Watch “A Family Tree,” Jonathan Demme’s 1980s Sitcom Episode with David Byrne & Rosanna Arquette

in Film, Television | May 4th, 2017

It comes as some­thing of a sur­prise to real­ize that the film­mak­er Jonathan Demme, who died last week, nev­er made a tele­vi­sion series of his own. He did, in addi­tion to fea­tures like Some­thing Wild and The Silence of the Lambs and doc­u­men­taries like Stop Mak­ing Sense, direct a few episodes of TV shows as var­ied as Sat­ur­day Night Live and Enlight­ened. But we nev­er got to see a full-on cre­at­ed-by-Demme series that, in this long Gold­en Age of Tele­vi­sion in which we live, could sure­ly have show­cased in an even deep­er way his much-praised inter­est in and empa­thy for human­i­ty. But we can get a sense of how one might have played from “A Fam­i­ly Tree,” the Rosan­na Arquette-star­ring sit­com episode he made in 1987 for the PBS prime-time com­e­dy series Try­ing Times.

Demme, in the words of The New York­er’s Dan Piepen­bring, “direct­ed an ensem­ble com­e­dy about CB-radio enthu­si­asts, a doc­u­men­tary on an Epis­co­palian min­is­ter, and the only episode of Colum­bo to traf­fic in the dra­ma of haute cui­sine. But nev­er did he roam far­ther afield than he does in ‘A Fam­i­ly Tree,’ a pitch-black anti-sit­com about an anx­ious young woman whose desire to belong leads her — per­haps in a nod to Stop Mak­ing Sense — to lit­er­al­ly burn down the house. Fit­ting­ly, David Byrne him­self is there to watch the flames go up, enjoy­ing an impe­ri­ous turn as a cig­ar-puff­ing, pie-hid­ing, rep­tile-obsessed broth­er-in-law.” And who could resist, hav­ing read a descrip­tion like that, giv­ing the episode a watch on Youtube, avail­able there in three parts (watch them above and below)?

The pro­duc­tion cer­tain­ly stood out from the Amer­i­can tele­vi­su­al land­scape of the time. The Chica­go Tri­bune’s TV crit­ic Clif­ford Per­ry, after trash­ing the then-new Full House, described Dem­me’s episode of Try­ing Times, the series’ pre­miere, as “built upon sick humor and a per­va­sive nas­ti­ness,” high­light­ing “an appeal­ing­ly vul­ner­a­ble per­for­mance by Arquette as the harassed out­sider who suf­fers through cig­ar smoke, belch­ing, home­made apple­jack, intra­mur­al bick­er­ing and a bar­rage of insults — as well as her own inep­ti­tude, which results in a series of house­hold dis­as­ters. Fine sup­port is giv­en by Hope Lange as the shrewish moth­er, Robert Ridge­ly as the just-fired father,” and par­tic­u­lar­ly Byrne “as the acer­bic yet bor­ing broth­er-in-law-to-be.”

Ulti­mate­ly, Per­ry judged “A Fam­i­ly Tree” as a “schiz­o­phrenic half-hour” that “veers between the far­ci­cal and the sur­re­al,” which pre­sum­ably was­n’t intend­ed as a straight­for­ward com­pli­ment. Today, how­ev­er, its laugh track-free tone of inti­mate unease and real­ism unapolo­get­i­cal­ly tinged with the bizarre would no doubt win it a con­sid­er­able fol­low­ing. The trib­utes paid to Demme have described him as a mak­er of films well root­ed in their eras and set­tings, but now we know he could make tele­vi­sion thir­ty years ahead of its time as well.

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Jonathan Demme Put Human­i­ty Into His Films: From The Silence of the Lambs to Stop Mak­ing Sense

Jonathan Demme Nar­rates I Thought I Told You To Shut Up!!, a Short Film About the Coun­ter­cul­ture Car­toon Reid Flem­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, 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 a Reading of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Set to Music: Features 100+ Musicians and Readers from Across the World

in Literature, Music | May 4th, 2017

In a post last year on an ambi­tious musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Finnegans Wake, I not­ed that—when most in baf­fle­ment over the Irish writer’s final, seem­ing­ly unin­ter­pretable, work—I turn to Antho­ny Burgess, who not only pre­sumed to abridge the book, but wrote more lucid com­men­tary than any oth­er schol­ar­ly crit­ic or writer­ly admir­er of Joyce. In his study ReJoyce, Burgess described the novel—or whatever-you-call-it—as a “man-made moun­tain… as close to a work of nature as any artist ever got—massive, baf­fling, serv­ing noth­ing but itself, sug­gest­ing a mean­ing but nev­er quite yield­ing any­thing but a frac­tion of it, and yet (like a tree) des­per­ate­ly sim­ple.”

Joyce did seem to aspire to omni­science and the pow­er of god­like cre­ation, to sup­plant the “old father, old arti­fi­cer” he beseech­es at the end of A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man. And if Finnegans Wake is a work of nature, it seems to me that we might approach it like nat­u­ral­ists, look­ing for its inner laws and mech­a­nisms, per­form­ing dis­sec­tions and mount­ing it, flayed open, on dis­play boards.

