Hear a Great Radio Documentary on William S. Burroughs Narrated by Iggy Pop

in Literature | February 4th, 2015

Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

William S. Bur­roughs is one of the most mythol­o­gized Amer­i­can authors of the 20th cen­tu­ry. When you recall the details of his life, they read like the biog­ra­phy of a fic­tion­al char­ac­ter. He was an unabashed hero­in addict yet he dressed like a dap­per insur­ance sales­man. He was open­ly, mil­i­tant­ly gay at a time when homo­sex­u­al­i­ty wasn’t even men­tioned in polite soci­ety. He shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mex­i­co City while play­ing an ill-con­ceived game of William Tell and then spent years in Tang­iers indulging in every pos­si­ble vice while writ­ing Naked Lunch, which hap­pened to be one of the most con­tro­ver­sial books of the cen­tu­ry. And his writ­ing influ­enced just about every­one you con­sid­er cool.

This week is the 101st birth­day of Bur­roughs. To mark the occa­sion, This Amer­i­can Life aired a BBC doc­u­men­tary on Burroughs’s life. The show is nar­rat­ed by Iggy Pop whose voice, in announc­er mode, bears an uncan­ny resem­blance to Sam Elliot. Pop relates how Bur­roughs influ­enced Kurt Cobain, punk rock and Bob Dylan, and how he him­self lift­ed lyrics from Bur­roughs for his most pop­u­lar song, and unlike­ly Car­ni­val Cruise jin­gle, “Lust for Life.”

As Ira Glass notes, the doc­u­men­tary paints a clear pic­ture of why he is such a revered fig­ure – going into detail about his writ­ing, his huge­ly influ­en­tial “Cut Up” method, his obses­sion with cats – while nev­er buy­ing into his mys­tique. In fact, one of the most inter­est­ing parts of the doc is a damn­ing appraisal of Burroughs’s cool junkie per­sona by author Will Self, who was him­self an addict for a cou­ple of decades. You can lis­ten to the whole episode above.

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: 

William S. Bur­roughs Reads His First Nov­el, Junky

William S. Bur­roughs on the Art of Cut-up Writ­ing

William S. Bur­roughs Explains What Artists & Cre­ative Thinkers Do for Human­i­ty

550 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

William S. Bur­roughs on Sat­ur­day Night Live, 1981

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.

Junot Díaz’s Syllabi for His MIT Writing Classes, and the Novels on His Reading List

in Education, Literature | February 3rd, 2015

We can prob­a­bly all agree that it’s a lit­tle pre­ma­ture, but all the same, the BBC has bar­reled ahead with its list of “The 21st Century’s 12 great­est nov­els.” Top­ping the list of excel­lent, if not espe­cial­ly sur­pris­ing, picks is The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-win­ning debut nov­el about, as he puts it in the inter­view above, “a clos­et­ed nerd writ­ing about an absolute­ly out nerd, and using their shared mutu­al lan­guage to tell the sto­ry.” The book has con­nect­ed with such a wide swath of read­ers for more than its appeal to fel­low nerds, though that’s no small thing. A great many read­ers have seen their own lives reflect­ed in Díaz’s characters—Dominican immi­grants grow­ing up in New Jersey—or have found their expe­ri­ences illu­mi­nat­ing. And even though Yunior and Oscar’s very male point of view might have alien­at­ed female read­ers in the hands of a less­er author, Díaz has the sen­si­tiv­i­ty and self-aware­ness to—as Joe Fassler argues in The Atlantic—write sex­ist char­ac­ters, but not sex­ist books. As the author him­self says above, “if it wasn’t for women read­ers, I wouldn’t have a career.”

Díaz’s ear for dia­logue and idiom and his facil­i­ty for con­struct­ing com­plete­ly believ­able char­ac­ters with com­plete­ly dis­tinc­tive voic­es are matched by his com­mit­ment to rep­re­sent­ing the expe­ri­ences of peo­ple who still get rou­tine­ly left out of the con­tem­po­rary canon. Despite the atten­tion giv­en to such stel­lar non-white, non-male writ­ers as Toni Mor­ri­son, Max­ine Hong-Kingston, Arund­hati Roy, and Jamaica Kin­caid, most MFA pro­grams, Diaz argued in a recent essay for The New York­er, are still “too white,” repro­duc­ing “exact­ly the dom­i­nant culture’s blind spots and assump­tions around race and racism (and sex­ism and het­ero­nor­ma­tiv­i­ty, etc).” In his own MFA work­shop expe­ri­ences at Cor­nell, he found that “the default sub­ject posi­tion of read­ing and writing—of Lit­er­a­ture with a cap­i­tal L—was white, straight and male.”

