Watch the Pilot of Orson Welles’ Never-Aired Talk Show, Starring the Muppets (1979)

in Film, Television | May 8th, 2015

The Hen­son Rar­i­ties site on YouTube keeps giv­ing and giv­ing. Not only has it giv­en us access to some of Jim Henson’s ear­li­est (and delight­ful­ly vio­lent) com­mer­cials, but it has dis­cov­ered this: a pilot of The Orson Welles Show from 1979. The show was nev­er aired, and you might be able to dis­cern why from check­ing it out.

It’s the height of ‘70s excess with wide col­lars, poly­ester shirts, var­i­ous forms of pre-show indul­gences, and it’s all under­lit like a night­club, not a talk show set. Orson Welles doesn’t inter­view his first guest Burt Reynolds, but instead imme­di­ate­ly throws the ques­tions to the audi­ence, turn­ing the first half of the show into an ur-Actors Stu­dio episode. (An eagle eyed YouTube com­men­ta­tor points out a young–but unver­i­fied–Joe Dante in the audi­ence.) And the entire show has the feel­ing of very, very rough footage saved by edit­ing and heap­ing on table­spoons of canned laugh­ter.

Even­tu­al­ly Welles intro­duces “a lit­tle com­pa­ny of cloth head­ed come­di­ans” that was already in its third sea­son of the Mup­pet Show and about to pre­miere its first movie. (That first Mup­pet Movie, by the way, fea­tures Welles near the end as a movie exec­u­tive.)

Welles, who calls him­self a magi­cian more often than a direc­tor in this episode, no doubt loves the mag­ic behind the Mup­pets. Even when the lights are ful­ly upon Hen­son and his frog pup­pet, we nev­er ques­tion that Ker­mit is not real. In the 50th minute, Welles intro­duces both Hen­son (“pic­ture Rasputin as an Eagle Scout” says the direc­tor) and Frank Oz (“A man who tru­ly fits his name.”)

The show peters out with a mag­ic trick, an appear­ance by Ang­ie Dick­in­son (more tricks!) and a final Welles monolog, who reads Jen­ny Kissed Me by James Leigh Hunt. Like the poem, there’s a shad­ow of maudlin mor­tal­i­ty hang­ing over all of Welles’ lines through­out the show. Six years lat­er Welles would pass away with his final movie unfin­ished, still wait­ing for the cash that he hoped pro­grams like The Orson Welles Show would bring.

via @KirstinButler

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Orson Welles Read Edgar Allan Poe on a Cult Clas­sic Album by The Alan Par­sons Project

Future Shock: Orson Welles Nar­rates a 1972 Film About the Per­ils of Tech­no­log­i­cal Change

Jim Henson’s Orig­i­nal, Spunky Pitch for The Mup­pet Show

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

What’s It Like to Fight in 15th Century Armor?: A Surprising Demonstration

in History | May 7th, 2015

Above, Le Musée Nation­al du Moyen-Âge (oth­er­wise known as The Nation­al Muse­um of the Mid­dle Ages) and The Uni­ver­si­ty of Gene­va recre­ate fight scenes from the 15th cen­tu­ry, demon­strat­ing the move­ments and tech­niques of com­bat­ants who clanked around in full suits of armor. If you’re like me, you’re watch­ing with sur­prise — sur­prised by their agili­ty and dex­ter­i­ty. Was­n’t quite expect­ing that!

If you don’t read French, it’s worth not­ing that the video starts with a demon­stra­tion of mobil­i­ty, then explores medieval fight­ing tech­niques, from stab­bing an oppo­nent right between the eyes, to strik­ing a mor­tal blow on the ground.  The video was brought to the web by Le Figaro.

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:

Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Illus­trat­ed in a Remark­able Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­script (c. 1450)

Yoda’s Long Lost Twin Found in a 14th Cen­tu­ry Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

See The Guidon­ian Hand, the Medieval Sys­tem for Read­ing Music, Get Brought Back to Life

140 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es

Hear James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Aloud & Set to Music: 31 Hours of Free Unabridged Audio

in Books, Music | May 7th, 2015

James Joyce’s final and most dif­fi­cult nov­el Finnegans Wake unlocks a lot of its secrets when read aloud, prefer­ably in an Irish accent. In this way, Joyce’s mul­ti­lay­ered word­play makes sense aural­ly even if all the mean­ing might not be appar­ent on paper. (His broth­er, Stanis­laus, called it “the work of a psy­chopath.”)

An audio­book ver­sion would be good—-and there is one by Patrick Healy from 1992 (lis­ten online) —but one with music would be much bet­ter. This month, Way­words and Mean­signs, a project co-found­ed by Derek Pyle, has released its ver­sion of the nov­el with each of its 17 chap­ters per­formed by a dif­fer­ent group of musi­cians and read­ers. The full text is rep­re­sent­ed here in a stag­ger­ing 30+ hours. (You can read along here.)

