Casablanca’s Hilarious Alternative Final Scene Featuring Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon: Pragmatism Carries the Day!
The classic film Casablanca is perennially ripe for parody, but for some reason, its spoofs usually confine themselves to Rick’s Café Américain. It’s rare that anyone gets funny with the famous final scene, where (spoiler!) Humphrey Bogart’s Rick sacrifices his personal happiness, insisting that his beloved board a plane that will safely carry her and her husband, a leader of the Czech Resistance, away from Vichy-contolled Casablanca.
There are exceptions of course.
Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon bests them all with a dewy-eyed Ingrid Bergman impression nailing the Swedish-born actress’ gloriously cinematic middle Atlantic accent, described by writer Trey Taylor in The Atlantic as a learned “hybrid of Britain’s Received Pronunciation and standard American English as it exists today.”
It’s a refreshing change to see the Ilsa character driving the laughs.
McKinnon’s scene partner, J.K. Simmons, gives an equally credible performance as Bogart’s Rick. The award-winning actor has demonstrable comic chops, but for this sketch, the writers wisely had him play it dead serious.
The players are further abetted by the design team’s faithful execution of the original, including costumes by Tom Broecker and Eric Justian. Who wouldn’t want to wear that hat?
Much of Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch’s original dialogue was left intact. It’s reproduced below for your scrutiny, along with Bogart and Bergman’s performance.
You’ll notice one significant line reassignment, necessitated by this Ilsa’s pragmatic response to the possibility of winding up in a concentration camp.
As in the original, love does not triumph, but they’ll always have Paris.
INT./EXT. AIRPORT HANGAR — NIGHT
Rick takes the letters of transit out of his pocket and
hands them to Renault, who turns and walks toward the hangar.
RICK
If you don’t mind, you fill in the names. That will make it even more official.
RENAULT
You think of everything, don’t you?
RICK
(quietly And the names are Mr. and Mrs. Victor Laszlo.
Renault stops dead in his tracks, and turns around. Both Ilsa and Renault look at Rick with astonishment.
ILSA
But why my name, Richard?
RICK
Because you’re getting on that plane.
ILSA
(confused) I don’t understand. What about you?
RICK
I’m staying here with him ’til the plane gets safely away.
Rick’s intention suddenly dawns on Ilsa.
ILSA
No, Richard, no. What has happened to you? Last night we said —
RICK
Last night we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I’ve done a lot of it since then and it all adds up to one thing. You’re getting on that plane with Victor where you belong.
ILSA
(protesting) But Richard, no, I, I —
RICK
You’ve got to listen to me. Do you have any idea what you’d have to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of ten we’d both wind up in a concentration camp. Isn’t that true, Louis?
Renault countersigns the papers.
RENAULT
I’m afraid Major Strasser would insist.
ILSA
You’re saying this only to make me go.
RICK
I’m saying it because it’s true. Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part
of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with
him, you’ll regret it.
ILSA
No.
RICK
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.
ILSA
But what about us?
RICK
We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we’d lost it, until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
ILSA
And I said I would never leave you.
RICK
And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do, too. Where I’m going you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that. Now, now…
Ilsa’s eyes well up with tears. Rick puts his hand to her chin and raises her face to meet his own.
RICK
Here’s looking at you, kid.
If McKinnon’s take on Ingrid Bergman leaves you screaming for more, here are Hillary Rodham Clinton, Justin Bieber and Ellen DeGeneres.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...The Daily Habits of Famous Writers: Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King & More
Image by The USO, via Flickr Commons
Though few of us like to hear it, the fact remains that success in any endeavor requires patient, regular training and a daily routine. To take a mundane, well-worn example, it’s not for nothing that Stephen R. Covey’s best-selling classic of the business and self-help worlds offers us “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” rather than “7 Sudden Breakthroughs that Will Change Your Life Forever”—though if we credit the spam emails, ads, and sponsored links that clutter our online lives, we may end up believing in quick fixes and easy roads to fame and fortune. But no, a well-developed skill comes only from a set of practiced routines.
That said, the type of routine one adheres to depends on very personal circumstances such that no single creative person’s habits need exactly resemble any other’s. When it comes to the lives of writers, we expect some commonality: a writing space free of distractions, some preferred method of transcription from brain to page, some set time of day or night at which the words flow best. Outside of these basic parameters, the daily lives of writers can look as different as the images in their heads.