Or we might approach it like poets, painters, field recordists—like artists, in oth­er words. We might leave its innards intact, and instead rep­re­sent what it does to our minds when we con­front its nigh-inscrutable ontol­ogy.

This lat­ter approach is the one adopt­ed by Way­words and Mean­signs’ lat­est release, which brings togeth­er record­ings from over 100 artists from 15 dif­fer­ent coun­tries—some semi-famous, most thrilling­ly obscure. Joyce’s book, explains project direc­tor Derek Pyle, is “the kind of thing that demands cre­ative approaches—from jazz and punk musi­cians to sound artists and mod­ern com­posers, each per­son hears and per­forms the text in a way that’s total­ly unique and end­less­ly excit­ing.” We first com­ment­ed on the endeav­or two years ago, when it released 31 hours of unabridged Joyce inter­pre­ta­tion. Last year’s sec­ond edi­tion great­ly expand­ed on the singing, read­ing, and exper­i­men­tal noodling of and around Finnegans Wake.

The third edi­tion con­tin­ues what has becom­ing a very fine tra­di­tion, and per­haps one of the most appro­pri­ate respons­es to the nov­el in the 78 years since its pub­li­ca­tion. This release (stream­able above, or on Archive.org) adds to the sec­ond edi­tion a belat­ed con­tri­bu­tion from icon­ic bassist and song­writer Mike Watt (of The Min­ute­men, fIRE­HOSE, and solo fame) and “actor and ‘JoyceGeek” Adam Har­vey. (And a Gum­by-star­ring illus­tra­tion, above, by punk rock cov­er artist Ray­mond Pet­ti­bon). The third unabridged col­lec­tion of inter­pre­ta­tive musi­cal read­ings, fur­ther up, offers con­tri­bu­tions from:

Mer­cury Rev vet­er­ans Jason Sebas­t­ian Rus­so and Paul Dil­lon, Joe Cas­sidy of But­ter­fly Child, Rail­road Earth’s Tim Car­bone and Lewis & Clarke’s Lou Rogai, psych-rock­ers Kin­s­ki, vocal­ist Phil Minton, poet S.A. Grif­fin, trans­la­tor Krzysztof Bart­nic­ki, “krautrock” pio­neer Jean-Hervé Péron of faUSt, British fringe musi­cian Neil Camp­bell, Mar­tyn Bates of Eye­less in Gaza, Lit­tle Spar­ta with Sal­ly Timms (Mekons) and Mar­tin Bill­heimer, com­pos­er Seán Mac Erlaine, indi­etron­i­ca pio­neer Schnei­der TM, and many more.

If some­thing on that list doesn’t grab you, you may have stum­bled into the wrong par­ty. In any case, you’ll find hun­dreds oth­er read­ings, songs, etc. to choose from in the expand­ing three-vol­ume com­pi­la­tion. Or you can lis­ten to it straight through, from the first edi­tion, to the sec­ond, to the third. Like the book, this project cel­e­brates, imi­tates, reflects, and refracts, Way­words and Mean­signs admits entry at any point, and near­ly always charms even as it per­plex­es. The fact that no one can real­ly grasp the slip­pery nature of Finnegans Wake per­haps makes the book, and its best cre­ative inter­pre­ta­tions, all the more gen­uine­ly for every­one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load as a Free Audio Book & Free eBook

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Gets Turned into an Inter­ac­tive Web Film, the Medi­um It Was Des­tined For

H.G. Wells Reads Finnegans Wake & Tells James Joyce: It’s “A Dead End,” “You Have Turned Your Back on Com­mon Men” (1928)

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

Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Explains Why If We Have True Meaning in Our Lives, We Can Make It Through the Darkest of Times

in Philosophy, Psychology | May 3rd, 2017

In one school of pop­u­lar rea­son­ing, peo­ple judge his­tor­i­cal out­comes that they think are favor­able as wor­thy trade­offs for his­tor­i­cal atroc­i­ties. The argu­ment appears in some of the most inap­pro­pri­ate con­texts, such as dis­cus­sions of slav­ery or the Holo­caust. Or in indi­vid­ual thought exper­i­ments, such as that of a famous inven­tor whose birth was the result of a bru­tal assault. There are a great many peo­ple who con­sid­er this think­ing repul­sive, moral­ly cor­ro­sive, and astound­ing­ly pre­sump­tu­ous. Not only does it assume that every ter­ri­ble thing that hap­pens is part of a benev­o­lent design, but it pre­tends to know which cir­cum­stances count as unqual­i­fied goods, and which can be blithe­ly ignored. It deter­mines future actions from a tidy and con­ve­nient sto­ry of the past.

