Hear Alec Guinness (The Legend Behind Obi-Wan Kenobi) Read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets & The Waste Land

in Poetry | January 4th, 2016

Those who only know T.S. Eliot from such ear­ly poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land may be sur­prised to encounter what many crit­ics con­sid­er his great­est work, the Four Quar­tets. The Eliot of the ear­li­er, bet­ter-known poems alter­nates between mock­ing dis­sec­tion and trag­ic lamen­ta­tion for the sup­posed cul­tur­al decay of the West; in The Waste Land espe­cial­ly, Eliot draws upon his con­sid­er­able eru­di­tion to col­lapse cen­turies of poet­ic and reli­gious text into shards of mod­ernist inge­nu­ity and sharp frag­ments of despair­ing irony. The Four Quar­tets, on the oth­er hand—first pub­lished in 1943, though writ­ten sep­a­rate­ly over a peri­od of six years—-attempts to uni­fy tra­di­tions, in ways both more earnest and more oblique than read­ers of Eliot had seen before.

The cen­tral theme tying togeth­er the four poems—“Burnt Nor­ton,” “East Cok­er,” “The Dry Sal­vages,” and “Lit­tle Gidding”—is time: as eter­ni­ty, as empti­ness, as a waste­land of words and ges­tures with­out mean­ing or pur­pose. “If all time is eter­nal­ly present / All time is unre­deemable,” the poet argues in “Burnt Nor­ton,” and he goes on to illus­trate ideas drawn from St. Augus­tine, the Chris­t­ian mys­tics, and the Upan­ishads. Although, as George Orwell wrote in a review, the poems “appear on the sur­face to be about… cer­tain local­i­ties in Eng­land and Amer­i­ca with which Mr. Eliot has ances­tral con­nex­ions,” they also serve as a philo­soph­i­cal apolo­gia for his deep­en­ing Anglo-Catholi­cism. Orwell, how­ev­er, doubt­ed Eliot’s reli­gious sin­cer­i­ty; “there is faith” in the poems, he wrote, “but not much hope, and cer­tain­ly no enthu­si­asm.”

Yet much of the appeal of the Four Quar­tets to those of a mys­ti­cal bent comes from the poems’ enact­ing of a med­i­ta­tive faith, how­ev­er ten­u­ous, held amidst tumults of mean­ing­less activ­i­ty and a chill­ing sense of cul­tur­al ener­va­tion. (One preg­nant phrase from “Burnt Nor­ton” inspired the title of a book on Zen and Chris­t­ian mys­ti­cism.) Eliot’s con­ser­vatism may pre­vent him from imag­in­ing any sort of world­ly human progress, but gen­er­a­tions of read­ers have seen in the Four Quar­tets the pro­found­est med­i­ta­tion on a spir­i­tu­al jour­ney, and it is per­haps in those late poems, writ­ten in the poet’s mid­dle age, that Eliot comes clos­est to his per­son­al lit­er­ary hero, Dante, who entered the dark wood in the Can­to I of The Infer­no while “halfway along life’s path.”

In a pre­vi­ous post on the Four Quar­tets, we fea­tured Eliot him­self read­ing the poems, and Mike Springer offered some help­ful con­text on their set­tings. Above, we have the rare treat of a read­ing by Sir Alec Guin­ness. Record­ed in 1971—six years before Guin­ness donned Obi-Wan Kenobi’s robes—we hear in his read­ing the grav­i­tas that made his Star Wars Jedi guru seem so wise and weary (though appar­ent­ly he did not rel­ish that role). As an added bonus, below, hear an audio pro­duc­tion of The Waste Land with clips of read­ings by Guin­ness, Ted Hugh­es, Fiona Shaw, Eliot him­self, and more.

It’s inter­est­ing to hear these audio ren­di­tions of the late and ear­ly poems side-by-side: Four Quar­tets held togeth­er by the sin­gu­lar sooth­ing voice of Guin­ness, The Waste Land split apart into the mul­ti­ple voic­es of its var­i­ous char­ac­ters. (Eliot orig­i­nal­ly titled the poem “He Do the Police in Dif­fer­ent Voic­es.”) Click here to hear Eliot him­self read The Waste Land, his high mod­ernist mas­ter­work of despair and epic ennui.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Read the Entire Com­ic Book Adap­ta­tion of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Lis­ten to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Mas­ter­piece, the Four Quar­tets

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

See The Empire Strikes Back as a Silent Film — Precisely How George Lucas Imagined the Star Wars Films

in Film, Sci Fi | January 4th, 2016

The rush to rank the lat­est Star Wars movie The Force Awak­ens against its pre­de­ces­sors has got the series’  legions of fans look­ing back with even more scruti­ny than usu­al at those six chap­ters of this appar­ent­ly nev­er-end­ing cin­e­mat­ic space opera. While Star Wars fans have been known to argue amongst them­selves, quite a few of them do agree on cer­tain broad­er points of assess­ment: about as many of them call 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back as the best of the bunch as call 1999’s The Phan­tom Men­ace the worst. (The worst Star Wars movie, the worst movie, the worst thing — take your pick.)