But it seems that once a writer settles on a set of habits—whatever they may be—they stick to them with particular rigor. The writing routine, says hyper-prolific Stephen King, is “not any different than a bedtime routine. Do you go to bed a different way every night?” Likely not. As for why we all have our very specific, personal quirks at bedtime, or at writing time, King answers honestly, “I don’t know.”
So what does King’s routine look like? “There are certain things I do if I sit down to write,” he’s quoted as saying in Lisa Rogak’s Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King:
“I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning,” he explained. “I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.”
The King quotes come to us via the site (and now book) Daily Routines, which features brief summaries of “how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days.” We’ve previously featured a few snapshots of the daily lives of famous philosophers. The writers section of the site similarly offers windows into the daily practices of a wide range of authors, from the living to the long dead.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
A contemporary of King, though a slower, more self-consciously painstaking writer, Haruki Murakami incorporates into his workday his passion for running, an avocation he has made central to his writing philosophy. Expectedly, Murakami keeps a very athletic writing schedule and routine.
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
Not all writers can adhere to such a disciplined way of living and working, particularly those whose waking hours are given over to other, usually painfully unfulfilling, day jobs.
Image of Franz Kafka, via Wikimedia Commons
An almost archetypal case of the writer trapped in such a situation, Franz Kafka kept a routine that would cripple most people and that did not bring about physical strength, to say the least. As Zadie Smith writes of the author’s portrayal in Louis Begley’s biography, Kafka “despaired of his twelve hour shifts that left no time for writing.”
[T]wo years later, promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, he was now on the one-shift system, 8:30 AM until 2:30 PM. And then what? Lunch until 3:30, then sleep until 7:30, then exercises, then a family dinner. After which he started work around 11 PM (as Begley points out, the letter- and diary-writing took up at least an hour a day, and more usually two), and then “depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or three o’clock, once even till six in the morning.” Then “every imaginable effort to go to sleep,” as he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the office once more. This routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse.
Might he have chosen a healthier way? When his fiancée Felice Bauer suggested as much, Kafka replied, “The present way is the only possible one; if I can’t bear it, so much the worse; but I will bear it somehow.” And so he did, until his early death from tuberculosis.
While writers require routine, nowhere is it written that their habits must be salubrious or measured. According to Simone De Beauvoir, outré French writer Jean Genet “puts in about twelve hours a day for six months when he’s working on something and when he has finished he can let six months go by without doing anything.” Then there are those writers who have relied on pointedly unhealthy, even dangerous habits to propel them through their workday. Not only did William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson write under the influence, but so also did such a seemingly conservative person as W.H. Auden, who “swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty years… balancing its effect with the barbiturate Seconal when he wanted to sleep.” Auden called the amphetamine habit a “labor saving device” in the “mental kitchen,” though he added that “these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down.”
So, there you have it, a very diverse sampling of routines and habits in several successful writers’ lives. Though you may try to emulate these if you harbor literary ambitions, you’re probably better off coming up with your own, suited to the oddities of your personal makeup and your tolerance—or not—for serious physical exercise or mind-altering substances. Visit Daily Routines to learn about many more famous writers’ habits.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Life & Discoveries of Mary Leakey Celebrated in an Endearing Cutout Animation
“Over half a century, Mary Leakey labored under the hot African sun, scratching in the dirt for clues to early human physical and cultural evolution. Scientists in her field said she set the standards for documentation and excavation in paleolithic archeology. They spoke of hers as a life of enviable achievement.” That’s how The New York Times started its 1996 obituary for Mary Leakey, “matriarch of the famous fossil-hunting family in Africa whose own reputation in paleoanthropology soared with discoveries of bones, stone tools and the footprints of early human ancestors.”
Above, you can watch the Times’ newly-released cutout animation, celebrating her life and paleoanthropology work in eastern Africa. The endearing seven-minute film covers her discovery of Proconsul africanus in 1948, Zinjanthropus boisei in 1959, Homo habilis in 1960, and the trail of early human footprints found at Laetoli in the mid-1970s. The film also features something you’ll likely never see elsewhere — people throwing elephant dung frisbees! Enjoy.
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Read More...