We might con­trast this atti­tude with a more Zen stance, for exam­ple, a rad­i­cal­ly agnos­tic “wait and see” approach to every­thing that hap­pens. Not-know­ing seems to give med­i­tat­ing monks a great deal of seren­i­ty in prac­tice. But the the­o­ry ter­ri­fies most of us. Effects must have caus­es, we think, caus­es must have effects, and in order to pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen next (and there­by save our skins), we must know why we’re doing what we’re doing. The deep impulse is what psy­chol­o­gist and psy­chother­a­pist Vik­tor Fran­kl iden­ti­fies, in his pre-gen­der-neu­tral­ly titled book, as Man’s Search for Mean­ing. Despite the mis­use of this fac­ul­ty to cre­ate neu­rot­ic or dehu­man­iz­ing myths, “man’s search for mean­ing,” writes Fran­kl, “is the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion in his life and not a ‘sec­ondary ratio­nal­iza­tion’ of instinc­tu­al dri­ves.”

Fran­kl under­stood per­fect­ly well how the con­struc­tion of meaning—through nar­ra­tive, art, rela­tion­ships, social fic­tions, etc.—might be per­vert­ed for mur­der­ous ends. He was a sur­vivor of four con­cen­tra­tion camps, which took the lives of his par­ents, broth­er, and wife. The first part of his book, “Expe­ri­ences in a Con­cen­tra­tion Camp,” recounts the hor­ror in detail, spar­ing no one account­abil­i­ty for their actions. From these expe­ri­ences, Fran­kl draws a con­clu­sion, one he explains in the inter­view above in two parts from 1977. “The les­son one could learn from Auschwitz,” he says, “and in oth­er con­cen­tra­tion camps, in the final analy­sis was, those who were ori­ent­ed toward a meaning—toward a mean­ing to be ful­filled by them in the future—were most like­ly to sur­vive” beyond the expe­ri­ence. “The ques­tion,” Fran­kl says, “was sur­vival for what?” (See a short ani­mat­ed sum­ma­ry of Fran­kl’s book below.)

Fran­kl does not excuse the deaths of his fam­i­ly, friends, and mil­lions of oth­ers in his psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ry, which he calls logother­a­py. He cer­tain­ly does not triv­i­al­ize the most unimag­in­able of in-human expe­ri­ences. “We all said to each oth­er in camp,” he writes, “that there could be no earth­ly hap­pi­ness which could com­pen­sate for all we had suf­fered.” But it was not the hope of hap­pi­ness that “gave us courage,” he writes. It was the “will to mean­ing” that looked to the future, not to the past. In Frankl’s exis­ten­tial­ist view, we our­selves cre­ate that mean­ing, for our­selves, and not for oth­ers. Logother­a­py, Fran­kl writes, “defo­cus­es all the vicious-cir­cle for­ma­tions and feed­back mech­a­nisms which play such a great role in the devel­op­ment of neu­roses.” We must acknowl­edge the need to make sense of our lives and fill what Fran­kl called the “exis­ten­tial vac­u­um.” And we alone are respon­si­ble for writ­ing bet­ter sto­ries for our­selves.

To dig deep­er in Fran­kl’s phi­los­o­phy, you can read not only Man’s Search for Mean­ing but also The Will to Mean­ing: Foun­da­tions and Appli­ca­tions of Logother­a­py.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exis­ten­tial­ist Psy­chol­o­gist Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains How to Find Mean­ing in Life, No Mat­ter What Chal­lenges You Face

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

Albert Camus’ His­toric Lec­ture, “The Human Cri­sis,” Per­formed by Actor Vig­go Mortensen

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

A Three-Minute Introduction to Buckminster Fuller, One of the 20th Century’s Most Productive Design Visionaries

in Design, Technology | May 3rd, 2017

Archi­tect, inven­tor, the­o­rist, and all-around fount of ideas Buck­min­ster Fuller came up with many new things, though most of us asso­ciate him with one above all: geo­des­ic domes. Those dis­tinc­tive hemi­spher­ic struc­tures built out of strong tri­an­gu­lar parts, hav­ing gone in and out of vogue over the decades, most recent­ly reap­peared in the zeit­geist as the type of lodg­ing promised to the atten­dees of the ill-con­ceived Fyre Fes­ti­val — an ultra-lux­u­ry mar­ket-tar­get­ed dis­as­ter not rep­re­sen­ta­tive, safe to say, of the world Fuller spent his entire career try­ing to real­ize. His vision of a future for “Space­ship Earth,” as he called it, drove him to cre­ate all he cre­at­ed, from new maps to new hous­es to new cars to new sleep­ing meth­ods. But what did he base that vision on?

“Fuller’s phi­los­o­phy could be best sum­ma­rized as being a social thinker, believ­ing that human­i­ty’s sur­vival is con­tin­gent upon how it man­ages Space­ship Earth and the resources it con­tains,” says the nar­ra­tor of the three-minute Proso­cial Progress Foun­da­tion primer above, “and that cre­at­ing abun­dance whilst doing lit­tle to no harm to the envi­ron­ment would help to alle­vi­ate a lot of the prob­lems in the world today.”

With every project he empha­sized “sys­tems think­ing,” or think­ing premised on “the idea that the world is an inter­con­nect­ed sys­tem with inter­con­nect­ed prob­lems, and that a way to solve these prob­lems would be to call upon col­lec­tive action.” We’d all have to work togeth­er, in his view, to solve the prob­lems we suf­fer togeth­er.