Much time and ener­gy has gone into the dis­cus­sion of what makes The Phan­tom Men­ace so bad, but what makes The Empire Strikes Back so good? We can get some insight into the mat­ter from the video above, which con­verts the much-ref­er­enced, oft-par­o­died duel between Luke Sky­walk­er and Darth Vad­er, com­plete with the big reveal of parent­age and ensu­ing wail, into a scratchy, twitchy, title card-punc­tu­at­ed, piano-scored (but still faith­ful to John Williams’ com­po­si­tion) arti­fact from some­time around 1920. I’ve heard it said that the best songs, how­ev­er heav­i­ly pro­duced in their best-known ren­di­tion, work just as well by their very nature when played on noth­ing but a gui­tar or piano. The Empire Strikes Back, by the same token, works as a silent film.

This all, if you believe Star Wars cre­ator George Lucas, comes down to music. “Star Wars films are basi­cal­ly silent movies,” he says in the inter­view clip just above. “The music has a very large role in car­ry­ing the sto­ry, more than it would in a nor­mal movie. In most movies, the sto­ry is car­ried by the dia­logue — in Star Wars films, the music car­ries the sto­ry.” Every install­ment in the series, from the most beloved to the most exe­crat­ed, has to hop from world to world quick­ly while advanc­ing the sto­ry, and Lucas sees the music as the “con­nec­tive tis­sue” that makes it work: “With­out that music there to smooth it out and take you from point A to point B in an ele­gant way, it becomes very jerky and con­fused, and the sto­ry does­n’t work very well — the film does­n’t work very well.” Does the the­o­ry hold for the also Williams-scored The Force Awak­ens? Let the debate begin.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

16 Great Star Wars Fan Films, Doc­u­men­taries & Video Essays to Get You Ready for Star Wars: The Force Awak­ens

Hard­ware Wars: The Moth­er of All Star Wars Fan Films (and the Most Prof­itable Short Film Ever Made)

Fans Recon­struct Authen­tic Ver­sion of Star Wars, As It Was Shown in The­aters in 1977

Star Wars Uncut: The Epic Fan Film

The Empire Strikes Back Uncut: A New Fan-Made, Shot-for-Shot Remake of the 1980 Sci-Fi Clas­sic

The Exis­ten­tial Star Wars: Sartre Meets Darth Vad­er

Watch a New Star Wars Ani­ma­tion, Drawn in a Clas­sic 80s Japan­ese Ani­me Style

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.

The Science of Willpower: 15 Tips for Making Your New Year’s Resolutions Last from Dr. Kelly McGonigal

in Life, Psychology | January 3rd, 2016

At the stroke of mid­night on Jan­u­ary 1, mil­lions of New Year’s res­o­lu­tions went into effect, with the most com­mon ones being lose weight, get fit, quit drink­ing and smok­ing, save mon­ey, and learn some­thing new (we can help you there). Unfor­tu­nate­ly, 33% of these res­o­lu­tions will be aban­doned by Jan­u­ary’s end. And more than 80% will even­tu­al­ly fall by the way­side. Mak­ing res­o­lu­tions stick is tricky busi­ness. But it’s pos­si­ble, and Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gist Kel­ly McGo­ni­gal has a few sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-proven sug­ges­tions for you.

For years, McGo­ni­gal has taught a very pop­u­lar course called The Sci­ence of Willpow­er in Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram, where she intro­duces stu­dents to the idea that willpow­er is not an innate trait. (You can sign up for an online ver­sion of her course which starts on Jan­u­ary 25. Get details here.) Rather it’s a “com­plex mind-body response that can be com­pro­mised by stress, sleep depri­va­tion and nutri­tion and that can be strength­ened through cer­tain prac­tices.” For those of you who don’t live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area, you can also find McGo­ni­gal’s ideas pre­sent­ed in a recent book, The Willpow­er Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Mat­ters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Below, we have high­light­ed 15 of Dr. McGo­ni­gal’s strate­gies for increas­ing your willpow­er reserves and mak­ing your New Year’s res­o­lu­tions endure.