Time Travel Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remarkably High-Quality 1940s Video
In May we featured color footage of a bombed-out Berlin a month after Germany’s defeat in the Second World War. Today we have footage of Tokyo, the other Axis power’s capital city, shot in that aftermath era, albeit in black-and-white — but at such a high level of clarity and with such smoothness that it feels as if it could have come from a historical movie made today. These clips, assembled into a sort of music video by the record producer and DJ Boogie Belgique, take us for a ride down a shopping street in the Shinbashi district, past market stalls in Shibuya, alongside the river, and even into areas meant exclusively for the occupying American forces.
Given that, and given the obviously high technology used to capture the footage itself, the occupying American forces more than likely shot this film themselves. But when did they do it? Clearly, Tokyo has had time to build itself back up after the immense destruction of the war, but how much time exactly? The Japan-watchers at Rocket News 24 have put their heads together to answer that question. “Japan was occupied from 1945 to 1952, so it was most likely around that time,” writes that site’s Scott Wilson.
He goes on to enumerate the visual clues that help pin down the year, including one poster for “Hatsu Imai, the first woman elected to the Japanese House of Representatives in 1946” and another for Miracle on 34th Street, originally released in November 1948. The consensus, in any case, seems to call this the Tokyo of the late 1940s, the city that Yasujirō Ozu, one of Japan’s most beloved auteurs, used as a setting in films like The Record of a Tenement Gentleman, A Hen in the Wind, and Late Spring.
But Ozu never included any visible traces of the American occupation, much less the clear presence we see in this documentary clip, in large part due to the demands of the American censors. They frowned on any direct reference to the United States, to the point that they almost cut out of Late Spring the admiring reference to Gary Cooper, to whom the main character’s matchmaking aunt compares the suitor she’s chosen for her. That main character, named Noriko, went on to appear in Ozu’s Early Summer in 1951 and Tokyo Story in 1953 — not as the exact same person each time, but always played by Setsuko Hara, rest her sweet soul, as the archetypal young-ish woman in postwar Tokyo. How many real-life Norikos of Shinbashi or Shibuya, I wonder, turned their heads to watch the American camera crew pass by?
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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, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Jorge Luis Borges Picks 33 of His Favorite Books to Start His Famous Library of Babel
“Jorge Luis Borges 1951, by Grete Stern.” Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Over the years the recommendation robots of Amazon and other online services seem to be usurping the role of the librarian. I do not know if this is ultimately good or bad—we may see in the future artificially intelligent librarians emerge from the web, personal literary assistants with impeccable taste and sensitivity. But at present, I find something lacking in online curation cultivated by algorithms. (I have a similar nostalgia for the bygone video store clerk.) Yes, customers who bought this book also bought others I might like, but what, tell me, would a genuine reader recommend?
A reader, say, like that arch reader Jorge Luis Borges, “one of the most well read men in history,” writes Grant Munroe at The Rumpus. Part of the thrill of discovering Borges resides in discovering all of the books he loved, both real and imaginary. The author always points to his sources. Borges, after all, “presented the genius of Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote [a story about writing as scrupulously faithful rewriting] by first carefully enumerating each book found in Menard’s personal library.” Borges himself, some readers may know, wrote the bulk of the short stories for which he’s known while working at a library in Buenos Aires, a job he described in his 1970 essay “Autobiographical Notes” as “nine solid years of unhappiness.”
Although he disliked the bureaucratic boredom of library work, Borges was better suited than perhaps anyone for a curatorial role. Given this reputation, Borges was asked more than once to select his favorite novels and stories for published anthologies. One such multi-volume project, titled Personal Library, saw Borges selecting 74 titles for an Argentine publisher between 1985 and his death in 1988. In another, Borges chose “a list of authors,” Monroe writes, “whose works were selected to fill 33 volumes in The Library of Babel, a 1979 Spanish language anthology of fantastic literature edited by Borges, named after his earlier story by the same name.”
Monroe tracked down all of the titles Borges chose for the eclectic anthology, “a fun, brilliant, polyglot collection” that includes a great many of the author’s perennial favorites, many of which you’ll recognize from their mentions in his fiction and essays. Below, we reproduce Monroe’s reconstruction of the 33 Library of Babel volumes, with links to those works available free online. Unfortunately, many of these stories are not available in translation. Others, such as those of Leon Bloy, have just become available in English since Monroe’s 2009 article. Thanks to his diligence, we can enjoy having Jorge Luis Borges as our personal librarian.