“Our hope was to cre­ate a ver­sion of Joyce’s book that would be acces­si­ble to new­com­ers, but still feel fresh and excit­ing for devot­ed stu­dents and schol­ars,” says Pyle.

As with all com­pi­la­tion albums, some tracks are bet­ter than oth­ers. Mar­i­ana Lanari & Sjo­erd Leijten’s open­ing chap­ter chops and cuts var­i­ous voic­es togeth­er with a hyp­not­ic elec­tron­ic back­ing, recre­at­ing the con­fu­sion of those open­ing pages and the bar­rage of influ­ences and voic­es. They also per­form the final chap­ter. (Lanari is part of the Rong­Wrong Finnegans Wake Read­ing Group in Ams­ter­dam.) Peter Quadri­no, Jake Read­ing & Evan James take on Book 3, Chap­ter 3, with a mix of faux-Tom Waits and Mar­tin Den­ny pro­vid­ing the back­drop. (Quadri­no is leader of the Finnegans Wake Read­ing Group of Austin, Texas) The jazz­i­er the back­drop, by the by, does reveal Joyce’s con­nec­tion to the Beat poets. Oth­er tracks are dry and more straight-for­ward: face it, not every­body has the most beau­ti­ful read­ing voice. It is def­i­nite­ly a labor of love, and reveals how many FW read­ing groups there are around the globe.

Oth­er artists involved in the project include sax­o­phon­ist Hay­den Chisholm, and painter Robert Amos, whose work you can find at the James Joyce Bistro in Vic­to­ria, British Colum­bia.

Way­words and Mean­signs have released the full project on Archive.org under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. (Stream above or down­load all of the files here.) Those who read this and feel they’ve missed out on the cre­ativ­i­ty of tack­ling Finnegans Wake, don’t wor­ry. The web­site is tak­ing sub­mis­sions for a sec­ond edi­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

F. Scott Fitzger­ald Has a Strange Din­ner with James Joyce & Draws a Cute Sketch of It (1928)

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Record­ings (1924/1929)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

David Byrne’s Unusual Forms of Visual Art: Bike Racks, Corporate Signs & Powerpoint Presentations

in Art | May 7th, 2015

A decade ago, I vol­un­tar­i­ly watched a Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion. That may sound unre­mark­able, but under nor­mal cir­cum­stances I go to almost any length to avoid Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tions. I throw my lot in with The Visu­al Dis­play of Quan­ti­ta­tive Infor­ma­tion author Edward Tufte, known for his indict­ment of the “Pow­er­point cog­ni­tive style” that “rou­tine­ly dis­rupts, dom­i­nates, and triv­i­al­izes con­tent.” But this par­tic­u­lar Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion did­n’t hap­pen under nor­mal cir­cum­stances: it came from none oth­er than artist, writer, and for­mer Talk­ing Head David Byrne.

Byrne may have done a num­ber of such pre­sen­ta­tions under the ban­ner of “I Love Pow­er­point,” but he and Tufte regard that omnipresent Microsoft slideshow appli­ca­tion more sim­i­lar­ly than you might think. “Hav­ing nev­er used the pro­gram before, I found it lim­it­ing, inflex­i­ble, and biased, like most soft­ware,” Byrne wrote of his user expe­ri­ence in Wired. “On top of that, Pow­er­Point makes hilar­i­ous­ly bad-look­ing visu­als.” And yet, “although I began by mak­ing fun of the medi­um, I soon real­ized I could actu­al­ly cre­ate things that were beau­ti­ful. I could bend the pro­gram to my own whim and use it as an artis­tic agent.”

The fruits of Byrne’s exper­i­men­ta­tion, apart from those talks in the 2000s, include the book Envi­sion­ing Epis­te­mo­log­i­cal Emo­tion­al Infor­ma­tion, a col­lec­tion of his Pow­er­point “pieces that were mov­ing, despite the lim­i­ta­tions of the ‘medi­um.’ ” You can find more infor­ma­tion on davidbyrne.com’s art page, which doc­u­ments the host of non-musi­cal projects Byrne has pulled off in his post-Heads career, includ­ing whim­si­cal urban bike racks installed in Man­hat­tan and Brook­lyn. The short Wall Street Jour­nal video at the top of the post doc­u­ments the project, which fits right in the wheel­house of a such a design-mind­ed, New York-based, bicy­cle-lov­ing kind of guy.

Byrne, as his musi­cal out­put might have you expect, tends to stray from too-estab­lished forms when­ev­er pos­si­ble. Just above, we have one exam­ple of his works in the form of the cor­po­rate sign, each image of which shows the name of a big, bland com­pa­ny when viewed from one angle, and a world like “TRUST,” “GRACE,” or “COURAGE” when viewed from anoth­er. “Multi­na­tion­al tomb­stones nes­tled in the (land­scaped) pas­toral glade,” Byrne’s site calls these enhanced pho­tographs tak­en in North Car­oli­na’s office park-inten­sive Research Tri­an­gle. “A utopi­an vision in the Amer­i­can coun­try­side.”

