly “eked out a liv­ing as an engraver and illus­tra­tor” of com­mer­cial books. He also drew and paint­ed sev­er­al Bib­li­cal sub­jects and scenes from lit­er­ary texts by his favorite authors, Mil­ton and Dante.

The illu­mi­nat­ed books, Bark­er writes “rank among Blake’s most cel­e­brat­ed achieve­ments.” Writ­ten “in a range of forms—prophecies, emblems, pas­toral vers­es, bib­li­cal satire, and children’s books,” these eclec­tic works “addressed var­i­ous time­ly subjects—poverty, child exploita­tion, racial inequal­i­ty, tyran­ny, reli­gious hypocrisy.” With lit­er­ary vig­or, moral clar­i­ty, and emo­tion­al insight, Blake harsh­ly cri­tiqued what he saw as the evils of his age, and more­over, offered an alternative—an anti-Enlight­en­ment, rad­i­cal­ly egal­i­tar­i­an, free love vision, com­posed of patch­work ele­ments of the Bible, Mil­ton, Emanuel Swe­den­borg, and pagan and druidic sources.

Two of the most famous of Blake’s illu­mi­nat­ed books show the influ­ence of Milton’s Il Penseroso and L’Allegro, stud­ies in the con­trast of melan­choly and mirth, which Blake once illus­trat­ed. In Blake’s hands, these become Songs of Inno­cence, “the gen­tlest of his lyrics,” writes BBC, and Songs of Expe­ri­ence, “con­tain­ing a pro­found expres­sion of adult cor­rup­tion and repres­sion.” Blake also found in Dante “a seem­ing­ly inex­haustible source of inspi­ra­tion in his own fer­tile mind,” Bark­er explains. But just as he trans­formed his artis­tic influ­ences, he took his lit­er­ary inspi­ra­tions in direc­tions no one else but Blake would think to do. And for that, he remains a sin­gu­lar­ly orig­i­nal artist, peer­less in inven­tive­ness and ded­i­ca­tion to his work.

See the William Blake Archive here. The link to his “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books” from which the images here come is at the top left-hand cor­ner of the archive’s nav bar.

You can pur­chase a copy of William Blake: The Com­plete Illu­mi­nat­ed Books in book for­mat here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

William Blake’s Mas­ter­piece Illus­tra­tions of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

Artists Illus­trate Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Bot­ti­cel­li, Mœbius & More

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

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Watch Willem Dafoe Become Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s New Film, At Eternity’s Gate

in Art, Film | September 6th, 2018

We know Julian Schn­abel for work­ing in two forms: paint­ing and film. His work in both has more con­nec­tion than it might at first seem, since most of his films are about art, or at least about artists. After mak­ing it big in the art world him­self in the late 1970s and 1980s with his sig­na­ture large-scale can­vass­es incor­po­rat­ing a wide vari­ety of mate­ri­als, he got behind the cam­era in 1996 to direct Basquiat, a biopic on the epony­mous graf­fi­ti-artist-turned-painter. In the 2000s he fol­lowed it up with Before Night Falls, about Cuban poet Reinal­do Are­nas, and The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly, about a French mag­a­zine edi­tor turned writer after a stroke left him “locked” inside his own head. (At that same time he also shot a Lou Reed con­cert film, a song from which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.)

Now Schn­abel has brought his film­mak­ing career back to where he start­ed it with anoth­er film about anoth­er painter, a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure in his day, whose influ­ence grew after his ear­ly death. At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate depicts the final days in the life of Dutch Post-Impres­sion­ist Vin­cent van Gogh, cast­ing in the role no less a thes­pi­an than Willem Dafoe, known for play­ing every­one from T.S. Eliot to Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni to Jesus of Nazareth.

Though he has already lived a much longer life than Van Gogh ever did, Dafoe no doubt has the skills to use that in the per­for­mance’s favor, trans­mit­ting the way that the painter saw more deeply into the world around him than any­one else did and got labeled a mad­man for it. And yes, there was also the mat­ter of his ear, from which the trail­er above assures us that Schn­abel’s film does­n’t shy away.