The Library of Babel
(Note: The titles of all stories currently without a proper translation into English have been left in their original language.)
(Also note: All stories marked with [c] are still protected by US copyright law. Only residents of the UK and Australia can legally click on the hyperlink provided.)
- Jack London, The Concentric Deaths
“The Minions of Midas”
“The Shadow and the Flash”
“Lost Face”
“The House of Mapuhi”
“The Law of Life”
- Jorge Luis Borges, August 26, 1983
(All but the last three articles are available in Penguin’s Borges: The Collected Fictions.)
“August 26, 1983″
“The Rose of Peracelsus”
“Blue Tigers”
“Shakespeare’s Memory”
An Interview with Borges, with Maria Esther Vasquez
A Chronology of J.L. Borges’ Life, from Siruela Magazine
The Ruler and Labyrinth: An Approximation of J.L Borges’ Bibliography, by Fernandez Ferrer
- Gustav Meyrink, Cardinal Napellus[ii]
“Der Kardinal Napellus”
“J.H. Obereits Besuch bei den Zeitegeln”
“Der Vier Mondbrüder”
- Léon Bloy, Disagreeable Tales
[All available in a translation published just this year]
“La Taie d’Argent”
“Les Captifs de Longjumeau”
“Une Idée Médiocre”
“Une Martyre”
“La Plus Belle Trouvaille de Caïn”
“On n’est pas Parfait”
“La Religion de M. Pleur”
“Terrible Châtiment d’un Dentiste”
“La Tisane”
“Tout Ce Que Tu Voudras!”
“La Dernière Cuite”
“Le Vieux de la Maison”
- Giovanni Papini, The Mirror That Fled
“Il Giorno Non Restituito”
“Due Immagini in una Vasca”
“Lo Specchio che Fugge”
“Storia Completamente Assurda”
“Il Mendicante di Anime”
“Una Morte Mentale”
“Non Voglio Più Essere Ciò che Sono”
“Chi Sei?”
“Il Suicida Sostituto”
“L’ultima Visita del Gentiluomo Malato”
- Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”
“The Canterville Ghost”
“The Selfish Giant”
“The Happy Prince”
“The Nightingale and the Rose”
- Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, El Convidado de las Últimas Festivas
(Used copies of the 1985 Oxford U. Press translation of Cruel Tales (the collection in which these stories are published) are available online.)
“L’Aventure de Tsé-i-la”
“Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes”
“A Torture By Hope” [trans. 1891]
“La Reine Ysabeau”
“Sombre Récit Conteur Plus Sombre”
“L’Enjeu”
“Véra”
- Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, El Amigo de la Muerte
“El Amigo de la Muerte” [or “The Strange Friend of Tito Gil”]
“The Tall Woman”
- Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street”
- William Beckford, Vathek
Vathek, a novella.
- H.G. Wells, The Door in the Wall
“The Plattner Story”
“The Story of Late Mr. Elvesham”
“The Crystal Egg”
“The Country of the Blind”
“The Door in the Wall”
- Pu Songling, The Tiger Guest [iii]
“The Buddhist Priest of Ch’ang-Ch’ing”
“In the Infernal Regions”
“The Magic Mirror”
“A Supernatural Wife”
“Examination for the Post of Guardian Angel”
“The Man Who Was Changed into a Crow”
“The Tiger Guest”
“Judge Lu”
“The Painted Skin”
“The Stream of Cash”
“The Invisible Priest”
“The Magic Path”
“The Wolf Dream”
“Dreaming Honors”
“The Tiger of Chao-Ch’ëng”
“Taking Revenge”
- Arthur Machen, The Shining Pyramid
“The Novel of the Black Seal”
“The Novel of the White Powder”
“The Shining Pyramid”
- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Isle of Voices [iv]
“The Bottle Imp”
“The Isle of Voices”
“Thrawn Janet”
“Markheim”
- G.K. Chesterton, The Eye of Apollo
“The Duel of Dr Hirsch”
“The Queer Feet”
“The Honor of Israel Gow”
“The Eye of Apollo”
“The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse” [c]
- Jacques Cazotte, The Devil in Love
(A new translation is available from Dedalus Press of the UK.)