How­ev­er wit­ty, amus­ing, and even friv­o­lous it may look on its face, Byrne’s infra­struc­tur­al, cor­po­rate, and Pow­er­point-ified art also accom­plish­es what all the best art must: mak­ing us see things dif­fer­ent­ly. He may not have made me love Pow­er­point, but I’ve nev­er quite looked at any slideshow cre­at­ed in the pro­gram in quite the same way since — not that any­one else has since cre­at­ed one that I could sit through whol­ly with­out objec­tion. Still, all the best art also gives us some­thing to aspire to.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne: From Talk­ing Heads Front­man to Lead­ing Urban Cyclist

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

Hear the Ear­li­est Known Talk­ing Heads Record­ings (1975)

Radio David Byrne: Stream Free Music Playlists Cre­at­ed Every Month by the Front­man of Talk­ing Heads

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Michael Moore’s 13 Rules for Making Documentaries — Really Powerful & Entertaining Documentaries

in Film, Politics | May 7th, 2015

Flickr Com­mons Image by Nico­las Genin

You don’t rile up as many peo­ple as Michael Moore has with­out mas­ter­ing the art of but­ton push­ing. Clint East­wood threat­ened to kill him (alleged­ly). Christo­pher Hitchens, echo­ing the sen­ti­ments of many Iraq war sup­port­ers, called his work “dis­hon­est and dem­a­gog­ic.” And the State Department—opponents of both social­ized health­care and the Cuban government—attempted to dis­cred­it Moore with lies about his film Sicko. Those are some pow­er­ful ene­mies, espe­cial­ly for a “come­di­an and a pop­ulist” whose only weapons are cam­eras, micro­phones, and best­selling top­i­cal rants. On the oth­er hand, Moore inspires mil­lions of reg­u­lar folks. As far back as 2004, a pro­file in The New York­er described the simul­ta­ne­ous­ly angry and jovial doc­u­men­tar­i­an as “a polit­i­cal hero” to mil­lions who “revere” him.

How does a doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er cre­ate such pas­sion? Moore, writes The New York­er, inten­tion­al­ly pro­vokes; but he is also “exquis­ite­ly sen­si­tive to his audience’s mood and response. The harsh­ness of his com­e­dy, the pro­por­tion of com­e­dy to polit­i­cal anger, the flat­tery or mock­ery of the audi­ence, the num­ber and type of swear­words he uses….” All care­ful­ly con­trolled. And all of it adds up to some­thing more than doc­u­men­tary. Moore treats the term almost as a pejo­ra­tive, as he told an audi­ence in his keynote speech at the 2014 Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Festival’s Doc Con­fer­ence. Typ­i­cal doc­u­men­tar­i­ans, Moore said, “sound like a scold. Like you’re Moth­er Supe­ri­or with a wood­en ruler in your hand.”

Some crit­ics of Moore make this very charge against him. Nonethe­less, his abil­i­ty to move peo­ple, both in the­aters and live audi­ences, to tears, peals of laugh­ter, and fits of rage, speaks of much more than humor­less moral­ism. Doc­u­men­tar­i­ans, Moore says in the 13-point “man­i­festo” of his speech, should aspire to more. Hence his first rule, which he derives part­ly from Fight Club. Below it, see abridg­ments of the oth­er twelve guide­lines, and read Moore’s speech in its entire­ty at Indiewire. If he repeats him­self, and he does, a lot, I sup­pose it’s because he feels the point is impor­tant enough to dri­ve home many times:

1. The first rule of doc­u­men­taries is: Don’t make a doc­u­men­tary — make a MOVIE.

…the audi­ence, the peo­ple who’ve worked hard all week — it’s Fri­day night, and they want to go to the movies. They want the lights to go down and be tak­en some­where. They don’t care whether you make them cry, whether you make them laugh, whether you even chal­lenge them to think — but damn it, they don’t want to be lec­tured, they don’t want to see our invis­i­ble wag­ging fin­ger pop­ping out of the screen. They want to be enter­tained.

2. Don’t tell me shit I already know.

Oh, I see — you made the movie because there are so many peo­ple who DON’T know about genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied foods. And you’re right. There are. And they just can’t wait to give up their Sat­ur­day to learn about it

3. The mod­ern doc­u­men­tary sad­ly has mor­phed into what looks like a col­lege lec­ture, the col­lege lec­ture mode of telling a sto­ry.

That has to stop. We have to invent a dif­fer­ent way, a dif­fer­ent kind of mod­el.

4. I don’t like Cas­tor Oil…. Too many of your doc­u­men­taries feel like med­i­cine.

The peo­ple don’t want med­i­cine. If they need med­i­cine, they go to the doc­tor. They don’t want med­i­cine in the movie the­aters. They want Goobers, they want pop­corn, and they want to see a great movie.

5. The Left is bor­ing.

…we’ve lost our sense of humor and we need to be less bor­ing. We used to be fun­ny. The Left was fun­ny in the 60s, and then we got real­ly too damn seri­ous. I don’t think it did us any good.