That notion may strike us as utopi­an even today, and indeed, most of Fuller’s inven­tions only saw lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion dur­ing his life­time. But the label of utopi­an, which sug­gests a dis­re­gard for the rig­ors of real­i­ty, does­n’t quite fit the man him­self, so much con­cern did he have for prac­ti­cal­i­ties like the effi­cient allo­ca­tion of resources, quick con­struc­tion and deploy­ment, and ease of use. But giv­en the dystopi­an terms we’ve increas­ing­ly come to use to describe events here on Space­ship Earth, maybe we need a Fuller-style prac­ti­cal utopi­anism now more than ever. If these three min­utes have giv­en you a taste for more of the details, have a look at Fuller’s video lec­ture series Every­thing I Know — but make sure to clear 42 hours of your cal­en­dar first. The future of human­i­ty may depend on it!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Buck­min­ster Fuller Tell Studs Terkel All About “the Geo­des­ic Life”

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, 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.

Watch a Reading of Steve Bannon’s Screenplay Which Attempted to Turn Shakespeare’s Coriolanus Into a Rap Musical

in Media | May 3rd, 2017

Some­where between work­ing at Gold­man Sachs, and call­ing the shots for Bre­it­bart and Don­ald Trump, the Volde­mor­t­ian Steve Ban­non went to Hol­ly­wood and made 18 films, many of them polit­i­cal. Described “as the Leni Riefen­stahl of the Tea Par­ty move­ment” (by Andrew Bre­it­bart him­self), Ban­non helped pro­duce the Ronald Rea­gan doc­u­men­tary In the Face of Evil and Fire from the Heart­land: The Awak­en­ing of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Woman. But he’s per­haps best known for writ­ing a treat­ment for the nev­er-made doc­u­men­tary, Destroy­ing the Great Satan: The Rise of Islam­ic Fas­cism in Amer­i­ca. The eight page draft, writes The Wash­ing­ton Post, pro­posed “a three-part movie that would trace ‘the cul­ture of intol­er­ance’ behind sharia law, exam­ine the ‘Fifth Col­umn’ made up of ‘Islam­ic front groups’ and iden­ti­fy the Amer­i­can enablers paving ‘the road to this unique hell on earth.’ ” Look­ing back, it’s no won­der that Ban­non tried to engi­neer a ban of Mus­lims immi­grants upon enter­ing the White House.

For any­one inter­est­ed in revis­it­ing anoth­er unre­al­ized Ban­non pro­duc­tion, you can now watch (above) a table read of his screen­play for The Thing I Am. Co-writ­ten with Julia Jones dur­ing the late 1990s, it’s a “rap musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Shakespeare’s Cori­olanus set in South Cen­tral Los Ange­les dur­ing the 1992 riots after the LAPD beat­ing of Rod­ney King.” Put togeth­er by an orga­ni­za­tion called Now This, the read fea­tures Rob Corddry, Lucas Neff, Parvesh Cheena, Daniele Gaither, Gary Antho­ny Williams, Char­lie Carv­er, Cedric Yarbor­ough, and hip hop artist A.J. Crew. And, as the web­site Refinery29 warns, it’s “full of cussing, the n‑word, and men­tions of crotch grabs.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sin­clair Lewis’ Chill­ing Play, It Can’t Hap­pen Here: A Read-Through by the Berke­ley Reper­to­ry The­atre

A Free Course from Yale on the U.S. Civ­il War: Because Trump Just Gave Us Anoth­er Teach­able Moment

A Hypnotic Look at How Japanese Samurai Swords Are Made

in History | May 2nd, 2017

Paper, books, wood­en joints, tea whisks — Japan­ese cul­ture has, for seem­ing­ly all of its long record­ed his­to­ry, great­ly esteemed the mak­ing of objects. But no one object rep­re­sents the Japan­ese ded­i­ca­tion to crafts­man­ship, and with­in that the eter­nal pur­suit of approach­able but nev­er quite attain­able per­fec­tion, than the sword. You can see what it takes to make a katana, the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese sword of the kind car­ried by the armed mil­i­tary class of the samu­rai between rough­ly the 8th and 19th cen­turies, in the 26-minute video above, which offers a close look at each stage of the sword­mak­ing process: the Shin­to bless­ing of the forge, the ham­mer­ing of the red-hot met­al, the tem­per­ing of the fresh­ly shaped blade, the con­struc­tion of the scab­bard and hilt, the final assem­bly, and every painstak­ing step in between.

Orig­i­nal­ly pro­duced for the Unit­ed King­dom’s Nation­al Muse­um of Arms and Armour and Port­land Art Muse­um’s col­lab­o­ra­tive 2013 spe­cial exhi­bi­tion “Samu­rai! Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Bar­bi­er-Mueller Col­lec­tion,” the video’s word­less but cer­tain­ly not silent por­tray­al of this ancient and con­tin­u­ing prac­tice has a kind of hyp­not­ic qual­i­ty.