The Devil in Love, a novella.
“Jacquez Cazotte,” an essay by Gerard de Nerval
- Franz Kafka, The Vulture
(While I’ve provided links to online translations, they’re somewhat suspect; probably better to check the Complete Short Stories.)
“The Hunger Artist”
“First Sorrow” [or “The Trapeze Artist”]
“The Vulture”
“A Common Confusion”
“Jackals and Arabs”
“The Great Wall of China”
“The City Coat of Arms”
“A Report to the Academy”
“Eleven Sons”
“Prometheus”
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
“The Purloined Letter”
“Ms. Found in a Bottle”
“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”
“The Man in the Crowd”
“The Pit and the Pendulum”
- Leopoldo Lugones, The Pillar of Salt
(A new translation of Lugones’ stories, published by The Library of Latin America, is available at Powell’s.)
“The Pillar of Salt”
“Grandmother Julieta”
“The Horses of Abdera”
“An Inexplicable Phenomenon”
“Francesca”
“Rain of Fire: An Account of the Immolation of Gomorra”
- Rudyard Kipling, The Wish House
(All the copyrighted stories are from Kipling’s Debits and Credits. They should be available in any thorough collection of his short fiction.)
“The Wish House” [c]
“A Sahib’s War”
“The Gardener” [c]
“The Madonna of the Trenches” [c]
“The Eye of Allah” [c]
- The Thousand and One Nights, According to Galland
“Abdula, the Blind Beggar” [trans. 1811]
“Alladin’s Lamp” [ibid]
- The Thousand and One Nights, According to Burton
“King Sinbad and His Falcon”
“The Adventures of Bululkia”
“The City of Brass”
“Tale of the Queen and the Serpent”
“Tale of the Husband and the Parrot”
“Tale of the Jewish Doctor”
“Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince”
“Tale of the Prince and the Ogres”
“Tale of the Wizir and the Wise Duban”
“The Fisherman and the Genii”
- Henry James, The Friends of the Friends
“The Friends of the Friends”
“The Abasement of the Northmores”
“Owen Wingrave”
“The Private Life”
- Voltaire, Micromegas
(A contemporary translation of these stories is available at Powell’s.)
“The Black and the White”
“The Two Conforters”
“The History of the Travels of Scaramentado”
“Memnon the Philosopher”
“Micromegas”
“The Princess of Babylon”
- Charles Hinton, Scientific Romances
“A Plane World”
“What is the Fourth Dimension?”
“The Persian King”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Great Stone Face
“Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe”
“The Great Stone Face”
“Earth’s Holocaust”
“The Minister’s Black Veil”
“Wakefield”
- Lord Dunsany, The Country of Yann
“Where the Tides Ebb and Flow”
“The Sword and the Idol”
“Carcassonne”
“Idle Days on the Yann”
“The Field”
“The Beggars”
“The Bureau d’Echange de Maux”
“A Night at an Inn”
- Saki, The Reticence of Lady Anne
“The Story-Teller”
“The Lumber Room”
“Gabriel-Ernest”
“Tobermory”
“The Background” [translated as “El Marco” (or “The Frame”)]
“The Unrest Cure”
“The Interlopers”
“Quail Seed”
“The Peace of Mowsle Barton”
“The Open Window”
“The Reticence of Lady Anne”
“Sredni Vashtar”
- Russian Tales
“Lazarus,” Leonid Andreyev
“The Crocodile,” Fydor Doestoevsky
“The Death of Ivan Illitch,” Leo Tolstoy
- Argentinean Tales
“El Calamar Opta por su Tinta,” Adolfo Bioy Casares
“Yzur,” Leopoldo Leones [See above.]
“A House Taken Over,” Julio Cortazar
“La Galera,” Manuel Mujica Láinez
“Los Objectos,” Sylvina Decampo
“El Profesor de Ajedrez,” Federico Peltzer
“Pudo Haberme Ocurrido,” Manuel Peyrou
“El Elegido,” Maria Esther Vasquez
- J.L. Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, New Stories of H. Bustos Domecq
(Available at Amazon.com.)