But At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate clear­ly focus­es on Van Gogh’s strug­gle to pur­sue his art, accord­ing to his per­son­al vision, in an unre­cep­tive time and place. “Rather than sim­ply sug­gest that mad­ness and genius are inex­tri­ca­bly linked, as count­less movies of this sort have already done, the film­mak­er por­trays the act of cre­at­ing art as less an action and more a state of being, an ever-flow­ing stream that the man hold­ing the paint­brush is pow­er­less to stop or even con­trol,” writes Indiewire’s Michael Nor­dine. “Watch­ing the artist at work and hear­ing noth­ing but his rapid brush­strokes as the wind howls in the back­ground is med­i­ta­tive, even mes­mer­ic.” Schn­abel’s film fol­lows last year’s Lov­ing Vin­cent, which told Van Gogh’s sto­ry with ani­ma­tion made entire­ly of oil paint­ings. Its suc­cess, and the acclaim that has so far come in for At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate in advance of its wide release in Novem­ber, sup­ports one obser­va­tion in par­tic­u­lar made by Dafoe-as-Van Gogh: “Maybe God made me a painter for peo­ple who aren’t born yet.”

via IndieWire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Near­ly 1,000 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: View/Download the Col­lec­tion

New Ani­mat­ed Film About Vin­cent Van Gogh Will Be Made Out of 65,000 Van Gogh-Style Paint­ings: Watch the Trail­er and Mak­ing-Of Video

Watch as Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Por­trait Morphs Into a Pho­to­graph

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

The Vin­cent Van Gogh Action Fig­ure, Com­plete with Detach­able Ear

Lou Reed Sings “Sweet Jane” Live, Julian Schn­abel Films It (2006)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

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To Make Great Films, You Must Read, Read, Read and Write, Write, Write, Say Akira Kurosawa and Werner Herzog

in Film | September 6th, 2018

I wouldn’t pre­sume to draw many com­par­isons between the work of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wern­er Her­zog. There is, in both direc­tors, a rough, mas­culin­ist dar­ing that ful­ly explores the trag­ic lim­i­ta­tions and bloody con­se­quences of rough, mas­culin­ist dar­ing. This broad the­mat­ic com­mit­ment express­es itself in both artists’ films in wild­ly dif­fer­ent ways. Maybe what most con­nects them, and con­nects them to their ardent fans, is a shared writer­ly sen­si­bil­i­ty. Film may be fore­most a visu­al medi­um, yet—given the weight of thou­sands of years of oral and writ­ten sto­ry­telling that came before it—filmmakers can­not pro­duce great work with­out steep­ing them­selves in lit­er­a­ture.

Or, at least, that’s what both Kuro­sawa and Her­zog have argued—and who would con­tra­dict them? Film­mak­ing is a risky endeav­or in the best of cir­cum­stances. “It costs a great deal of mon­ey to make a film these days,” and becom­ing a direc­tor is “not so eas­i­ly accom­plished,” says Kuro­sawa in his inter­view offer­ing advice to aspir­ing film­mak­ers above. “If you gen­uine­ly want to make films,” he says, “then write screen­plays.” Where did the ideas for his screen­plays come from? From lit­er­a­ture. It’s impor­tant, he says, that film­mak­ers “do a cer­tain amount of read­ing. Unless you have a rich reserve with­in, you can’t cre­ate any­thing.”

Kuro­sawa adapt­ed the 1951 Rashomon, per­haps his most wide­ly acclaimed film, from two short sto­ries by Japan­ese writer Ryūno­suke Aku­ta­gawa, “Rashomon” (1915) and “In a Grove” (1921). 1985’s Ran is famous­ly “an East­ern retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear,” an author from whom Kuro­sawa learned much. He adapt­ed Dos­to­evsky, his favorite writer, in a Japan­ese con­text, and his 1957 film The Low­er Depths adapts a play by Max­im Gorky. Even his films that do not direct­ly trans­late anoth­er writer’s work still draw inspi­ra­tion from lit­er­ary sources. Read­ing leads to writ­ing, and to become an accom­plished film­mak­er, Kuro­sawa says in no uncer­tain terms, you must write.