But if you’d like a more ver­bal expla­na­tion to accom­pa­ny your views of the mak­ing of a tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese sword, you’ll get it in the 50-minute doc­u­men­tary above, The Secret World of the Japan­ese Sword­smith, a por­trait of the high­ly respect­ed Yoshin­do Yoshi­hara, one of only thir­ty full-time sword­smiths cur­rent­ly prac­tic­ing in Japan. If you then feel up to a Japan­ese sword­smithing triple-bill, give Samu­rai Sword: Mak­ing of a Leg­end a watch as well.

This 50-minute pro­gram tells the sto­ry of the katana itself, begin­ning with this breath­less nar­ra­tion: “For over one thou­sand years, one weapon has dom­i­nat­ed the bat­tle­fields of Japan, a weapon so fear­some that it can split a man from throat to groin — yet it spawned an an entire­ly new art form and spir­i­tu­al way of life. A sword so tech­no­log­i­cal­ly per­fect in struc­ture, so beau­ti­ful in cre­ation, that it gave rise to an aris­to­crat­ic war­rior creed.” It also gave rise to no small num­ber of samu­rai movies, a tra­di­tion that many a cinephile among us can cer­tain­ly appre­ci­ate. Though inex­tri­ca­bly tied to a spe­cif­ic time and place in his­to­ry, and an even more spe­cif­ic class that arose from the pecu­liar polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances of that time and place, the katana con­tin­ues to fas­ci­nate — and in this dig­i­tal, hands-free age, its mak­ers draw a more intense kind of respect than ever.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Japan­ese Crafts­man Spends His Life Try­ing to Recre­ate a Thou­sand-Year-Old Sword

Female Samu­rai War­riors Immor­tal­ized in 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Pho­tos

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, 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.

How the Soviets Imagined in 1960 What the World Would Look in 2017: A Gallery of Retro-Futuristic Drawings

in Sci Fi | May 2nd, 2017

In one of the most impas­sioned and beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten defens­es of Burkean con­ser­vatism I have ever read, the poet Wen­dell Berry took gov­ern­ment projects of both the left and right to task, pro­claim­ing in 1968 that the emer­gence of a mas­sive bureau­cra­cy was a trag­ic sign of the “loss of the future.” His argu­ment is sim­i­lar to one made over twen­ty years ear­li­er by the Trot­sky­ist-turned-con­ser­v­a­tive writer James Burn­ham, whose 1941 book The Man­age­r­i­al Rev­o­lu­tion pre­dict­ed “at each point,” wrote George Orwell in a thor­ough review, “a con­tin­u­a­tion of the thing that is hap­pen­ing.” A “man­age­r­i­al” cen­tral state, Burn­ham also argued, inevitably brought about a “loss of the future.”

Nei­ther the con­tem­pla­tive Berry nor the inci­sive Burn­ham have been able to account for one his­tor­i­cal­ly inescapable fact: the peri­ods in which 20th cen­tu­ry soci­eties imag­ined the future most vivid­ly were those most dom­i­nat­ed by bureau­crat­ic, tech­no­crat­ic, cen­tral­ized polit­i­cal economies. This is true under con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ments like that of the U.S. under Eisen­how­er, in which huge infra­struc­ture projects—from the high­way sys­tem to hydro­elec­tric dams— rearranged the lives of mil­lions.

And it was true under Khrushchev’s Sovi­et state, whose Vir­gin Lands cam­paign did the same. Indeed, mid-cen­tu­ry Sovi­et “expec­ta­tions were pret­ty sim­i­lar to the futur­is­tic pre­dic­tions of Amer­i­cans,” writes Matt Novak, “with a touch more Com­mu­nism, of course.” Unsur­pris­ing, per­haps, giv­en that the two nations were locked in com­pe­ti­tion over the dom­i­na­tion of both earth and space.

Novak’s under­state­ment is ful­ly war­rant­ed. Although the peo­ple in images like those you see here tend to appear in more col­lec­tive arrange­ments, their sci-fi sur­round­ings almost mir­ror those in the images from the U.S. that were par­o­died by The Jet­sons two years after this 1960 col­lec­tion. These detailed sce­nar­ios come from a “retro-futur­is­tic film­strip, which would have been played through a Diafilm,” a kind of slide pro­jec­tor. It’s a vision, it just so hap­pens, of our time, 2017, but it looks back­ward to get there, both in its tech­nol­o­gy and its design. The illus­tra­tion above, for exam­ple, “was almost cer­tain­ly inspired by the Futu­ra­ma exhib­it from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.” (Itself built, we may note, on the shoul­ders of Roosevelt’s New Deal.)