- The Book of Dreams (A Collection of Recounted Dreams)
List of Authors: Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, Alexandra David-Néel, Alfonso X, Alfred de Vigny, Aloysius Bertrand, Antonio Machado, Bernabé Cobo, F. Sarmiento, Eliseo Díaz, Francisco Acevedo, François Rabelais, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gastón Padilla, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Gottfried Keller, H. Desvignes Doolittle, Herbert Allen Giles, Herodotus, H. Garro, Horace, Ibrahim Zahim [Ibrahim Bin Adham], James G. Frazer, Jorge Alberto Ferrando, Jorge Luis Borges, José Ferrater Mora, José María Eça de Queiroz, Joseph Addison, Juan José Arreola, Lewis Carroll, Lao Tzu, Louis Aragon, Luigi Pirandello, Luis de Góngora, Mircea Eliade, Mohammad Mossadegh, Nemer ibn el Barud [no Wiki entry; see Amazon comment field], O. Henry, Otto von Bismarck, Paul Groussac, Plato, Plutarch, Rabbi Nissim ben Reuven, Raymond de Becker, Rodericus Bartius, Roy Bartholomew, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Thornton Wilder, Lucretius, Tsao Hsue Kin [Cao Xueqin], Ward Hill Lamon, William Butler Yeats, Wu Cheng’en, Giovanni Papini, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Baudelaire
- Borges A to Z (A Compilation)
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...A Superconductor Levitating on a Möbius Strip
We’ve seen some pretty creative things done on a Möbius strip – like watching a Bach canon get played forwards, then back. But how about this? Above, watch Andy Marmery show a superconductor levitating on a Möbius strip made with over 2,000 magnets. The magic is in the superconducting material, Yttrium barium copper oxide, which lets the superconductor whiz along, seemingly floating both above and below the track. This video comes from a video series called “Tales from the Prep Room,” created by The Royal Institution, “a 200 year old charity based in London dedicated to connecting people with the world of science through events, education, and [its] Christmas Lectures.”
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Read More...Watch Groundbreaking Comic Artist Mœbius Draw His Characters in Real Time
Jean Giraud, better known as Mœbius, may have passed away in 2012, but he gave his many fans glimpses into his unparalleled artistic imagination right up until the end. In 2010 and 2012, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain put on Mœbius-Transe-Forme, the first major exhibition in Paris devoted to his work, and one that, at Mœbius’ request, explored “the theme of metamorphosis, a leitmotif that runs throughout his comics, drawings, and film projects” and that presented his work in a variety of ways that even some of his most avid readers, used to experiencing his work only on the page, would never have seen before.
One such way took the form of The Dancing Line, a series of videos which capture Mœbius drawing live on a graphic tablet, offering an artist’s-eye-view into how he transformed a blank digital canvas into a window on the world he spent his career creating. Here we have three selections from the series: at the top we have Mœbius filling in the details on the face of Malvina from The Airtight Garage.
Just above, he draws the title character from his even better known comic series Blueberry, the unconventional Western he created with Jean-Michel Charlier. Below, you can watch the creation of a piece called “Inside Mœbius” — not a self-portrait, exactly, but a portrait of the sort of artist that exists in Mœbius’ world drawing a portrait of Mœbius himself.
“Staying alive for an artist means to always be in an unknown part of himself, to be out of himself,” Mœbius told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “The exhibition in Paris, the theme was transformation. Art is the big door but real life is a lot of small doors that you must pass through to create something new. You don’t always need to go far.” Nobody, artist or otherwise, stays alive forever, but Mœbius knew how, in the time he had, to stay as alive as possible by constantly seeking out those unknown parts. The Dancing Line videos show us how he felt his way through that terra incognita, pointing the way with the expansive body of work he left behind toward all those small doors we, too, must pass through to create something new of our own.