This advice does not always go over well, he admits. Writ­ing is painful and dif­fi­cult, often a thank­less, unfor­giv­ing task with no imme­di­ate reward. “Still,” he says, para­phras­ing Balzac, “for writ­ers, includ­ing nov­el­ists, the most essen­tial and nec­es­sary thing is the for­bear­ance to face the dull task of writ­ing one word at a time.” One only learns how to do this by doing it—and by immers­ing one­self in the work of oth­ers who have done it. To suc­ceed as a sto­ry­teller, the basis of the director’s art, you must “write, write, write, and read.”

Her­zog, imply­ing the impor­tance of writ­ing more than stat­ing it out­right, begins and ends his advice to young aspi­rants above with the repeat­ed injunc­tion, “read, read, read, read,” and so on. “If you don’t read, you’ll nev­er be a film­mak­er.” Tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions are sec­ondary. Herzog’s Rogue Film School encour­ages stu­dents to “go absolute­ly and com­plete­ly wild”… by read­ing Hem­ing­way, Vir­gil, The Poet­ic Edda, and J.A. Baker’s The Pere­grine. (He also sug­gests The War­ren Com­mis­sion Report and Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s True His­to­ry of the Con­quest of New Spain.) Kuro­sawa does not offer spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tions. He grants that “cur­rent nov­els are fine, but one should read the clas­sics too.” The kinds of sto­ries these film­mak­ers rec­om­mend has much to do with their own tem­pera­ments and inter­ests; what­ev­er you might pre­fer to read in the course of your direc­to­r­i­al train­ing, Her­zog says you must read as much as pos­si­ble, and, Kuro­sawa adds, you must write, write, write, and write some more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Cre­ates Required Read­ing & Movie View­ing Lists for Enrolling in His Film School

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

How Did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Make Such Pow­er­ful & Endur­ing Films? A Wealth of Video Essays Break Down His Cin­e­mat­ic Genius

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies

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

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How Michael Jackson Wrote a Song: A Close Look at How the King of Pop Crafted “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”

in Music | September 6th, 2018

First of all, hap­py belat­ed birth­day to Evan Puschak, the man behind Nerd­writer and some of the best video essays on the web that we often fea­ture here on Open Cul­ture. He recent­ly turned 30, and if you’re in your 20s that’s some elder states­man busi­ness. If you’re old­er, well, remem­ber how you felt when you turned 30? Wouldn’t you want that youth­ful anx­i­ety back?

Any­way, Evan’s gift to us is this appre­ci­a­tion of Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” the break­away hit from his 1979 album Off the Wall, the one that began Jackson’s rise into the stratos­phere, a jour­ney that would end with an iso­lat­ed man chas­ing the dragon’s tail of suc­cess. But that was far off in the future, and though Thriller was the block­buster album, Off the Wall has so much more joy, sex­u­al­i­ty, and heart than what was to come. “Rock with You” and the title track are smooth, soul­ful num­bers, but as Puschak says, “Don’t Stop” is *the* sin­gle off that album, a song that still sounds fresh today, a cross-over pop hit par excel­lence, despite being over­played at every wed­ding recep­tion since the ‘80s. (Even when watch­ing the video for this piece, I found myself clap­ping along, some­thing I rarely do. But it’s just so. damn. catchy.)

So why is that? How does this song work?

Puschak makes a few salient points.

One is that the song comes heav­i­ly indebt­ed to dis­co, yet it is not a dis­co song. The rhythm struc­ture is clos­er to funk than disco–it’s real­ly just a vamp on two chords–and the verse-cho­rus struc­ture is from rock music. It’s “pure dance music,” as Puschak says, quot­ing writer Ann Daniel­son.