The prob­lem is more than just per­son­al, though he cer­tain­ly found the expe­ri­ence per­son­al­ly alien­at­ing, and it isn’t a mat­ter of redress­ing his­tor­i­cal wrongs or enforc­ing an abstract PC notion of diver­si­ty. Instead, as Díaz told Salon, it’s a prob­lem of accu­rate­ly rep­re­sent­ing real­i­ty. “If race or gen­der (or any oth­er impor­tant social force) are not part of your inter­pre­tive logic—if they’re not part of what you con­sid­er the real—then you’re leav­ing out most of what has made our world our world.” In his own role at a pro­fes­sor at MIT, teach­ing under­grad­u­ate writ­ing cours­es for the Com­par­a­tive Media Studies/Writing Depart­ment, Díaz is very thought­ful about his approach, empha­siz­ing, “it’s not the books you teach, but how you teach them.” In addi­tion to nov­els by authors like Hait­ian-born Edwidge Dan­ti­cat and Zim­bab­wean author NoVi­o­let Bul­awayo, he has his stu­dents read “clas­sic Goth­ic texts which are them­selves not very diverse by our stan­dards,” but, he says, “the crit­i­cal lens I deploy helps my stu­dents under­stand how issues of race, gen­der, colo­nial­i­ty etc. are nev­er far.”

Salon tracked down the syl­labi and read­ing lists for two of Díaz’s MIT cours­es, “World-Build­ing” and “Advanced Fic­tion.” We do find one clas­sic Goth­ic text—Bram Stok­er’s Drac­u­la—and also much of what we might expect from the self-con­fessed nerd, includ­ing work from such well-regard­ed com­ic writ­ers as Frank Miller and Alan Moore and clas­sic sci-fi from Tarzan cre­ator Edgar Rice Bur­roughs. In addi­tion to these white, male writ­ers, we have fic­tion from African-Amer­i­can sci-fi authors Octavia But­ler and N.K. Jemisin. Díaz’s “Advanced Fic­tion” list is even more wide-rang­ing, inclu­sive of writ­ers from Chile, Zim­bab­we, Chi­na, and Haiti, as well as the U.S. See both lists below.

World-Build­ing:

Descrip­tion: “This class con­cerns the design and analy­sis of imag­i­nary (or con­struct­ed) worlds for nar­ra­tive media such as role­play­ing games, films, comics, videogames and lit­er­ary texts. … The class’ pri­ma­ry goal is to help par­tic­i­pants cre­ate bet­ter imag­i­nary worlds – ulti­mate­ly all our efforts should serve that high­er pur­pose.”

Pre­req­ui­sites: “You will need to have seen Star Wars (episode four: A New Hope) and read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.”

Read­ing List:

“A Princess of Mars” by ER Bur­roughs
“Drac­u­la” by Bram Stok­er
“Bat­man: The Dark Knight Returns” by Frank Miller
“Sun­shine” by Robin McKin­ley
“V for Vendet­ta” by Alan Moore
“The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
“The Hun­dred Thou­sand King­doms” by NK Jemisin
“Lilith’s Brood” by Octavia But­ler
“Per­di­do Street Sta­tion” by Chi­na Miéville
“Snow Crash” by Neal Stephen­son (Rec­om­mend­ed)

Some things to con­sid­er always when tak­ing on a new world: What are its pri­ma­ry features—spatial, cul­tur­al, bio­log­i­cal, fan­tas­tic, cos­mo­log­i­cal? What is the world’s ethos (the guid­ing beliefs or ideals that char­ac­ter­ize the world)? What are the pre­cise strate­gies that are used by its cre­ator to con­vey the world to us and us to the world? How are our char­ac­ters con­nect­ed to the world? And how are we the view­er or read­er or play­er con­nect­ed to the world?

Advanced Fic­tion

Descrip­tion: “An advanced work­shop on the writ­ing and cri­tiquing of prose.”