Related Content:
Moebius’ Storyboards & Concept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune
The Inscrutable Imagination of the Late Comic Artist Mœbius
Moebius Gives 18 Wisdom-Filled Tips to Aspiring Artists (1996)
Mœbius Illustrates Paulo Coelho’s Inspirational Novel The Alchemist (1998)
Mœbius Illustrates Dante’s Paradiso
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, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Martin Luther King, Jr. Writes a List of 16 Suggestions for African-Americans Riding Newly-Integrated Buses (1956)
Last Tuesday, December 1st, marked the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ refusal to relinquish her seat at the front of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, and as some people pointed out, the story many of us were told as children about Parks’ act of civil disobedience was fabricated. Parks was not a humble, elderly seamstress worn out from a long day of work, a myth author Herbert Kohl summarizes as “Rosa Parks the Tired.” She was a well-connected activist and NAACP leader who had already initiated actions to integrate local libraries. Of her grossly oversimplified biography, Parks remarked in her memoirs, “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Nor was Parks the first to brave arrest for refusing to give up a seat at the front of the bus. That same year, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give in, and seven months later, so did 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith. Neither of their arrests, however, had the power to spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the action that brought national attention to the civil rights movement and to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership role. King would later recall that “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history” because “her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted.” King’s repeated emphasis on “character” throughout his direction of the boycott and beyond often seems an awful lot like what is today disparaged, with good reason, as “respectability politics”—the notion that only those who conform to conservative, middle-class norms of dress and behavior deserve to be treated with dignity and to have their civil rights respected.
But this was not necessarily his point. His embrace of nonviolent resistance was in part a strategic means of presenting the Jim Crow power structure with an implacable united front that could not be moved to react in ways that might seem to justify violence in the eyes of a largely unsympathetic public—to make it clear beyond any doubt who was the aggressor. And the violence and repression directed at the boycotters was significant. They were attacked while walking to work; King’s and civil rights leader E.D. Nixon’s houses were both firebombed; and King, Parks, and 87 others were indicted for their participation in the boycott.
Nor did the boycott’s success in 1956 put an end to the attacks. As a site commemorating this history summarizes, “After the boycott came to a close, snipers shot into buses in black communities, at one point hitting a young black woman, Rosa Jordan, in the legs.” And on one single night in 1957, “four black churches and two homes were bombed.” These acts were on the extreme end of a daily series of aggressive confrontations and humiliations black riders faced as they boarded the newly-integrated Montgomery buses. To help those riders navigate this environment, King prepared the list of guidelines above on the week before the buses integrated. You can read a full transcript of the list below, thanks to Lists of Note, who include it in their recent book-length collection.
King makes his agenda clear in the introductory paragraph: “If there is violence in word or deed it must not be our people who commit it.” Some of these directives encourage great passivity in the face of often extreme hostility. It is very difficult for me to imagine responding in such ways to insults or physical attacks. And yet, the boycotters had already daily, and calmly, faced death and severe injury. As white Lutheran minister Robert Graetz—whose home was also bombed—remembered later, “Dr. King used to talk about the reality that some of us were going to die and that if any of us were afraid to die we really shouldn’t be there.”
INTEGRATED BUS SUGGESTIONS
This is a historic week because segregation on buses has now been declared unconstitutional. Within a few days the Supreme Court Mandate will reach Montgomery and you will be re-boarding integrated buses. This places upon us all a tremendous responsibility of maintaining, in face of what could be some unpleasantness, a calm and loving dignity befitting good citizens and members of our Race. If there is violence in word or deed it must not be our people who commit it.
For your help and convenience the following suggestions are made. Will you read, study and memorize them so that our non-violent determination may not be endangered. First, some general suggestions:
1 Not all white people are opposed to integrated buses. Accept goodwill on the part of many.
2 The whole bus is now for the use of all Take a vacant seat.
3 Pray for guidance and commit yourself to complete non-violence in word and action as you enter the bus.
4 Demonstrate the calm dignity of our Montgomery people in your actions.
5 In all things observe ordinary rules of courtesy and good behavior.
6 Remember that this is not a victory for Negroes alone, but for all Montgomery and the South. Do not boast! Do not brag!
7 Be quiet but friendly; proud, but not arrogant; joyous, but not boisterous.
8 Be loving enough to absorb evil and understanding enough to turn an enemy into a friend.
Now for some specific suggestions:
1 The bus driver is in charge of the bus and has been instructed to obey the law. Assume that he will cooperate in helping you occupy any vacant seat.
2 Do not deliberately sit by a white person, unless there is no other seat.
3 In sitting down by a person, white or colored, say “May I” or “Pardon me” as you sit. This is a common courtesy.
4 If cursed, do not curse back. If pushed, do not push back. If struck, do not strike back, but evidence love and goodwill at all times.