Anoth­er point is that the rhythm mix is all about syn­co­pa­tion, with bass, shak­ers, strings, horns, and even a Coke bot­tle (played by Jack­son him­self) fill­ing in the spaces between the beat. (Those that find, say, house music bor­ing can put a lot of it down to the lack of syn­co­pa­tion).

And final­ly, there’s Jackson’s vocals, the top of each verse being two notes in a tri­tone inter­val. The tri­tone has been called the “devil’s inter­val”–there’s a nice video essay here on its his­to­ry–but there’s noth­ing dev­il­ish about Jackson’s falset­to. As Puschak says, quot­ing Ethan Hein, “the rela­tion­ship between these notes is some­what off kil­ter, and your mind notices that. And that infus­es the song with an urgency that it wouldn’t oth­er­wise have.”

Inter­est­ing­ly, the lyrics are not dis­cussed. And prob­a­bly for good reason–apart from the song’s title in the cho­rus, Jackson’s lyrics are sung so high they are inscrutable. Be hon­est, until you read the lyric sheet, did you know what he was singing? My point would be–it doesn’t mat­ter. The point is in the title; the mean­ing is in the mood.

Jack­son would try to catch light­ing in a bot­tle again on Thriller with “You Wan­na Be Startin’ Some­thing,” a pret­ty bla­tant rewrite. It’s still a great sin­gle, but that song, along with “Beat It” start­ed Jack­son along the path of lry­ics about aggres­sion and pos­tur­ing. (A few years lat­er, we’d have “Bad,” “Smooth Crim­i­nal,” and more.)

Hence my point about the mag­ic of Off the Wall–before the fame, before the insan­i­ty, before the “King of Pop” busi­ness, Jack­son was a sen­su­al, androg­y­nous angel sent down to bring love to the dance floor, or your bed­room, and all spaces in between. It didn’t last long, but it’s a beau­ti­ful sin­gle, a beau­ti­ful album, and a beau­ti­ful moment in pop.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear “Starlight,” Michael Jackson’s Ear­ly Demo of “Thriller”: A Ver­sion Before the Lyrics Were Rad­i­cal­ly Changed

The Ori­gins of Michael Jackson’s Moon­walk: Vin­tage Footage of Cab Cal­loway, Sam­my Davis Jr., Fred Astaire & More

Miles Davis Cov­ers Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” (1983)

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.

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Why You Should Read One Hundred Years of Solitude: An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Animation, Books, Literature | September 5th, 2018

Maybe we read some cel­e­brat­ed lit­er­ary works the way we eat kale or quinoa—you don’t exact­ly love it but they say it’s, like, a super­food. Not so Gabriel Gar­cia Marquez’s One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude. When I first start­ed read­ing the nov­el, I couldn’t stop. Twelve hours and a cou­ple pots of cof­fee lat­er, I want­ed to read it again right away. It’s a page-turner—not some­thing one often says of lit­er­ary fic­tion beloved by high­brow crit­ics and academics—but I mean it as the high­est pos­si­ble com­pli­ment.

The book has every fea­ture of a binge-wor­thy soap opera: char­ac­ters we love and love to hate, doomed affairs, sex, vio­lence, end­less fam­i­ly squab­bling, tragedy, intrigue, melo­dra­ma…. Again, this is no crit­i­cism; Mar­quez loved telen­ov­e­las and even wrote a script for one. He want­ed his work to reach as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble, to thrill and enter­tain. But he did­n’t with­hold any lit­er­ary nutri­ents either.

The novel’s poet­ic lan­guage, his­tor­i­cal scope, and the­mat­ic and sym­bol­ic com­plex­i­ty has led crit­ics like William Kennedy to com­pare it to the book of Gen­e­sis, and led no small num­ber of read­ers to wild­ly pre­fer it to the Bible or any oth­er ancient book of mythol­o­gy.

If you’re one of the two or three peo­ple who hasn’t read the nov­el, and you don’t find all this praise ful­ly con­vinc­ing, con­sid­er the case made by Fran­cis­co Díez-Buzo in the TED-Ed ani­mat­ed video above.