You can see many more of these illus­tra­tions at Pale­o­fu­ture, and at the top of the post watch a video ver­sion with “jazzy music and star wipes.” You may find these visions quaint, charm­ing in their naiveté and inaccuracy—yet often quaint­ly pre­scient as well. Retro-futurism’s appeal to us seems to rest prin­ci­pal­ly in how sil­ly it can seem in hind­sight, even when it gets things right. Per­haps it is the case that the most ful­ly-real­ized, total­iz­ing visions of tomor­row are as far-fetched as the con­trol­ling soci­eties that pro­duce them are unsus­tain­able. As Bob Dug­gan writes at Big Think, for exam­ple, we are bound to asso­ciate the “undead art move­ment” of Ital­ian Futur­ism with the very short-lived regime of Ital­ian Fas­cism. Maybe the degree to which a gov­ern­ment lacks a future is in inverse pro­por­tion to the inten­si­ty of its retro-futur­ism.

So what exact­ly is the rela­tion­ship between state pow­er and utopi­an futur­ism? The ques­tion invites a dis­ser­ta­tion, and sure­ly many have been writ­ten, as they have on the symp­to­mol­o­gy of the tech­no-dystopi­an and urban apoc­a­lyp­tic forms of futur­ism. We might begin by won­der­ing what our actu­al 2017 will look like 57 years from now. What will peo­ple in 2074 make of our end­less cul­ture of revival­ism, from zom­bie steam­punk to retreads and remakes of every­thing from Ghost in the Shell, to The Matrix, to Star Wars? Who can say. Per­haps, for what­ev­er soci­o­log­i­cal rea­son, we are suf­fer­ing, as Berry put it, from a loss of the future.

via Pale­o­fu­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Artists Envi­sion a Com­mu­nist Utopia in Out­er Space

“Glo­ry to the Con­querors of the Uni­verse!”: Pro­pa­gan­da Posters from the Sovi­et Space Race (1958–1963)

Down­load 144 Beau­ti­ful Books of Russ­ian Futur­ism: Mayakovsky, Male­vich, Khleb­nikov & More (1910–30)

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

A Free Course from Yale on the U.S. Civil War

in History | May 2nd, 2017

If there’s a sil­ver lin­ing to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, it’s that it pro­vides some teach­able moments for his­to­ri­ans and stu­dents. Just days after the inau­gu­ra­tion, Trump com­ment­ed at a cel­e­bra­tion of Black His­to­ry Month, “Fred­er­ick Dou­glass is an exam­ple of some­body who’s done an amaz­ing job and is get­ting rec­og­nized more and more, I notice.” Enter the his­to­ri­ans, who quick­ly remind­ed us that the great abo­li­tion­ist, ora­tor and writer had died back in 1895. There’s no present tense here, only past.

And now there’s this: Yes­ter­day, the pres­i­dent spec­u­lat­ed in an odd inter­view that the Civ­il War could have been avert­ed if Andrew Jack­son had been there to stop it:

I mean, had Andrew Jack­son been a lit­tle lat­er, you would­n’t have had the Civ­il War. He was a very tough per­son, but he had a big heart, and he was real­ly angry that he saw what was hap­pen­ing with regard to the Civ­il War. He said, “There’s no rea­son for this.” Peo­ple don’t real­ize, you know, the Civ­il War, you think about it, why?

His­to­ri­ans were quick to point out that Jack­son end­ed his pres­i­den­cy in 1837 and died in 1845–respectively, 24 and 16 years before the start of the Civ­il War. How Jack­son would have han­dled the lead up to the Civ­il War is pure spec­u­la­tion. Just as it would be spec­u­la­tion to say how FDR or Tru­man would have dealt with the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis.

David Blight, a Yale his­to­ri­an and expert on slav­ery and the Civ­il War, had a bit stronger reac­tion to Trump’s com­ments, telling Moth­er Jones:

So he real­ly said this about Jack­son and the Civ­il War? All I can say to you is that from day one I have believed that Don­ald Trump’s great­est threat to our soci­ety and to our democ­ra­cy is not nec­es­sar­i­ly his author­i­tar­i­an­ism, but his essen­tial ignorance—of his­to­ry, of pol­i­cy, of polit­i­cal process, of the Con­sti­tu­tion. Say­ing that if Jack­son had been around we might not have had the Civ­il War is like say­ing that one strong, aggres­sive leader can shape, pre­vent, move his­to­ry how­ev­er he wish­es. This is sim­ply 5th grade under­stand­ing of his­to­ry or worse.

Today, as with the past, Trump seems to be fig­ur­ing out (the hard way) that one per­son can’t change the course of a nation by force of will–not when there are so many oth­er forces and play­ers that shape things. A lot of hubris and inflat­ed rhetoric came into White House in Jan­u­ary. Whether Trump is actu­al­ly learn­ing the physics of pol­i­tics remains to be seen.