6. Why don’t more of your films go after the real vil­lains — and I mean the REAL vil­lains?

Why aren’t you nam­ing names? Why don’t we have more doc­u­men­taries that are going after cor­po­ra­tions by name? Why don’t we have more doc­u­men­taries going after the Koch Broth­ers and nam­ing them by name?

7. I think it’s impor­tant to make your films per­son­al.

I don’t mean to put your­self nec­es­sar­i­ly in the film or in front of the cam­era. Some of you, the cam­era does not like you. Do not go in front of the cam­era. And I would count myself as one of those. … But peo­ple want to hear the voice of a per­son. The vast major­i­ty of these doc­u­men­tary films that have had the most suc­cess are the ones with a per­son­al voice.

8. Point your cam­eras at the cam­eras.

Show the peo­ple why the main­stream media isn’t telling them what is going on.      

9. Books and TV have non­fic­tion fig­ured out. Peo­ple love to watch Stew­art and Col­bert. Why don’t you make films that come from that same spir­it? 

Why would­n’t you want the same huge audi­ence they have? Why is it that the Amer­i­can audi­ence says, I love non­fic­tion books and I love non­fic­tion TV — but there’s no way you’re drag­ging me into a non­fic­tion movie! Yet, they want the truth AND they want to be enter­tained. Yes, repeat after me, they want to be enter­tained!

10. As much as pos­si­ble, try to film only the peo­ple who dis­agree with you.

That is what is real­ly inter­est­ing. We learn so much more by you train­ing your cam­era on the guy from Exxon or Gen­er­al Motors and get­ting him to just blab on.

11. The audi­ence is part of the film.

While you are film­ing a scene for your doc­u­men­tary, are you get­ting mad at what you are see­ing? Are you cry­ing? Are you crack­ing up so much that you are afraid that the micro­phone is going to pick it up? If that is hap­pen­ing while you are film­ing it, then there is a very good chance that’s how the audi­ence is going to respond, too. Trust that. You are the audi­ence, too.

12. Less is more. You already know that one.

Edit. Cut. Make it short­er. Say it with few­er words. Few­er scenes. Don’t think your shit smells like per­fume. It does­n’t.

13. Final­ly… Sound is more impor­tant than pic­ture.

Pay your sound woman or sound man the same as you pay the DP, espe­cial­ly now with doc­u­men­taries. Sound car­ries the sto­ry. It’s true in a fic­tion film, too.

So there you have it aspir­ing film­mak­ers. Should you to wish to gal­va­nize, polar­ize, move, and inspire your audi­ence as you tell them the truth (as you see it), you’d do well to take a few point­ers from Michael Moore. Polit­i­cal differences—and homi­ci­dal urges—aside, even par­tic­u­lar­ly right-lean­ing doc­u­men­tary direc­tors might con­sid­er tak­ing a few pages from Moore’s play­book. A few media per­son­al­i­ties, it seems, already have, at least when it comes to defin­ing their pur­pose. One last time, with feel­ing, for the TL;DR crowd: “Yes, repeat after me, [audi­ences] want to be enter­tained! If you can’t accept that you are an enter­tain­er with your truth, then please get out of the busi­ness.”

via Indiewire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michael Moore Tells Wis­con­sin Teach­ers “Amer­i­ca Isn’t Broke”

Bowl­ing for Columbine: It’s Online and 10 Years Lat­er the School Mas­sacres Con­tin­ue. Have You Had Enough?!

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Short, Strange & Brutal Stint as an Elementary School Teacher

in Education, History, Philosophy | May 6th, 2015

Lud­wig Wittgen­stein fin­ished writ­ing the Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus, the achieve­ment for which most of us remem­ber him, in 1918; three years lat­er came its first pub­li­ca­tion in Ger­many. And to what prob­lem did Wittgen­stein put his lumi­nous philo­soph­i­cal mind in the inter­im? Teach­ing a class of ele­men­tary school­ers in rur­al Aus­tria. “Well on his way to being con­sid­ered the great­est philoso­pher alive,” as Spencer Robins puts it in a thor­ough Paris Review post on Wittgen­stein’s teach­ing stint, he also found him­self “con­vinced he was a moral fail­ure.” Search­ing for a solu­tion, he got rid of his fam­i­ly for­tune, left the “Palais Wittgen­stein” in which he’d grown up, and out of “a roman­tic idea of what it would be like to work with peasants—an idea he’d got­ten from read­ing Tol­stoy,” went to teach kids in the mid­dle of nowhere. See them all above.\

“I am to be an ele­men­tary-school teacher in a tiny vil­lage called Trat­ten­bach,” Wittgen­stein wrote to his own teacher and friend Bertrand Rus­sell in a let­ter dat­ed Octo­ber 23, 1921. A month lat­er, in anoth­er let­ter, he described his cir­cum­stances as those of “odi­ous­ness and base­ness,” com­plain­ing that “I know human beings on the aver­age are not worth much any­where, but here they are much more good-for-noth­ing and irre­spon­si­ble than else­where.” The great philoso­pher’s exper­i­ment in pri­ma­ry edu­ca­tion would appear not to have gone well.