1. Will pow­er is like a mus­cle. The more you work on devel­op­ing it, the more you can incor­po­rate it into your life. It helps, McGo­ni­gal says in this pod­cast, to start with small feats of willpow­er before try­ing to tack­le more dif­fi­cult feats. Ide­al­ly, find the small­est change that’s con­sis­tent with your larg­er goal, and start there.
2. Choose a goal or res­o­lu­tion that you real­ly want, not a goal that some­one else desires for you, or a goal that you think you should want. Choose a pos­i­tive goal that tru­ly comes from with­in and that con­tributes to some­thing impor­tant in life.
3. Willpow­er is con­ta­gious. Find a willpow­er role mod­el — some­one who has accom­plished what you want to do. Also try to sur­round your­self with fam­i­ly mem­bers, friends or groups who can sup­port you. Change is often not made alone.
4. Know that peo­ple have more willpow­er when they wake up, and then willpow­er steadi­ly declines through­out the day as peo­ple fatigue. So try to accom­plish what you need to — for exam­ple, exer­cise — ear­li­er in the day. Then watch out for the evenings, when bad habits can return.
5. Under­stand that stress and willpow­er are incom­pat­i­ble. Any time we’re under stress it’s hard­er to find our willpow­er. Accord­ing to McGo­ni­gal, “the fight-or-flight response floods the body with ener­gy to act instinc­tive­ly and steals it from the areas of the brain need­ed for wise deci­sion-mak­ing. Stress also encour­ages you to focus on imme­di­ate, short-term goals and out­comes, but self-con­trol requires keep­ing the big pic­ture in mind.” The upshot? “Learn­ing how to bet­ter man­age your stress is one of the most impor­tant things you can do to improve your willpow­er.” When you get stressed out, go for a walk. Even a five minute walk out­side can reduce your stress lev­els, boost your mood, and help you replen­ish your willpow­er reserves.
6. Sleep depri­va­tion (less than six hours a night) makes it so that the pre­frontal cor­tex los­es con­trol over the regions of the brain that cre­ate crav­ings. Sci­ence shows that get­ting just one more hour of sleep each night (eight hours is ide­al) helps recov­er­ing drug addicts avoid a relapse. So it can cer­tain­ly help you resist a dough­nut or a cig­a­rette.
7. Also remem­ber that nutri­tion plays a key role. “Eat­ing a more plant-based, less-processed diet makes ener­gy more avail­able to the brain and can improve every aspect of willpow­er from over­com­ing pro­cras­ti­na­tion to stick­ing to a New Year’s res­o­lu­tion,” McGo­ni­gal says.
8. Don’t think it will be dif­fer­ent tomor­row. McGo­ni­gal notes that we have a ten­den­cy to think that we will have more willpow­er, ener­gy, time, and moti­va­tion tomor­row. The prob­lem is that “if we think we have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a dif­fer­ent choice tomor­row, we almost always ‘give in’ to temp­ta­tion or habit today.”
9. Acknowl­edge and under­stand your crav­ings rather than deny­ing them. That will take you fur­ther in the end. The video above has more on that.
10. Imag­ine the things that could get in the way of achiev­ing your goal. Under­stand the ten­den­cies you have that could lead you to break your res­o­lu­tion. Don’t be over­ly opti­mistic and assume the road will be easy.
11. Know your lim­its, and plan for them. Says McGo­ni­gal, “Peo­ple who think they have the most self-con­trol are the most like­ly to fail at their res­o­lu­tions; they put them­selves in tempt­ing sit­u­a­tions, don’t get help, give up at set­backs. You need to know how you fail; how you are tempt­ed; how you pro­cras­ti­nate.”
12. Pay atten­tion to small choic­es that add up. “One study found that the aver­age per­son thinks they make 14 food choic­es a day; they actu­al­ly make over 200. When you aren’t aware that you’re mak­ing a choice, you’ll almost always default to habit/temptation.” It’s impor­tant to fig­ure out when you have oppor­tu­ni­ties to make a choice con­sis­tent with your goals.
13. Be spe­cif­ic but flex­i­ble. It’s good to know your goal and how you’ll get there. But, she cau­tions, “you should leave room to revise these steps if they turn out to be unsus­tain­able or don’t lead to the ben­e­fits you expect­ed.”
14. Give your­self small, healthy rewards along the way. Research shows that the mind responds well to it. (If you’re try­ing to quite smok­ing, the reward should­n’t be a cig­a­rette, by the way.)
15. Final­ly, if you expe­ri­ence a set­back, don’t be hard on your­self. Although it seems counter-intu­itive, stud­ies show that peo­ple who expe­ri­ence shame/guilt are much more like­ly to break their res­o­lu­tions than ones who cut them­selves some slack. In a nut­shell, you should “Give up guilt.”

To put all of these tips into a big­ger frame­work, you can get a copy of Kel­ly McGo­ni­gal’s book, The Willpow­er Instinct: How Self-Con­trol Works, Why It Mat­ters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Or you can get The WillPow­er Instinct, as a free audio book, if you care to try out Audible.com’s free tri­al pro­gram.

If you live in the SF Bay Area, you can take Kel­ly’s The Sci­ence of Willpow­er course that begins on Jan­u­ary 25. Any­one can enroll.

Final­ly you might also want to peruse How to Think Like a Psy­chol­o­gist (iTunes Video), a free online course led by Kel­ly McGo­ni­gal. It appears in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in Jan­u­ary 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pow­er of Empa­thy: A Quick Ani­mat­ed Les­son That Can Make You a Bet­ter Per­son

Carl Gus­tav Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in Rare Inter­view (1957)

Jacques Lacan’s Con­fronta­tion with a Young Rebel: Clas­sic Moment, 1972

New Ani­ma­tion Explains Sher­ry Turkle’s The­o­ries on Why Social Media Makes Us Lone­ly

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es (Part of our list of 800 Free Online Cours­es)

Mark Twain Knocks New Year’s Resolutions: They’re a “Harmless Annual Institution, Of No Particular Use to Anybody”

in Life, Literature | January 1st, 2016

Now that anoth­er New Year’s Day has come around, we must once again ask our­selves: do we believe in New Year’s res­o­lu­tions, or don’t we? As with most insti­tu­tions, Mark Twain, that most quot­ed of all Amer­i­can humorists, both believed and did­n’t believe in them. Or maybe we could say that his lack of belief tran­scend­ed run-of-the-mill cyn­i­cism to become a kind of devout faith in human fol­ly itself.

Here we have a few words on the sub­ject from the man him­self, first pub­lished in the Jan­u­ary 1, 1863 edi­tion of the Ter­ri­to­r­i­al Enter­prise, the Vir­ginia City, Neva­da news­pa­per where the young Twain worked for a time:

Now is the accept­ed time to make your reg­u­lar annu­al good res­o­lu­tions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usu­al. Yes­ter­day, every­body smoked his last cig­ar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. To-day, we are a pious and exem­plary com­mu­ni­ty. Thir­ty days from now, we shall have cast our ref­or­ma­tion to the winds and gone to cut­ting our ancient short com­ings con­sid­er­ably short­er than ever. We shall also reflect pleas­ant­ly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. How­ev­er, go in, com­mu­ni­ty. New Year’s is a harm­less annu­al insti­tu­tion, of no par­tic­u­lar use to any­body save as a scape­goat for promis­cu­ous drunks, and friend­ly calls, and hum­bug res­o­lu­tions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a loose­ness suit­ed to the great­ness of the occa­sion.