But here’s one thing you don’t have to wait for. David Blight has made avail­able a free course on the Civ­il War. In 27 lec­tures, his course “explores the caus­es, course, and con­se­quences of the Amer­i­can Civ­il War, from the 1840s to 1877,” look­ing at how the Unit­ed States was trans­formed on mul­ti­ple lev­els: racial­ly, social­ly, polit­i­cal­ly, con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly and moral­ly. You can access the 27 free lec­tures, pre­sent­ed in audio and video, via YouTube, iTunes, and the Yale web site (plus a syl­labus). We also have it on the list of our Free His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

Ani­mat­ed Map Lets You Watch the Unfold­ing of Every Day of the U.S. Civ­il War (1861–1865)

“The Civ­il War and Recon­struc­tion,” a New MOOC by Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning His­to­ri­an Eric Fon­er

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle (A Free Course from Stan­ford)

Why Should We Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace (and Finish It)? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case

in Literature | May 1st, 2017

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy’s epic nov­el of Rus­sia in the Napoleon­ic wars, has for some time borne the unfor­tu­nate, if mild­ly humor­ous, cul­tur­al role as the ulti­mate unread doorstop. (At least before David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s Infi­nite Jest or Karl Ove Knaus­gaard’s My Strug­gle.) The daunt­ing length and com­plex­i­ty of its nar­ra­tive can seem unique­ly for­bid­ding, though it’s equaled or exceed­ed in bulk by the books of ear­ly Eng­lish nov­el­ist Samuel Richard­son or lat­er mas­ter­works by the Ger­man Robert Musil and French Mar­cel Proust (not to men­tion the 8,000 page, 27-vol­ume roman Men of Good­will by Jules Romains.)

But where it may be nec­es­sary in cer­tain cir­cles to have a work­ing knowl­edge of À la recherche du temps per­du’s “madeleine moment,” one needn’t have read every vol­ume of the painstak­ing work to get the main fla­vor for this ref­er­ence. Tolstoy’s nov­el, on the oth­er hand, is all of a piece, an oper­at­ic text of so many dis­parate threads that it’s near­ly impos­si­ble to fol­low only one of them. And “any­one who tells you that you can skip the ‘War’ parts and only read the ‘Peace’ parts is an idiot,” writes Philip Hen­sh­er at The Guardian. (Now he tells me….) Hen­sh­er also swears one can read War and Peace “in 10 days max­i­mum.” Very like­ly, if you approach it with­out fear or prej­u­dice, and take some vaca­tion time. (But “could you read War and Peace in a week,” Tim Dowl­ing teased in those same pages?)

Tolstoy’s mas­sive psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait of Tsarist Rus­sia in thrall to the French emper­or remains a cor­ner­stone of world, and of course, Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture. With­out it, there may have been no Doc­tor Zhiva­go or August 1914. “War and Peace is a long book, sure,” con­cedes the TED-Ed video above from Bren­dan Pel­sue, “but it’s also a thrilling exam­i­na­tion of his­to­ry, pop­u­lat­ed with some of the deep­est, most real­is­tic char­ac­ters you’ll find any­where.” Like most hulk­ing nov­els of the peri­od, the book was orig­i­nal­ly seri­al­ized in a magazine—the pre-HBO means of dis­sem­i­nat­ing com­pelling drama—but Tol­stoy had not intend­ed for it to grow to such a length or take up five years of his life. One story—that of the Decembrists—led to anoth­er. Grand, sweep­ing views of his­to­ry emerged from exam­i­na­tions of “the small lives that inhab­it those events.”

Pel­sue makes a per­sua­sive rhetor­i­cal case, but also—for most type‑A, over-employed, or high­ly dis­tractible read­ers, at least—inadvertently makes the coun­ter­ar­gu­ment. There are no main char­ac­ters in the book. No Anna Karen­i­na or Ivan Ilyich to fol­low from start to bit­ter end. “Instead, read­ers enter a vast inter­lock­ing web of rela­tion­ships and ques­tions” about the nature of love and war. Maybe you’ve already got one of those—like—in all the time you spend not read­ing nov­els. So (snaps fin­gers), what’s the pay­off? The upshot? The “made­line moment”? (No offense to Proust.) Well, no one can—or should attempt to—summarize a com­plex lit­er­ary work in such a way that we don’t need to read it for our­selves. Nor, can any inter­pre­ta­tion be in any way defin­i­tive. To his cred­it Pel­sue doesn’t try for any­thing of the kind.

Instead, he offers up Tolstoy’s “large, loose bag­gy mon­ster,” in Hen­ry James’ famous­ly dis­mis­sive phrase, not as a nov­el, nor, as Tol­stoy coun­tered, an epic poem or his­tor­i­cal chron­i­cle, but as a dis­tinct­ly Russ­ian form of lit­er­a­ture and “the sum total of Tolstoy’s imag­i­na­tive pow­ers, and noth­ing less.” A blurb that needs some work? We’re only going to miss the point unless we meet the work itself, whether we read it over 10 days or 10 years. The same can be said for so many epic works that lazy peo­ple like… well, all of us at times… com­plain about. There is absolute­ly no sub­sti­tute for read­ing Moby Dick from start to fin­ish at least twice, I’ve told peo­ple with such con­vic­tion they’ve rolled their eyes, snort­ed, and almost kicked me, but I haven’t myself been able to digest all of War and Peace, nor even pre­tend­ed to. Tolstoy’s great­est work has sad­ly come to most of us as a book it’s per­fect­ly okay to skim (or watch the movie).