And yet Wittgen­stein comes off, by many accounts, as an exem­plary and almost unbe­liev­ably engaged teacher. He and his stu­dents, in Robins’ words, “designed steam engines and build­ings togeth­er, and built mod­els of them; dis­sect­ed ani­mals; exam­ined things with a micro­scope Wittgen­stein brought from Vien­na; read lit­er­a­ture; learned con­stel­la­tions lying under the night sky; and took trips to Vien­na, where they stayed at a school run by his sis­ter Her­mine.” Her­mine her­self remem­bered the kids “pos­i­tive­ly climb­ing over each oth­er in their eager­ness” to answer their philoso­pher-teacher’s ques­tions, and at least one par­tic­u­lar­ly promis­ing kid among them received Wittgen­stein’s exten­sive extracur­ric­u­lar instruc­tion — and even an offer of adop­tion.

We might also con­sid­er Wittgen­stein a cham­pi­on, in his own way, of equal treat­ment for the sex­es: unlike oth­er teach­ers in rur­al ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Aus­tria, he expect­ed the girls to solve the very same ver­tig­i­nous­ly dif­fi­cult math prob­lems he put to the boys. But by the same token, he doled out cor­po­ral pun­ish­ment to them just as equal­ly when they got the answer wrong, and even when they did­n’t grasp the con­cepts at hand as swift­ly as he might have liked. This rough treat­ment cul­mi­nat­ed in “the Haid­bauer inci­dent,” an occa­sion of child-smack­ing con­se­quen­tial enough in Wittgen­stein’s life to mer­it its own Wikipedia page, and which effec­tive­ly end­ed his edu­ca­tion­al involve­ment with young­sters. The inci­dent report­ed­ly left  an 11-year-old school­boy “uncon­scious after being hit on the head dur­ing class.”

“Ulti­mate­ly, he was to alien­ate the vil­lagers of Trat­ten­bach with his tyran­ni­cal and often bul­ly­ing behav­ior, the result of a mind unable to empathize with the stage at which some of his pupils found them­selves in their learn­ing,” writes edu­ca­tion blog­ger Alex Beard in his own post on Wittgen­stein-as teacher. “Today we would admire his high expec­ta­tions and the puri­ty of his inten­tion as an edu­ca­tor, but look rather less kind­ly on the Ohrfeige (ear-box­ing) and Haareziehen (hair-pulling) that his stu­dents lat­er recalled.” We mod­ern-day Wittgen­stein fans have to ask our­selves what won­ders we might we have learned had fate assigned our ele­men­tary-school selves to his class­room — and whether we would have grad­u­at­ed to our next year unscathed.

Read more about Wittgen­stein’s stint as a teacher at The Paris Review.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell on His Stu­dent Lud­wig Wittgen­stein: Man of Genius or Mere­ly an Eccen­tric?

Wittgen­stein and Hitler Attend­ed the Same School in Aus­tria, at the Same Time (1904)

Wittgen­stein Day-by-Day: Face­book Page Tracks the Philosopher’s Wartime Expe­ri­ence 100 Years Ago

Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Trac­ta­tus Gets Adapt­ed Into an Avant-Garde Com­ic Opera

See the Homes and Stud­ies of Wittgen­stein, Schopen­hauer, Niet­zsche & Oth­er Philoso­phers

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Maurice Sendak’s Bawdy Illustrations For Herman Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities

in Art, Books, Literature | May 6th, 2015

Mau­rice Sendak—like some few oth­er excep­tion­al children’s authors—also did work for adults, and in at least one case, did adult work, in his illus­tra­tions for a con­tro­ver­sial 1995 edi­tion of Her­man Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambi­gu­i­ties. The draw­ings are erot­ic, as well as homo­erot­ic, illus­trat­ing the gay sub­text in the nov­el. Sendak may seem like an unlike­ly illus­tra­tor for the Moby Dick author’s work; he was already an unlike­ly Amer­i­can children’s lit­er­ary icon—“Jewish, gay, poor,” he nonethe­less became “a major cul­tur­al influ­ence,” writes blog BLT. As Sendak declared in an inter­view with Bill Moy­ers, he learned to “find a sep­a­rate peace” from his own anx­i­ety not through reli­gious faith but through a “total faith in art.” “My gods,” Sendak told Moy­ers, “are Her­man Melville, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Mozart,” among oth­ers. The author of Pierre fig­ured high­ly in that divine hier­ar­chy.