Twain made a career of skew­er­ing the count­less pieties of Amer­i­can life, and the cul­ture’s per­haps overzeal­ous spir­it of self-improve­ment pro­vid­ed him a vast and nev­er ful­ly deflat­able tar­get. His assess­ment feels as true today, and makes us laugh just as much today, as it must have 153 years ago. So keep enjoy­ing the friend­li­ness, fes­tiv­i­ty, and human com­e­dy of the New Year’s hol­i­day as Twain would have. If you do make a res­o­lu­tion, keep it to a man­age­able lev­el of moral­i­ty. And don’t for­get to revis­it the oth­er per­spec­tives on New Year’s we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured from such oth­er cul­tur­al lumi­nar­ies as Neil Gaiman, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sci­ence of Willpow­er: 15 Tips for Mak­ing Your New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions Last from Dr. Kel­ly McGo­ni­gal

A New Year’s Wish from Neil Gaiman

The Top 10 New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions Read by Bob Dylan

Woody Guthrie’s Doo­dle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions From 1943 in Life, Music| Jan­u­ary 1st, 2014

Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Go-Get­ter List of New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions (1955)

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.

Patti Smith Creates a Detailed Packing List for Going on Tour: Haruki Murakami Books, Loquat Tea & More

in Life, Literature, Music, Poetry, Travel | January 1st, 2016

Pack­ing lists are not inher­ent­ly punk rock.

But the hand­writ­ten pack­ing list God­moth­er of Punk Pat­ti Smith scrawled upside down on a pho­to­copied receipt from a children’s book­store on the eve of a 40-date Euro­pean tour comes close. One can kind of imag­ine her stuff­ing her adap­tors, her Japan­ese pants, and her “9 under­wears” into a shop­ping bag or a dirty day pack, using it as a pil­low in the back of the van…

Behold the real­i­ty, below.

Smith’s hard shell case is kit­ted out with prac­ticed pre­ci­sion, its con­tents pared to the lean­est of  lux­u­ry-brand neces­si­ties to keep her hap­py and healthy on the road.

It’s not often you find a devo­tee of Ann Demeule­meester black jack­ets and $8 tooth­paste who’s will­ing to night­ly wring their socks and undies over a hotel room sink, but accord­ing to her Ban­ga tour diary, Smith is.

Oth­er essen­tials in Smith’s tour bag include loquat tea for her throat and plen­ty of read­ing mate­r­i­al. In addi­tion to the Hunger Games, she elect­ed to take along some old favorites from author Haru­ki Muraka­mi:

I decide this will be essen­tial­ly a Haru­ki Muraka­mi tour. So I will take sev­er­al of his books includ­ing the three vol­ume IQ84 to reread. He is a good writer to reread as he sets your mind to day­dream­ing while you are read­ing him. thus i always miss stuff.

Read­ers, use the com­ments sec­tion to let us know what indis­pens­able items you would pack when embark­ing on a 40-city tour with Pat­ti Smith.

via That Eric Alper

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

Pat­ti Smith Reviews Haru­ki Murakami’s New Nov­el, Col­or­less Tsuku­ru Taza­ki and His Years of Pil­grim­age

Pat­ti Smith Doc­u­men­tary Dream of Life Beau­ti­ful­ly Cap­tures the Author’s Life and Long Career (2008)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her play, Fawn­book, opens in New York City lat­er this fall. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Great “Filmumentaries” Take You Inside the Making of Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark & Jaws

in Film | December 31st, 2015

Jamie Ben­ning, an Eng­lish­man who edits live tele­vi­sion broad­casts of auto races by day, spends all his nights pur­su­ing his appre­ci­a­tion for Hol­ly­wood block­busters of the 1970s and 80s — or at least I assume he does, giv­en how much effort and enthu­si­asm obvi­ous­ly goes into his sig­na­ture “fil­mu­men­taries,” long-form videos on the mak­ing of his favorite movies, packed with all the behind-the-scenes footage, sto­ry­boards, alter­nate takes, inter­views, and every oth­er bit and piece of media per­tain­ing to the pro­duc­tion on which he can lay his hands. Ear­li­er this year, we fea­tured his fil­mu­men­taries on the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­o­gy; today, we give you his fil­mu­men­ta­riza­tion of the work of Steven Spiel­berg, specif­i­cal­ly Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Even casu­al film­go­ers will rec­og­nize these movies, and they’ll feel, short­ly after press­ing play on Ben­ning’s Inside Jaws and Raid­ing the Lost Ark, as if they’ve just set­tled in to watch them again, though they’ll see them as they nev­er have before. Seri­ous film fans will, as the form of the fil­mu­men­tary emerges, rec­og­nize the basis of the con­cept. Described as “visu­al com­men­taries,” these pro­duc­tions take the con­cept of the com­men­tary track and step it up con­sid­er­ably, over­lay­ing the orig­i­nal film’s sound­track with the words of a ver­i­ta­ble cho­rus of those who worked on it — actors (even some not ulti­mate­ly cast), crew mem­bers, design­ers, pro­duc­ers, hang­ers-around — sourced and some­times even record­ed by Ben­ning.