Read­ing List:

“Clara” by Rober­to Bolaño
“Hit­ting Budapest” by NoVi­o­let Bul­awayo
“Whites” by Julie Otsu­ka
“Ghosts” by Edwidge Dan­ti­cat
“My Good Man” by Eric Gansworth
“Gold Boy, Emer­ald Girl” by Yiyun Li
“Boun­ty” by George Saun­ders

For more from Díaz him­self on his approach to writ­ing fic­tion, lis­ten to his inter­view with NPR’s Teri Gross. And just below, hear Díaz read from The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao at the Key West Lit­er­ary Sem­i­nar in 2008.

via Col­or Lines

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es

Junot Díaz Anno­tates a Selec­tion of The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao for “Poet­ry Genius”

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

Lyn­da Barry’s Won­der­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her UW-Madi­son Class, “The Unthink­able Mind”

Don­ald Barthelme’s Syl­labus High­lights 81 Books Essen­tial for a Lit­er­ary Edu­ca­tion

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

The Origins of Pleasure: Paul Bloom Explains Why We Like Expensive Wines & Original Paintings

in Art, Food & Drink, Psychology, Science, TED Talks | February 3rd, 2015

Let’s say you spend a con­sid­er­able amount of mon­ey for a paint­ing by a not­ed artist. Or maybe you get it for a steal. Either way, the paint­ing hangs promi­nent­ly in your home, where it is admired by guests and brings you plea­sure every time you look at it, which is often. Years lat­er, you acci­den­tal­ly dis­cov­er that your paint­ing is not the work of the artist whose sig­na­ture graces the low­er right hand cor­ner of the can­vas, but rather a hereto­fore anony­mous forg­er.  How do you react?

Do you laugh and say, “When I think of all the hap­pi­ness that liv­ing with this beau­ti­ful image has brought me over the years, I feel I have got­ten my money’s worth many times over. I don’t care who paint­ed it!”

Or do you look as though you’ve just real­ized that evil exists in the world, which is how Hitler’s right hand man, Her­mann Göring, reput­ed­ly looked when, as a pris­on­er at Nurem­berg, he was informed that his beloved Ver­meer, ”Christ with the Woman Tak­en in Adul­tery” (below), was actu­al­ly the work of the Dutch deal­er who had sold it to him.

Göring’s reac­tion may have been the most human thing about him. Accord­ing to Yale psy­chol­o­gist Paul Bloom, the plea­sure we take in the things we love is deeply informed by their per­ceived ori­gins. For­get mon­e­tary val­ue. For­get brag­ging rights. We need to believe that our paint­ing was not just paint­ed by Ver­meer, but han­dled by him, breathed upon him. If only that Ver­meer of mine could talk…I bet it could set­tle once and for all the exact nature of his rela­tion­ship with that lit­tle serv­ing girl. Remem­ber? The one with the pearl ear­ring?

Oh, wait. She was fic­tion­al. I for­got.

But that’s the sort of prove­nance we crave. The kind that comes with a sto­ry we can sink our teeth into.

The sto­ry must also fit the cir­cum­stances, as Bloom makes plain in his won­der­ful­ly enter­tain­ing TED talk on the Ori­gins of Plea­sure.

Unknow­ing­ly hop­ping in the sack with a blood rel­a­tive or eat­ing rat meat are intrigu­ing nar­ra­tives, pro­vid­ed they hap­pen to some­one else. Knowl­edge of such sto­ries could deep­en your con­nec­tion to a par­tic­u­lar piece of art.

(Can’t you feel the sex­u­al anguish ooz­ing out of my Ver­meer? Did you know he had to choose between buy­ing brush­es and buy­ing food?)

Not the sort of ori­gin sto­ry you’d want to find at the bot­tom of your own per­son­al soup bowl, how­ev­er.

Ergo, let us say that when it comes to plea­sure ema­nat­ing from food, we savor tastes we per­ceive as com­ing from whole­some organ­ic farms, arti­sanal oper­a­tions, restau­rants that are known to have passed the Board of Health’s san­i­tary inspec­tion with fly­ing col­ors. 

And when it comes to drink, we will will­ing­ly believe in the supe­ri­or fla­vor of any­thing poured under the aus­pices of an acclaimed label. Sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence con­firms this.

(On a relat­ed note, I once hung on to a bot­tle after drink­ing the lux­u­ry vod­ka it once con­tained, think­ing I’d refill it with a cheap liquor hack I had read about. The exper­i­ment end­ed when my hus­band com­plained that the water in our Bri­ta pitch­er tast­ed fun­ny.)