The sto­ry, we learn, arrived as an epiphany Mar­quez had while he and his fam­i­ly were on the road to a vaca­tion des­ti­na­tion. He turned the car around, aban­doned the trip, and start­ed writ­ing immediately—an exam­ple of the total com­mit­ment many writ­ers promise them­selves they’ll one day get around to maybe work­ing on. Eigh­teen months and many pots of cof­fee lat­er, One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude appeared, intro­duc­ing a world­wide read­er­ship to Mar­quez, mag­i­cal real­ism, and Latin Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics, and his­to­ry.

Most every read­er now has a vol­ume of Octavio Paz or Pablo Neru­da on the shelf, and nov­els by Mar­quez, Mario Var­gas Llosa, or Isabelle Allende. Before Cien años de soledad arrived, how­ev­er, this was rarely so out­side of Span­ish-speak­ing coun­tries. The nov­el cre­at­ed a glob­al appetite for rich Latin Amer­i­can tra­di­tions of sto­ry­telling and lyri­cal poet­ry. New trans­la­tions from the region began appear­ing every­where.

Like Faulkner’s entire cor­pus com­pressed into one vol­ume, the epic tale of sev­en gen­er­a­tions of Buendías in the fic­tion­al Colom­bian town of Macon­do is vast and sprawl­ing. It “is not an easy book to read,” says Díez-Buzo. Here, as you might expect, I dis­agree. It is hard­er not to read it once you’ve picked it up. But you will need to read it again, and again, and again.

So packed is the book with detail, allu­sion, his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ence, and nar­ra­tive that you could read it for the rest of your life and nev­er exhaust its lay­ers of mean­ing. As Harold Bloom put it, “every page is rammed full of life beyond the capac­i­ty of any sin­gle read­er to absorb… There are no wast­ed sen­tences, no mere tran­si­tions, in this nov­el, and you must notice every­thing at the moment you read it.” Pablo Neru­da called it “the great­est rev­e­la­tion in the Span­ish lan­guage since Don Quixote of Cervantes”—the found­ing text of Span­ish-lan­guage lit­er­a­ture and, indeed, of the nov­el form itself.

The super­nat­ur­al and the sur­re­al suf­fuse each page, rais­ing even mun­dane encoun­ters to a myth­ic dimen­sion, stag­ing his­to­ry as time­less dra­ma, played out over and over again through each gen­er­a­tion. In each rep­e­ti­tion, fan­tas­tic and fatal changes also “pro­duce a sense of his­to­ry,” says Díez-Buzo, “as a down­ward spi­ral the char­ac­ters seem pow­er­less to escape.”

It is this his­to­ry that Mar­quez described, when he accept­ed the Nobel Prize in 1982, as “a bound­less realm of haunt­ed men and his­toric women, whose unend­ing obsti­na­cy blurs into leg­end.” Marquez’s own fam­i­ly his­to­ry, full of “haunt­ed men and his­toric women,” served as a mod­el for his suc­ces­sion of fic­tion­al ances­tors. Latin Amer­i­cans, he said, “have not had a moment’s rest,” yet in the face of colo­nial­ist bru­tal­i­ty, civ­il war, dic­ta­tor­ships, “oppres­sion, plun­der­ing and aban­don­ment,” he declared, “we respond with life.” By some strange act of mag­ic, Mar­quez con­tained all of that life in one extra­or­di­nary nov­el.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s Extra­or­di­nary Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech, “The Soli­tude Of Latin Amer­i­ca,” in Eng­lish & Span­ish (1982)

New Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Dig­i­tal Archive Fea­tures More Than 27,000 Dig­i­tized Let­ters, Man­u­script Pages, Pho­tos & More

Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Describes the Cul­tur­al Mer­its of Soap Operas, and Even Wrote a Script for One

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

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Discover “Journey of the Universe,” a Multimedia Project That Explores Humanity’s Place in the Epic History of the Cosmos

in Astronomy, Books, History | September 5th, 2018

Today we know what no pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion knew: the his­to­ry of the uni­verse and of the unfold­ing of life on Earth. Through the aston­ish­ing achieve­ments of nat­ur­al sci­en­tists world­wide, we now have a detailed account of how galax­ies and stars, plan­ets and liv­ing organ­isms, human beings and human con­scious­ness came to be.