The line­up even includes Spiel­berg him­self, who famous­ly does­n’t record com­men­tary tracks, but whose inter­views giv­en over the decades Ben­ning cred­i­bly repur­pos­es into their form. As we hear all this while watch­ing these movies we know so well, we also see all man­ner of rel­e­vant footage relat­ed to their mak­ing, just the sort of avenue of cinephilic plea­sure I once imag­ined the DVD play­er’s “angle” but­ton would open up. The facts also keep flow­ing, in Raid­ing the Lost Ark, in the form of onscreen text, just like those old­er DVD releas­es that offered a sep­a­rate sub­ti­tle track with pop-up pro­duc­tion notes. Sam­ple: “Due to dif­fi­cult ter­rain, the don­keys had to be air­lift­ed by heli­copter to the shoot­ing loca­tion.”

Spiel­berg has explained his refusal to do com­men­taries in terms of his reluc­tance to break the illu­sion he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors work so hard to cre­ate in their movies — a fair con­cern, but when I immerse myself in the rich oscil­la­tion between and mix­ture of illu­sion and real­i­ty, fic­tion and fact, movies and their mak­ing, the sto­ry and the sto­ries behind pio­neered by Ben­ning’s fil­mu­men­taries, I feel ready to see a few more illu­sions so fas­ci­nat­ing­ly bro­ken.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Shot-By-Shot Break­downs of Spielberg’s Film­mak­ing in Jaws, Scorsese’s in Cape Fear, and De Palma’s in The Untouch­ables

Spiel­berg Reacts to the 1975 Oscar Nom­i­na­tions: ‘Com­mer­cial Back­lash!’

Watch Steven Spielberg’s Rarely Seen 1968 Film, Amblin’

Learn the Ele­ments of Cin­e­ma: Spielberg’s Long Takes, Scorsese’s Silence & Michael Bay’s Shots

The Com­plete Star Wars “Fil­mu­men­tary”: A 6‑Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Doc­u­men­tary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Com­men­tary

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.

The First Adult Coloring Book: See the Subversive Executive Coloring Book From 1961

in Books, Coloring Books, Politics | December 31st, 2015

Since the Har­ry Pot­ter craze began, we’ve seen young adult fic­tion gain mas­sive pop­u­lar­i­ty with adults, in ways some crit­ics have lament­ed as a trend that infan­tilizes the buy­ing pub­lic. (Some say the same about super­hero films and adult fans of boy bands). Katie Couric iden­ti­fied the phe­nom­e­non as “the rise of so-called Peter Pan activ­i­ties,” throw­ing “adult sum­mer camps and Lego leagues” in the mix. Crit­ics of Peter Panism can add anoth­er trend to their bat­tery of exam­ples: the rise of the adult col­or­ing book. Busi­ness Insid­er report­ed in April that “in Britain, four out of the top 10 Ama­zon best­sellers are col­or­ing (or colour­ing, as the Brits insist) books for adults.” Cur­rent­ly, Amazon’s top 20 best­sellers for 2015 includes three adult col­or­ing books. Among so many oth­er con­sumer signs and por­tents, adult col­or­ing books may indeed her­ald a com­ing apoc­a­lypse, at least for Rus­sell Brand, who won­ders, “What has turned us into ter­ri­fied divs that want to live in child­ish stu­pors?”

Well, whether “child­ish,” art ther­a­py or “Zen,” adult col­or­ing books meet a need mil­lions of grown-ups have to soothe their jan­gled nerves, and it seems almost cru­el to mock peo­ple so anx­i­ety-rid­den they’ve returned to kinder­garten reme­dies. Then again, it’s worth not­ing, as Smith­son­ian did recent­ly, “the adult col­or­ing con­cept is not exact­ly new.”

It dates back to the 1960s, when “book­stores explod­ed” with col­or­ing books geared exclu­sive­ly toward adults. The dif­fer­ence between then and now lies in the fact that those books were adult in con­tent as well as form—“satirical and sub­ver­sive,” offer­ing “a mock­ing look at Amer­i­can soci­ety.” The first of these, The Exec­u­tive Col­or­ing Book, arrived in 1961, fol­lowed by The John Birch Soci­ety Col­or­ing Book and many sim­i­lar titles “sat­i­riz­ing con­formism, John F. Kennedy and the Sovi­et Union,” among oth­er tar­gets. And yet, “Unlike the adult col­or­ing books fly­ing off the shelves today,” Smith­son­ian writes, “these books were not cre­at­ed with the inten­tion to be col­ored in.”

Take the two pages from The Exec­u­tive Col­or­ing Book above. The first, at the top, shows us our exec­u­tive prepar­ing for his day with the cap­tion “THIS IS MY SUIT. Col­or it gray or I will lose my job.” Above, a line of iden­ti­cal exec­u­tives boards a train. Ham­mer­ing home the point, we’re told “THIS IS MY TRAIN. It takes me to my office every day. You meet lots of inter­est­ing peo­ple on the train. Col­or them all gray.” A notable excep­tion to these drea­ry instruc­tions, below, tells us “THIS IS MY PILL. It is round. It is pink. It makes me not care. Watch me take my round, pink pill… and not care.” The con­tents of the pill may have changed, but the med­icat­ed work­er bee is still very much with us, though the gray flan­nel suit is a thing of the past.