5 In case of an incident, talk as little as possible, and always in a quiet tone. Do not get up from your seat! Report all serious incidents to the bus driver.
6 For the first few days try to get on the bus with a friend in whose non-violence you have confidence. You can uphold one another by a glance or a prayer.
7 If another person is being molested, do not arise to go to his defense, but pray for the oppressor and use moral and spiritual force to carry on the struggle for justice.
8 According to your own ability and personality, do not be afraid to experiment with new and creative techniques for achieving reconciliation and social change.
If you feel you cannot take it, walk for another week or two. We have confidence in our people. GOD BLESS YOU ALL.
Related Content:
‘You Are Done’: The Chilling “Suicide Letter” Sent to Martin Luther King by the F.B.I.
200,000 Martin Luther King Papers Go Online
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Google Gives You a 360° View of the Performing Arts, From the Royal Shakespeare Company to the Paris Opera Ballet
We’ve long been able to read books online. More recently, the internet has also become a favored distribution system for movies, and certainly we’ve all heard more than enough about the effects of downloading and streaming on the music industry. No new technology can quite substitute, yet, for a visit to the museum, but as we’ve often posted about here, many of the museums themselves have gone ahead and made their paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts viewable in great detail online. At this point, will the experience of any art form at all remain unavailable to us on the internet?
Not long ago, I would have named any of the performing arts, but the brains at the Google Cultural Institute have now got around to those most living of all forms as well. The New York Times’ Michael Cooper writes of our newfound ability, through a series of 360-degree videos, to “stand, virtually, on the stage of the Palais Garnier, among the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet,” ” journey to Stratford-upon-Avon, where you can try to keep up with a frenetic Alex Hassell of the Royal Shakespeare Company as Henry V, exhorting his troops to go ‘once more unto the breach,’ ” or “go onstage at Carnegie Hall, where the video places you smack in the middle of the Philadelphia Orchestra as it plays a rousing ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King.’ ”
These come as part of a virtual exhibition involving “an innovative assemblage of performing arts groups” that went live earlier this month at the Google Cultural Institute’s site. The organizations, now more than 60 in total, include not just the Paris Opera, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Carnegie Hall, but the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera, the American Ballet Theater, the American Museum of Magic, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Rome Opera. You can find the performances neatly divided into categories: Music, Opera, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Art.
Google’s blog describes some of the technology behind all this, including the 360-degree performance recordings, the “indoor Street View imagery” of the grand venues where many of the performances happen, and the “ultra-high resolution Gigapixel” images available for your scrutiny. When you play the video above of the Philadelphia Orchestra, you can click and drag to view the performance from every possible angle from your vantage right there in the midst of the musicians. I can’t imagine what the Google Cultural Institute will come up with next, but surely it won’t be long before we can see things from the Black Swan’s point of view.
You can start exploring the 360s performances here.
via The New York Times/Google
Related Content:
Ballet Dancers Do Their Hardest Moves in Slow Motion
40,000 Artworks from 250 Museums, Now Viewable for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project
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, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Original Portrait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Layers of da Vinci’s Masterpiece
The BBC is getting ready to air a documentary, Secrets of the Mona Lisa, which will delve into the research of French scientist Pascal Cotte. Using an innovative imaging technique, Cotte has managed to probe the paint layers beneath the surface of da Vinci’s sixteenth-century masterpiece. And, lo and behold, he’s found hidden paintings, including what he believes is an original, “real” portrait of Lisa del Giocondo (the subject of da Vinci’s painting).
The host of the documentary, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon, announced, “I have no doubt that this is definitely one of the stories of the century.” Other art historians are not getting carried away. Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, said in an interview: “They [Cotte’s images] are ingenious in showing what Leonardo may have been thinking about. But the idea that there is that picture as it were hiding underneath the surface is untenable. I do not think there are these discrete stages which represent different portraits. I see it as more or less a continuous process of evolution. I am absolutely convinced that the Mona Lisa is Lisa.” Or, put differently, there are not different portraits on da Vinci’s canvas, just stages of the same portrait that now hangs in the Louvre today.
Get more background on the documentary and Cotte’s research here.
Related Content:
Did Leonardo da Vinci Paint a First Mona Lisa Before The Mona Lisa?
Free Course: An Introduction to the Art of the Italian Renaissance
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