With this knowl­edge, the ques­tion of what role we play in the 14-bil­lion-year his­to­ry of the uni­verse impos­es itself with greater poignan­cy than ever before. In ask­ing our­selves how we will tell the sto­ry of Earth to our chil­dren, we must inevitably con­sid­er the role of human­i­ty in its his­to­ry, and how we con­nect with the intri­cate web of life on Earth.

In Jour­ney of the Uni­verse–a mul­ti­me­dia edu­ca­tion­al project that fea­tures a book, film and free online courses–evolutionary philoso­pher Bri­an Thomas Swimme and his­to­ri­an of reli­gions Mary Eve­lyn Tuck­er pro­vide an ele­gant, sci­ence-based nar­ra­tive to tell this epic sto­ry, lead­ing up to the chal­lenges of our present moment. The authors describe the ori­gins of humans on Earth, how we devel­oped a sym­bol­ic con­scious­ness, and how our abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate using sym­bols make humans a “plan­e­tary pres­ence.”

We are now faced with a new dynamic—one where the sur­vival of the species and entire ecosys­tems depend pri­mar­i­ly on human activ­i­ty, and the choic­es humans make.

Weav­ing togeth­er the find­ings of mod­ern sci­ence togeth­er with endur­ing wis­dom found in the human­is­tic tra­di­tions of the West, Asia, and indige­nous peo­ples, the authors explore cos­mic evo­lu­tion as a pro­found­ly won­drous process based on cre­ativ­i­ty, con­nec­tion, and inter­de­pen­dence, and they envi­sion an unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty for the world’s peo­ple to address the daunt­ing eco­log­i­cal and social chal­lenges of our times.

Devel­oped over sev­er­al decades, and inspired by the authors’ long col­lab­o­ra­tion with Thomas Berry, Jour­ney of the Uni­verse boasts an impres­sive ros­ter of sci­ence advi­sors includ­ing Ursu­la Good­e­nough, Craig Kochel, and Ter­ry Dea­con.

Jour­ney of the Uni­verse is a mul­ti­me­dia edu­ca­tion­al project that includes:

1.) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: A Sto­ry for Our Time Spe­cial­iza­tion avail­able on Cours­era, cre­at­ed by Yale.  This is a col­lec­tion of three Mas­sive Online Open Cours­es that take stu­dents through the sci­en­tif­ic and cul­tur­al cos­mol­o­gy found through­out Jour­ney of the Uni­verse, as well as deep into its lin­eage with cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an and cos­mol­o­gist Thomas Berry:

Course 1: Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: The Unfold­ing of Life

Course 2: Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: Weav­ing Knowl­edge and Action

Course 3: The World­view of Thomas Berry: The Flour­ish­ing of the Earth Com­mu­ni­ty

2) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Film, win­ner of the 2012 San Francisco/Northern Cal­i­for­nia Emmy® Award for best doc­u­men­tary. You can watch the trail­er for the film above

3) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Book, pub­lished by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press. Trans­lat­ed into French, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Ger­man, Turk­ish, Chi­nese, Kore­an, Indone­sian.

4) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Con­ver­sa­tion Series, a twen­ty-part edu­ca­tion­al series inte­grates the per­spec­tives of the sci­ences and the human­i­ties into a retelling of our 13.7 bil­lion year sto­ry. In a series of one-on-one inter­views, sci­en­tists, his­to­ri­ans, and envi­ron­men­tal­ists explore the unfold­ing sto­ry of the uni­verse and Earth and the role of the human in respond­ing to our present chal­lenges.