Rather than giv­ing its tar­get audi­ence a chance to become kids again, The Exec­u­tive Col­or­ing Book pokes fun at the ways in which pam­pered exec­u­tives of the Mad Men-era could them­selves be shal­low man­chil­dren. One page, below, shows the executive’s sec­re­tary with the cap­tion “THIS IS MY SECRETARY. I hate her. She is mean. I used to have a soft, round lady. But my wife called her papa.” Anoth­er (bot­tom), rem­i­nis­cent of the busi­ness card scene in Amer­i­can Psy­cho, shows us the executive’s impor­tant phone: “THIS IS MY TELEPHONE. It has five but­tons. Count them. One, two, three, four, five. Five but­tons. How many but­tons does your tele­phone have? Mine has five.”

From its faux-leather cov­er to its final page of busi­ness-speak gib­ber­ish, the whole thing is a mas­ter­ful­ly sim­ple, self-con­tained piece of con­cep­tu­al art. The next pub­li­ca­tion by the same authors, The John Birch Col­or­ing Book, made its inten­tions a lit­tle more obvi­ous. A Sun­day Her­ald review quotes from its intro­duc­tion: “This book is respect­ful­ly ded­i­cat­ed to Dwight D. Eisen­how­er and many oth­er loy­al Amer­i­cans who have been maligned by extrem­ist groups.” One cap­tion reads “This is our eagle. We cut off his left wing. Now he is an all Amer­i­can eagle. But he flies only in cir­cles.” The “Birchers will have to learn to smile,” writes the review­er, as the book “spare[s] not their feel­ings.” Not like­ly. Rather than sell­ing relax­ation, the adult col­or­ing books of the 60s were “engaged,” wrote Mil­ton Brack­er in a 1962 New York Times review, “in polit­i­cal war­fare.”

via Smith­son­ian and Ad to the Bone

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

Sartre Writes a Tribute to Camus After His Friend-Turned-Rival Dies in a Tragic Car Crash: “There Is an Unbearable Absurdity in His Death”

in Philosophy | December 30th, 2015

The friend­ship of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus end­ed, famous­ly, in 1951. That year, increas­ing­ly frac­tious polit­i­cal ten­sions between the two philoso­pher-writ­ers came to a head over the pub­li­ca­tion of Camus’ The Rebel, a book-length essay that marked a depar­ture from rev­o­lu­tion­ary thought and a turn toward a more prag­mat­ic indi­vid­u­al­ism (as well as recall­ing the anar­cho-syn­di­cal­ism Camus had embraced in the 30s). The doc­tri­naire Sartre and his intel­lec­tu­al coterie took excep­tion, and while Sartre fur­ther pur­sued a Marx­ist polit­i­cal pro­gram, informed by a cri­tique of racism and colo­nial­ism, Camus con­front­ed the absurd; he “begins to sound more like Samuel Beck­ett,” writes Andy Mar­tin at the New York Times’ phi­los­o­phy blog, “all alone, in the night, between con­ti­nents, far away from every­thing.”

The two split not only over ideas, how­ev­er: after the war, Camus became increas­ing­ly dis­il­lu­sioned with Stalin’s total­i­tar­i­an Sovi­et rule, while Sartre made what Camus con­sid­ered weak attempts to defend or excuse the regime’s crimes. At first, writes Volk­er Hage in Der Spiegel, their dis­agree­ments were “lim­it­ed to a rel­a­tive­ly small group of intel­lec­tu­als.” Then Sartre pub­lished Fran­cis Jean­son’s scathing review of The Rebel in the jour­nal Sartre found­ed in 1945, Les Temps Mod­ernes. (See Jean­son dis­cuss the review in the video inter­view below, excerpt­ed from the short doc­u­men­tary on Sartre and Camus at the top of the post). Camus, Hage writes, “made the mis­take of send­ing a long rejoin­der. What fol­lowed was a trag­ic dis­so­lu­tion of what had once been a friend­ship.”

Sartre made his final kiss-off very pub­lic, print­ing in Les Temps Mod­ernes a “mer­ci­less” response, “insid­i­ous and mali­cious, yet also a mag­nif­i­cent mas­ter­piece of per­son­al polemics.” Almost ten years lat­er, in 1960, Camus was killed in a car acci­dent at the age of 46. Though the two nev­er for­mal­ly rec­on­ciled, Sartre penned a heart­felt trib­ute to his for­mer friend in The Reporter that con­tained none of the vit­ri­ol of his past con­dem­na­tions. Instead, he describes their falling out in the terms one might use for a for­mer lover:

He and I had quar­reled. A quar­rel does­n’t mat­ter — even if those who quar­rel nev­er see each oth­er again — just anoth­er way of liv­ing togeth­er with­out los­ing sight of one anoth­er in the nar­row lit­tle world that is allot­ted us. It did­n’t keep me from think­ing of him, from feel­ing that his eyes were on the book or news­pa­per I was read­ing and won­der­ing: “What does he think of it? What does he think of it at this moment?”

Sartre con­fess­es his uneasi­ness with Camus’ moody silence, “which accord­ing to events and my mood I con­sid­ered some­times too cau­tious and some­times too painful.” It was a silence that seem­ing­ly over­took Camus in his final years as he retreat­ed from pub­lic life, and though Camus’ fierce indi­vid­u­al­ism lay at the heart of their falling-out, Sartre wrote in deep appre­ci­a­tion of his friend and antagonist’s soli­tude and stub­born res­olute­ness:

He rep­re­sent­ed in our time the lat­est exam­ple of that long line of moral­istes whose works con­sti­tute per­haps the most orig­i­nal ele­ment in French let­ters. His obsti­nate human­ism, nar­row and pure, aus­tere and sen­su­al, waged an uncer­tain war against the mas­sive and form­less events of the time. But on the oth­er hand through his dogged rejec­tions he reaf­firmed, at the heart of our epoch, against the Machi­avel­lians and against the Idol of real­ism, the exis­tence of the moral issue.