But Melville, at the time of Pierre’s pub­li­ca­tion, was not loved as a god. Shunned by crit­ics and the read­ing pub­lic after the dev­as­tat­ing recep­tion accord­ed Moby Dick, his self-pro­fessed great­est work, Melville felt fur­ther humil­i­at­ed when his pub­lish­er demand­ed he accept 20 cents on the dol­lar instead of 50 for the next nov­el, Pierre. Crushed, he signed the new con­tract. Then, though he had been sat­is­fied with Pierre, con­sid­er­ing the nov­el fin­ished at the end of 1851, he added 150 pages, much of it a scathing, sar­don­ic indict­ment of the lit­er­ary estab­lish­ment, includ­ing a non-too-sub­tle chap­ter titled “Young Lit­er­a­ture in Amer­i­ca.”

Whether the expan­sion was, as Maria Popo­va sug­gests at Brain Pick­ings, an elo­quent riposte to his crit­ics, or, as Library Jour­nal sug­gests, made at the behest of his pub­lish­ers (unlike­ly) is unclear. Uni­ver­si­ty of Delaware pro­fes­sor Her­schel Park­er, the Melville schol­ar who edit­ed the Sendak edi­tion of Pierre, admits, “we had NOT known when the expan­sion start­ed and had not known just why.” Sendak him­self describes Pierre as “a great and inge­nious work of art.” Of the notion that Melville’s addi­tions were “a vin­dic­tive dia­tribe against all his crit­ics” Sendak spec­u­lates, “he might have been mad and hurt—He must have been mad and hurt. But he wouldn’t have spent that much time on a book being just mad and hurt.”

Sendak, a life­long ama­teur Melville schol­ar, knows what he’s talk­ing about. His famil­iar­i­ty with the author is such that his opin­ion was cit­ed approv­ing­ly in the acknowl­edg­ments of a schol­ar­ly edi­tion of Moby Dick. Despite Sendak’s com­ments in defense of Melville’s lat­er addi­tions, his and Park­er’s ver­sion of Pierre attempts to strip them out and restore the nov­el to its ear­li­er form, one Melville called his “Krak­en book.” Sendak appar­ent­ly ini­ti­at­ed the project in order to pub­lish the draw­ings. In them, writes John Bryan in a review for Col­lege Eng­lish, “Pierre is a full-blown ado­les­cent: mus­cu­lar, ecsta­t­ic, des­per­ate, devot­ed, and lone­ly; he is the man-child invin­ci­ble.” The novel’s hero spends much of his time a blue Super­man out­fit, “red cape and all,” so tight “that it is skin itself, con­ceal­ing noth­ing.”

Bib­liokept com­pares the illus­tra­tions to William Blake. They also con­tain ref­er­ences to Goya and oth­er artists who explored the grotesque, as well as the mor­bid, trans­gres­sive sex­u­al­i­ty of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. “Nowhere else in the his­to­ry of Melville illus­tra­tion,” writes John Bryan, “do we find such open­ings into the latent sex­u­al­i­ty of Melville’s prose.” Brain Pick­ings describes the draw­ings as “the most sex­u­al­ly expres­sive of any of his work, fea­tur­ing 27 dis­cernible nip­ples and 11 male ‘pack­ages’…. Bold, unapolo­getic, and incred­i­bly sen­su­al, the illus­tra­tions are also sub­tly sub­ver­sive in their treat­ment of gen­der iden­ti­ty and stereo­types.”

See many more of these hero­ic and sen­su­al illus­tra­tions at Brain Pick­ings. “The Krak­en Edi­tion”—as Sendak’s Pierre is called—can be had in rather pricey hard­cov­er or used, and appar­ent­ly now out of print, paper­back.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

Mau­rice Sendak’s Emo­tion­al Last Inter­view with NPR’s Ter­ry Gross, Ani­mat­ed by Christoph Nie­mann

An Ani­mat­ed Christ­mas Fable by Mau­rice Sendak (1977)

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

The Animated Dostoevsky: Two Finely Crafted Short Films Bring the Russian Novelist’s Work to Life

in Animation, Literature | May 5th, 2015

You can expe­ri­ence Dos­to­evsky in the orig­i­nal. You can expe­ri­ence Dos­to­evsky in trans­la­tion. Or how about an expe­ri­ence of Dos­to­evsky in ani­ma­tion? Today we’ve round­ed up two par­tic­u­lar­ly notable exam­ples of that last, both of which take up their uncon­ven­tion­al project of adap­ta­tion with suit­ably uncon­ven­tion­al ani­ma­tion tech­niques. At the top of the post, we have the first part (and just below we have the sec­ond) of Dos­to­evsky’s sto­ry “The Dream of a Ridicu­lous Man,” re-imag­ined by Russ­ian ani­ma­tor Alexan­der Petrov.

The ani­ma­tion, as Josh Jones wrote here in 2014, “uses painstak­ing­ly hand-paint­ed cells to bring to life the alter­nate world the nar­ra­tor finds him­self nav­i­gat­ing in his dream. From the flick­er­ing lamps against the drea­ry, dark­ened cityscape of the ridicu­lous man’s wak­ing life to the shift­ing, sun­lit sands of the dream­world, each detail of the sto­ry is fine­ly ren­dered with metic­u­lous care.” A haunt­ing visu­al style for this haunt­ing piece of late Dos­to­evsky in full-on exis­ten­tial­ist mode.