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Hear Langston Hughes Read His Poetry Over Original Compositions by Charles Mingus & Leonard Feather: A Classic Collaboration from 1958

in Jazz, Music, Poetry | September 5th, 2018

Have you looked up Charles Min­gus late­ly? You should. Min­gus, who died in 1979, has a “lost” album com­ing out—live record­ings made in ‘73, aired on the radio once, then dis­ap­peared into obscu­ri­ty until now. Seems there’s always some­thing new to learn about our favorite jazz musicians—and our favorite jazz poets. New­ly-dis­cov­ered poems from Langston Hugh­es, for exam­ple, appeared a few years back, writ­ten in “depths of the cri­sis” of the Great Depres­sion.

These poems are dark and bit­ter, “some of the harsh­est polit­i­cal verse ever penned by an Amer­i­can,” writes Hugh­es schol­ar Arnold Ram­per­sad. They are not the cel­e­bra­to­ry Hugh­es we read in school. While angry con­ser­v­a­tives and McCarthy­ism may have forced this side of him into hid­ing, in Hugh­es’ view, poet­ry, like jazz, had room for every­thing, whether it be love or rage.

“Jazz is a great big sea,” he wrote in his 1956 essay “Jazz as Com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” The music “wash­es up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat.” His task, in poems like “The Weary Blues” had been to put “jazz into words,” with all of its wild mood swings, lovers’ quar­rels, rapid-fire con­ver­sa­tions, and heat­ed argu­ments.

Through­out his career, Min­gus had been mov­ing in the oth­er direc­tion, tak­ing storms of ideas—angry, melan­choly, joy­ful, etc.—and turn­ing them into sounds. But his music, always “supreme­ly vocal,” notes The Nation’s Adam Shatz, spoke in one way or anoth­er. Min­gus “col­lab­o­rat­ed with poets in East Vil­lage Cof­fee­hous­es” and won his only Gram­my for a piece of writ­ing, the lin­er notes for his 1971 album Let My Chil­dren Hear Music.

For Min­gus, crit­ic Whit­ney Bal­li­ett remarked, jazz “was anoth­er way of talk­ing.” For anoth­er com­pos­er, pianist and jour­nal­ist Leonard Feath­er, lan­guage and music played equal roles. Feath­er, notes Jason Anke­ny, was known both as “the acknowl­edged dean of Amer­i­can jazz crit­ics” and author of “peren­ni­al” stan­dards “Evil Gal Blues,” “Blow­top Blues,” and “How Blue Can You Get?”

Two years after Hugh­es read “Jazz as Com­mu­ni­ca­tion” at the New­port Jazz Fes­ti­val, he col­lab­o­rat­ed with Feather’s All-Star Sex­tet and Min­gus and the Horace Par­lan Quin­tet on an album first released as The Weary Blues. It has recent­ly been re-released by Fin­ger­tips as Harlem in Vogue—22 tracks of Hugh­es read­ing poems like “The Weary Blues,” “Blues at Dawn,” and “Same in Blues/Comment on Curb” (top) over orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions by Feath­er and Min­gus, with six addi­tion­al tracks of Hugh­es read­ing solo and two orig­i­nal songs by Bob Dor­ough with the Bob Dor­ough Quin­tet. (Min­gus plays bass on tracks 11–18.)

You can stream the album in full above (and buy it here). Here, lis­ten to the Poet­ry Foundation’s Cur­tis Fox, jazz musi­cian Charley Ger­ard, and poet Hol­ly Bass dis­cuss the record and Hugh­es’ rela­tion­ship to jazz and blues. Hugh­es’ poems, notes Ger­ard, are “struc­tured just like blues,” their meters, rhymes, and rhythms always invok­ing the sounds of Harlem’s musi­cal scene. In these record­ings, Feath­er and Min­gus trans­pose Hugh­es’ lan­guage into music, just as he had turned jazz into words.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Langston Hugh­es Read Poet­ry from His First Col­lec­tion, The Weary Blues (1958)

Charles Min­gus Explains in His Gram­my-Win­ning Essay “What is a Jazz Com­pos­er?”

Poems as Short Films: Langston Hugh­es, Pablo Neru­da and More

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

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