It’s a frus­trat­ing work, some­times bor­ing and dis­agree­able, didac­tic and annoy­ing. It has “the worst open­ing sen­tence of any major nov­el,” opines Philip Hen­sh­er, and “the very worst clos­ing sen­tence by a coun­try mile.” And it is also per­haps, “the best nov­el ever written—the warmest, the round­est, the best sto­ry and the most inter­est­ing.” Tol­stoy not only enter­tains, but he accom­plish­es his inten­tion, argues Alain de Bot­ton, of increas­ing his read­ers’ “emo­tion­al intel­li­gence.” I wouldn’t take anyone’s word for it. We are free to reject Tol­stoy, as Tol­stoy him­self reject­ed Shake­speare, call­ing the ven­er­a­tion of the Bard “a great evil.” But we’d have to read him first. There must be some good rea­sons why peo­ple who have actu­al­ly read War and Peace to the end refuse to let the rest of us for­get it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Leo Tol­stoy, and How His Great Nov­els Can Increase Your Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence

Tol­stoy Calls Shake­speare an “Insignif­i­cant, Inartis­tic Writer”; 40 Years Lat­er, George Orwell Weighs in on the Debate

Watch War and Peace: The Splen­did, Epic Film Adap­ta­tion of Leo Tolstoy’s Grand Nov­el (1969)

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

An Aging Louis Armstrong Sings “What a Wonderful World” in 1967, During the Vietnam War & The Civil Rights Struggle

in Jazz, Life, Music | May 1st, 2017

It’s not uncom­mon to have a knee jerk response to Bob Thiele and George David Weiss’ now-ubiq­ui­tous “What a Won­der­ful World.”

The qual­i­ty of your reac­tion is like­ly deter­mined by your world­view.

A misty-eyed bride-to-be brows­ing tunes for her upcom­ing reception’s father-daugh­ter dance will not be com­ing at things from the same angle as the direc­tors of Bowl­ing for Columbine, Good Morn­ing, Viet­nam, and—unexpectedly—Mada­gas­car.

The first ver­sion, sung by an aging Louis Arm­strong, remains defin­i­tive, though it was dis­missed at first by record execs, who hoped for anoth­er rol­lick­ing chart top­per along in the “Hel­lo, Dol­ly!” mod­el.

As Jack Doyle notes on the Pop His­to­ry Dig, Arm­strong dug the song, and per­formed it often, hop­ing to strike a chord of hope and opti­mism dur­ing a peri­od of great civ­il unrest:

Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it, and all I’m say­ing is: see what a won­der­ful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love, baby, love.  That’s the secret…

The song’s white authors shared his view, and hoped his crossover appeal would pro­mote feel­ings of racial har­mo­ny on all sides of the record-buy­ing pub­lic. It was a hit in the UK, but a slow starter in the US, not real­ly catch­ing on until its appear­ance on Good Morn­ing, Viet­nam’s sound­track (1987).

Half a cen­tu­ry after its release, “What a Won­der­ful World” has entered the pan­theon, as any­one with a tele­vi­sion and ears can attest.

Its sim­ple lyrics involv­ing ros­es, rain­bows, and babies have result­ed in a num­ber of hideous­ly syrupy cov­ers. With so many choic­es, it’s almost impos­si­ble to pick a least-favorite. Their gooey­ness does a dis­ser­vice to the pow­er of the orig­i­nal.

What’s so poignant about the per­for­mance, above, are the moments where the dark­ness cuts through the trea­cle, ever so briefly. Check out Armstrong’s expres­sions at :25, :50, and 1:49, and inter­pret it how you will.

It’s worth not­ing that the night­ly news was monop­o­lized by reports of the war in Viet­nam and the strug­gle for civ­il rights at home. Arm­strong’s health was in decline. The real­i­ties of his own New Orleans child­hood were far more com­plex than the cray­on-bright vision paint­ed by the lyrics.

A mon­tage of bomb­ings and peace­ful demon­stra­tors being stomped under­foot would’ve seemed pre­ma­ture at such an ear­ly stage in the song’s his­to­ry, so Arm­strong smiled through, as he laid the ground­work for lat­er per­form­ers’ lay­ered inter­pre­ta­tions. Some of the ones we find most com­pelling are below:

Nick Cave & the Pogues’ Shane Mac­Gowan unhap­pi­ness has them reel­ing off their stools, even as they shake hands to com­ic effect.

Ministry’s sin­is­ter take opens with a love­ly lone­ly piano that, like the listener’s eardrums, gets plowed under by a mas­sive attack of indus­tri­al noise.

Joey Ramone had already been diag­nosed with the can­cer that cut his life short when he record­ed his ver­sion, that ends on a note of unabashed pop-punk joy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Clean­est Record­ings of 1920s Louis Arm­strong Songs You’ll Ever Hear

The Only Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong in a Record­ing Stu­dio: Watch the Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered Film (1959)

“What a Won­der­ful World,” Louis Armstrong’s Clas­sic, Per­formed with Tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese Instru­ments

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