Just below, you can see a longer and more ambi­tious adap­ta­tion of one of Dos­to­evsky’s much longer, much more ambi­tious works: Crime and Pun­ish­ment. This half-hour ani­mat­ed ver­sion by Pol­ish film­mak­er Piotr Dumala, Mike Springer wrote here in 2012, gets “told expres­sion­is­ti­cal­ly, with­out dia­logue and with an altered flow of time. The com­plex and mul­ti-lay­ered nov­el is pared down to a few cen­tral char­ac­ters and events,” all of them por­trayed with a form of labor-inten­sive “destruc­tive ani­ma­tion” in which Dumala engraved, paint­ed over, and then re-engraved each frame on plas­ter, a method where “each image exists only long enough to be pho­tographed and then paint­ed over to cre­ate a sense of move­ment.”

If you’d now like to plunge into Dos­to­evsky’s lit­er­ary world and find out if it com­pels you, too, to cre­ate strik­ing­ly uncon­ven­tion­al ani­ma­tions — or any oth­er sort of project inspired by the writer’s epic grap­pling with life’s great­est, most trou­bling themes — you can do it for free with our col­lec­tion of Dos­to­evsky eBooks and audio­books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dig­i­tal Dos­to­evsky: Down­load Free eBooks & Audio Books of the Russ­ian Novelist’s Major Works

Crime and Pun­ish­ment by Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky Told in a Beau­ti­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Film by Piotr Dumala

Watch a Hand-Paint­ed Ani­ma­tion of Dostoevsky’s “The Dream of a Ridicu­lous Man”

Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky Draws Elab­o­rate Doo­dles In His Man­u­scripts

Dos­to­evsky Draws a Pic­ture of Shake­speare: A New Dis­cov­ery in an Old Man­u­script

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instantly Discovered His Artistic Style

in Art | May 5th, 2015

As Nan­cy Rea­gan and my junior high school health teacher will tell you, LSD is ille­gal and ille­gal drugs are bad.

Unlike oth­er drugs, how­ev­er, LSD can blow open — as Aldous Hux­ley described it — the doors of per­cep­tion and remove the fil­ters of con­ven­tion­al thought. It has pushed some of the 20th century’s most cre­ative minds into mak­ing impor­tant cog­ni­tive leaps. Nobel Prize-win­ning sci­en­tist Fran­cis Crick famous­ly first imag­ined DNA’s dou­ble-helix struc­ture after drop­ping acid. Steve Jobs described his first trip as one of the most pro­found expe­ri­ences in his life. And in June 20, 1970, Pirates pitch­er Dock Ellis threw a no-hit­ter (or so the leg­end goes) while trip­ping on a pre­pos­ter­ous­ly large dose of the stuff. Let’s see you do that on meth.

Add to this list of acid acolytes Robert Crumb, the most influ­en­tial car­toon­ist of his gen­er­a­tion. His strange, fre­quent­ly obscene, often hilar­i­ous stream-of-con­scious­ness car­toons defined a cer­tain sub­set of hip­py­dom as much as the Grate­ful Dead and Ken Kesey. And his style emerged almost imme­di­ate­ly after his first trip.

It all start­ed in 1964, when the drug was still legal. Crumb was stuck in a dead end job draw­ing greet­ing cards in Cleve­land. “I took this very weird drug. Sup­pos­ed­ly it was LSD, but it had a real­ly weird effect where it made my brain all fuzzy,” he said while hunched over a draw­ing pad in Ter­ry Twigoff’s 1994 doc­u­men­tary Crumb. (You can watch the full clip above. ) “And this effect last­ed for a cou­ple months.”

The effect of that first encounter proved to be huge­ly influ­en­tial, a “road-to-Dam­as­cus expe­ri­ence” as he told the Paris Review:

It knocked you off your horse, tak­ing LSD. I remem­ber going to work that Mon­day, after tak­ing LSD on Sat­ur­day, and it just seemed like a card­board real­i­ty. It didn’t seem real to me any­more. Seemed com­plete­ly fake, only a paper-moon kind of world. My cowork­ers, they were like, Crumb, what’s the mat­ter with you, what hap­pened to you? Because I was just star­ing at every­thing like I had nev­er seen it before. And then it changed the whole direc­tion of my art­work. […] I got flung back into this crud­er for­ties style, that sud­den­ly became very pow­er­ful to me. It was a kind of grotesque inter­pre­ta­tion of this for­ties thing, Pop­eye kind of stuff. I start­ed draw­ing like that again. It was bizarre to peo­ple who had known my work before. Even [Mad Mag­a­zine Edi­tor Har­vey] Kurtz­man said, What the hell are you doing? You’re regress­ing!