In a way, he was that res­olute affir­ma­tion. Any­one who read or reflect­ed encoun­tered the human val­ues he held in his fist; he ques­tioned the polit­i­cal act. One had to avoid him or fight him-he was indis­pens­able to that ten­sion which makes intel­lec­tu­al life what it is.

Camus’ “silence,” the theme of Sartre’s trib­ute, “had some­thing pos­i­tive about it.” The for­mer harsh­ness of Sartre’s cri­tiques soft­ens as he chides Camus’ refusal “to leave the safe ground of moral­i­ty and ven­ture on the uncer­tain paths of prac­ti­cal­i­ty.” Camus’ con­fronta­tion with the Absurd, writes Sartre, with “the con­flicts he kept hid­den… both requires and con­demns revolt.”

At the bit­ter end of their friend­ship, Sartre vicious­ly con­demned the con­tra­dic­tions of Camus’ polit­i­cal thought as the prod­uct of per­son­al fail­ings, telling him, “You have become the vic­tim of an exces­sive sul­len­ness that masks your inter­nal prob­lems. Soon­er or lat­er, some­one would have told you, so it might as well be me.” In his final trib­ute to Camus, he returns to this idea, in much dif­fer­ent lan­guage, writ­ing that, at the age of 20, Camus had become “sud­den­ly afflict­ed with a mal­a­dy that upset his whole life”; he had “dis­cov­ered the Absurd—the sense­less nega­tion of man.” Rather than suc­cumb­ing, however—Sartre writes—Camus “became accus­tomed to it, he thought out his unbear­able con­di­tion, he came through.”

After the car acci­dent, Sartre acknowl­edged Camus’ fierce indi­vid­u­al­ism and prin­ci­ple in the face of life’s absur­di­ty as an exis­ten­tial tri­umph rather than a hand­i­cap: “We shall rec­og­nize in that work and in the life that is insep­a­ra­ble from it the pure and vic­to­ri­ous attempt of one man to snatch every instant of his exis­tence from his future death.”

Read the full trib­ute essay in a down­load­able PDF for­mat here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Camus Writes a Friend­ly Let­ter to Jean-Paul Sartre Before Their Per­son­al and Philo­soph­i­cal Rift

Hear Albert Camus Deliv­er His Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech (1957)

The Absurd Phi­los­o­phy of Albert Camus Pre­sent­ed in a Short Ani­mat­ed Film by Alain De Bot­ton

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

Discover The Music Vault: A Massive YouTube Archive of 22,000 Live Concert Videos

in Music | December 30th, 2015

Last sum­mer, we high­light­ed an almost unbe­liev­ably rich resource for music fans: the Music Vault, a Youtube archive of 22,000 live con­cert videos from a range of artists, span­ning about four decades into the present. In a time of soar­ing tick­et prices, the Music Vault allows us to catch a show at home for free, and to see bands we missed in their hey­day per­form on stages around the world. Last sum­mer, I wrote, “enjoy revis­it­ing the glo­ry days and rest assured, they aren’t going away any­time soon.” But I spoke too soon, as many Music Vault videos (there were only 13,000 then) began dis­ap­pear­ing, along with the nos­tal­gia and hip cur­ren­cy they offered. Well, now they’re back up and run­ning, and let’s hope it’s for good.

Unsurprisingly—given its asso­ci­a­tion with Wolf­gang’s Vault, a restora­tion and archive project that began with the col­lec­tion of leg­endary con­cert pro­mot­er Bill Gra­ham—the Music Vault’s store­house includes per­haps more Grate­ful Dead mate­r­i­al than any­thing else, like the near­ly six hour Win­ter­land con­cert above from 1978. Check out the intro inter­view with now Sen­a­tor, then come­di­an Al Franken, doing some polit­i­cal humor for radio sta­tion KSAN. (And see Franken do anoth­er Dead intro skit in 1980 at Radio City Music Hall here.) There’s so much Grate­ful Dead in fact, they get their own chan­nel. You’ll also find plen­ty more live clas­sic rock shows from Neil Young, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Van Mor­ri­son, the Stones, Joe Cock­er, and more. (Check out this rare show from a pre-Van Halen Sam­my Hagar in 1978.)

If that’s not what you’re into, there’s also plen­ty of punk and new wave, like the clas­sic Talk­ing Heads per­for­mance of “Life Dur­ing Wartime” above at the Capi­tol The­atre from 1980 (see the com­plete con­cert here). You can also catch Iggy Pop in ’86, Blondie in ’79, the Ramones in ’78, Prince in ’82, or Green Day in ’94. You don’t get the cred from say­ing you were there, what­ev­er that’s worth, but you get the thrill of see­ing these artists in their prime, (almost) live and direct. Fan­cy more con­tem­po­rary fare? Check out the New Music Dis­cov­ery chan­nel with live per­for­mances from cur­rent acts, curat­ed by Daytrot­ter and Paste Mag­a­zine. Dig funk, soul, and reg­gae? They’ve got you cov­ered, with shows from Par­lia­ment-Funkadel­ic, Jim­my Cliff, Cur­tis May­field, and many more. See Bob Mar­ley and the Wail­ers do a stel­lar ren­di­tion of “No Woman, No Cry” at the Oak­land Audi­to­ri­um in 1979, below.