A cou­ple of years lat­er, Crumb ditched Cleve­land (and his first wife) and head­ed for San Fran­cis­co, which was just start­ing to become the Mec­ca of the coun­ter­cul­ture. Soon issues of his Zap Comix would be blow­ing minds. All of his most famous char­ac­ters from those car­toons– from Mr. Nat­ur­al to Fritz the Cat to the Snoid – were first pro­duced in the months imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing that first trip.

But remem­ber, drugs are bad. And we don’t rec­om­mend them. And if you’re won­der­ing about LSD’s down­sides, tune into what Louis CK has to say.

You can see hear Crumb expound more about LSD, San Fran­cis­co and the whole Haight-Ash­bury scene below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beyond Tim­o­thy Leary: 2002 Film Revis­its His­to­ry of LSD

Artist Draws Nine Por­traits on LSD Dur­ing 1950s Research Exper­i­ment

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943

Beyond Tim­o­thy Leary: 2002 Film Revis­its His­to­ry of LSD

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter Alan Turing Wrote in “Distress” Before His Conviction For “Gross Indecency”

in History, Letters | May 5th, 2015

A pio­neer of com­put­er sci­ence, Alan Tur­ing’s name comes up in near­ly every con­ver­sa­tion about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. His “Tur­ing Test” pur­ports to indi­cate whether and when a machine has acquired intel­li­gence and abil­i­ty indis­tin­guish­able from that of a human, and his work with the Bletch­ley Park cryp­tog­ra­phy group dur­ing WWII helped the British break the Enig­ma code used by the Nazis. Those who came to learn about Tur­ing from the recent biopic The Imi­ta­tion Game, with Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch star­ring as the tor­ment­ed math­e­mati­cian, know this part of his life in par­tic­u­lar, as well as the part of his life that trag­i­cal­ly led to his ear­ly death at age 41.

Tur­ing was gay, but forced to hide it because of British law. In 1952, he was con­vict­ed of “gross inde­cen­cy” for his rela­tion­ship with anoth­er man. Before plead­ing guilty to the sup­posed offence, Tur­ing wrote the let­ter below to his col­league and friend Nor­man Rout­ledge.

Employ­ing a dark sense of humor and sign­ing off “Yours in dis­tress,” he gives every indi­ca­tion that he is fear­ful not only for him­self, but for the fate of his work. Just above, see Bene­dict Cum­ber­bach read the let­ter, which begins with a para­graph of small talk from an obvi­ous­ly ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion then abrupt­ly turns to the trou­ble at hand.

My dear Nor­man,

I don’t think I real­ly do know much about jobs, except the one I had dur­ing the war, and that cer­tain­ly did not involve any trav­el­ling. I think they do take on con­scripts. It cer­tain­ly involved a good deal of hard think­ing, but whether you’d be inter­est­ed I don’t know. Philip Hall was in the same rack­et and on the whole, I should say, he did­n’t care for it. How­ev­er I am not at present in a state in which I am able to con­cen­trate well, for rea­sons explained in the next para­graph.

I’ve now got myself into the kind of trou­ble that I have always con­sid­ered to be quite a pos­si­bil­i­ty for me, though I have usu­al­ly rat­ed it at about 10:1 against. I shall short­ly be plead­ing guilty to a charge of sex­u­al offences with a young man. The sto­ry of how it all came to be found out is a long and fas­ci­nat­ing one, which I shall have to make into a short sto­ry one day, but haven’t the time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a dif­fer­ent man, but quite who I’ve not found out.

Glad you enjoyed broad­cast. Jef­fer­son cer­tain­ly was rather dis­ap­point­ing though. I’m afraid that the fol­low­ing syl­lo­gism may be used by some in the future.

Tur­ing believes machines think
Tur­ing lies with men
There­fore machines do not think

Yours in dis­tress,

Alan

Tur­ing had long wres­tled with his sex­u­al­i­ty, but had also long come to terms with it at the time of the let­ter. As the Cum­ber­batch-star­ring film dra­ma­tizes (with some license), over ten years ear­li­er, dur­ing the war, he had attempt­ed to mar­ry the only female mem­ber of the main Bletch­ley group, Joan Clarke, then con­fid­ed his sex­u­al­i­ty to her.

Clarke was most­ly non­plussed and Tur­ing broke off the engage­ment. You can get much more insight about Turing’s strug­gle, and what he was actu­al­ly like, from two of the women who worked with him, includ­ing Clarke her­self in an inter­view above. Below, anoth­er of the Bletch­ley team—one of the thou­sands of “Bletchleyettes”—named Olive Bai­ly dis­cuss­es her impres­sions of Tur­ing. To learn much more about his life, watch The Strange Life and Death of Dr. Tur­ing, in two parts on Youtube.

via Let­ters of Note

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Tur­ing, Bril­liant Math­e­mati­cian and Code Break­er, Will Be Final­ly Par­doned by British Gov­ern­ment

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

Watch Break­ing the Code, About the Life & Times of Alan Tur­ing (1996)

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