More of a jazz cat? No wor­ries, Music Vault has an exten­sive jazz chan­nel fea­tur­ing every­one from Miles Davis to Her­bie Han­cock to Tony Ben­net, and includ­ing new­er artists like vocal­ist Lizz Wright and trio The Bad Plus. (They’ve even got a sur­pris­ing per­for­mance from Orange is the New Black’s Lea DeLar­ia at the New­port Jazz Fes­ti­val in 2002.) The Music Vault also hosts clas­sic music doc­u­men­taries and inter­views, like the Rolling Stones 1976 Euro­pean Tour doc­u­men­tary below. (Oth­er high­lights include doc­u­men­tary Last Days at the Fill­more and a 1974 inter­view with Bill Gra­ham.) What­ev­er your thing is, you’ll prob­a­bly find a lit­tle bit, or a lot, of it in this enor­mous data­base of live con­cert film and video and oth­er fea­tures (though almost no pop, r&b, or hip-hop). If you don’t, check back lat­er. The Music Vault promis­es to add new “hand-curat­ed” con­cert videos dai­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Grate­ful Dead’s Final Farewell Con­certs Now Stream­ing Online

10,173 Free Grate­ful Dead Con­cert Record­ings in the Inter­net Archive

What Was Your First Live Con­cert? We’ll Show You Ours, Share Yours.

The Clash Live in Tokyo, 1982: Watch the Com­plete Con­cert

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

How to Get Started: John Cage’s Approach to Starting the Difficult Creative Process

in Creativity, Music | December 30th, 2015

Image by WikiArt, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

You know what they say: eighty per­cent of the work you do on a project, you do get­ting the last twen­ty per­cent of that project right. But most of that oth­er twen­ty per­cent of the work must go toward get­ting start­ed in the first place; you’ve got to get over a pret­ty big hill just to get to the point of writ­ing the first sen­tence, paint­ing the first stroke, shoot­ing the first shot, or play­ing the first chords. Avant-garde com­pos­er John Cage knew well the chal­lenges of just get­ting start­ed, and his thoughts on the sub­ject moti­vat­ed him, toward the end of his career, to do the writ­ten, per­formed, and record­ed project we fea­ture today, How to Get Start­ed.

Cage him­self only put on How to Get Start­ed once, at an inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence on sound design at George Lucas’ Sky­walk­er Ranch on August 31, 1989. It worked like this: he brought with him ten note cards, each of which con­tained notes for a par­tic­u­lar “idea” he want­ed to talk about. On went a tape recorder, and he began speak­ing impro­vi­sa­tion­al­ly about the first idea. Then he flipped to the next card, and as he talked about its idea, the record­ing of the first one played in the back­ground. He con­tin­ued with this pro­ce­dure until, by the tenth idea on the tenth card, he had his impromp­tu speech­es on all nine pre­vi­ous ideas play­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly behind him. You can get an idea of what his read­ings sound­ed like in the three clips (from howtogetstarted.org) embed­ded here [first, sec­ond, third].

The ten ideas Cage jot­ted down on his note­cards come inspired by, and inspired him to dis­cuss fur­ther, his own cre­ative expe­ri­ences. In the first, he describes a new com­po­si­tion­al process that came to him in a dream, which involves crum­pling a score into a ball and unfold­ing it again. In the third, he thinks back to his work Roara­to­rio, an Irish cir­cus on Finnegans Wake, which con­vert­ed Joyce’s nov­el into music, and imag­ines a way for­ward that would involve turn­ing into music not one book at a time but sev­er­al. In the fifth, he ref­er­ences Mar­cel Ducham­p’s “The Cre­ative Act,” which brought home for him the notion of how audi­ences “fin­ish the work by lis­ten­ing,” which led to his cre­at­ing works of “musi­cal sculp­ture,” includ­ing one par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable exam­ple involv­ing “between 150 and 200” Yugosla­vian high school stu­dents, all play­ing their instru­ments in dif­fer­ent places.

Cage’s oth­er sto­ries of cre­ative epiphany in How to Get Start­ed involve a trip to an ane­choic cham­ber; find­ing out what made one dance per­for­mance at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na School of the Arts so “tawdry, shab­by, mis­er­able”; dis­cov­er­ing the artist’s “inner clock” in Leningrad; and how he works around what no less a musi­cal mind than Arnold Schoen­berg diag­nosed as his absent sense of har­mo­ny. You can read a tran­script of all of them in a PDF of How to Get Start­ed’s com­pan­ion book­let. And depend­ing upon how inspired you find your­self (or how close you live to Philadel­phia), you might con­sid­er mak­ing the trip to the Slought Foun­da­tion, who have built a room spe­cial­ly designed for the piece. You might not come out of it feel­ing like you’ve absorbed all the cre­ativ­i­ty of John Cage, but he him­self points us toward the impor­tant thing: not the amor­phous qual­i­ty of cre­ativ­i­ty, but the action of get­ting start­ed.

via Mono­skop

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

Albert Ein­stein Tells His Son The Key to Learn­ing & Hap­pi­ness is Los­ing Your­self in Cre­ativ­i­ty (or “Find­ing Flow”)

Isaac Asi­mov Explains the Ori­gins of Good Ideas & Cre­ativ­i­ty in Nev­er-Before-Pub­lished Essay

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

Jump Start Your Cre­ative Process with Bri­an Eno’s “Oblique Strate­gies” Deck of Cards (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.