Speak­ing of roman­tic part­ners, it turns out that beau­ty tru­ly is not so much in the eye, but the brain of the behold­er. And it’s prob­a­bly not a bad idea to make sure you’ve got the facts regard­ing a poten­tial lover’s age, gen­der, and blood­lines. Caveat emp­tor, as any­one who’s ever seen the Cry­ing Game  will attest.

Note: Paul Bloom has taught a free course through Yale called “Intro­duc­tion to Psy­chol­o­gy,”. It’s avail­able in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why We Love Rep­e­ti­tion in Music: Explained in a New TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

A Dar­win­ian The­o­ry of Beau­ty, or TED Does Its Best RSA

1756 TED Talks List­ed in a Neat Spread­sheet

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

Start Your Day with Werner Herzog Inspirational Posters

in Comedy, Film | February 3rd, 2015

Wern­er Her­zog is the wild man of cin­e­ma. His movies are stark and ele­men­tal and ecsta­t­ic and are usu­al­ly about a crazed dream­er who strug­gles to achieve an impos­si­ble task in the face of a chaot­ic, indif­fer­ent uni­verse. Think Aguirre, Wrath of God, about a con­quis­ta­dor who goes crazy while adrift along an Ama­zon­ian riv­er. Think Stroszek, about a Ger­man grifter who goes men­tal in the for­bid­ding land­scape of Wis­con­sin while strug­gling to find the Amer­i­can dream. That film famous­ly, inex­plic­a­bly, ends with shots of a danc­ing chick­en.

The ecsta­t­ic truths seen in his movies are reflect­ed in the man him­self. At the age of 14, Her­zog struck out from his native Ger­many for Alba­nia and then Sudan. In 1972, he once walked from Munich to Paris to vis­it an ail­ing friend. In 1977, he shot footage at the lip of a vol­cano at the brink of erup­tion. He’s a film­mak­er who seems to go out of his way to choose loca­tions that are remote and dif­fi­cult — Antarc­ti­ca, the Sahara and the Ama­zon­ian rain for­est — and his shoots always seem to be bedev­iled by intrigue and cat­a­stro­phe. His first fea­ture was near­ly derailed because of a coup d’état. While shoot­ing Fata Mor­gana in Cameroon, he was mis­tak­en for a want­ed crim­i­nal and thrown in jail. Once dur­ing a TV inter­view in the hills of Los Ange­les, he was shot by a ran­dom crazy per­son. Watch it here.

“A BBC tele­vi­sion crew came to see me in Lau­rel Canyon,” as he recount­ed for The New York­er. “They want­ed to inter­view me for the British pre­mière of ‘Griz­zly Man.’ I didn’t want them to film right out­side my house, so we went up to Sky­line Dri­ve. In the mid­dle of the inter­view, I was shot with a rifle by some­one stand­ing on his bal­cony. I seem to attract the clin­i­cal­ly insane.”

Instead of stop­ping the inter­view, run­ning for pro­tec­tion and per­haps going to the hos­pi­tal, Her­zog just con­tin­ued with the inter­view say­ing sim­ply, “It was not a sig­nif­i­cant bul­let. I am not afraid.”

Herzog’s improb­a­ble pen­chant for dis­as­ter, his col­lab­o­ra­tion with the bril­liant, but bat­shit crazy, Klaus Kin­s­ki, and of course, his sin­gu­lar, uncom­pro­mis­ing work have turned him into almost a myth­ic fig­ure in some cir­cles. But it’s these mad, macho dec­la­ra­tions like those above that have real­ly fed the cult of Her­zog.

Recent­ly, some unknown genius turned some of Herzog’s more extreme quo­ta­tions into inspi­ra­tional posters. Lines like “Civ­i­liza­tion is like a thin lay­er of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and dark­ness” are placed along side a shot of a glass of white wine and a sun­set.

So gaze upon them. Absorb the pearls of wis­dom. Find cold com­fort in their bleak, nihilist pro­nounce­ments. They make fine addi­tions to any cubi­cle.

See the full gallery here.

via Coudal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Picks His 5 Top Films

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing & Life Advice

Wern­er Her­zog Los­es a Bet to Errol Mor­ris, and Eats His Shoe (Lit­er­al­ly)

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.

Hear Albums from Brian Eno’s 1970s Label, Obscure Records

in Music | February 3rd, 2015

Giv­en his celebri­ty sta­tus in the realms of both music and visu­al art, I don’t know that we can real­ly call any­thing Bri­an Eno does obscure. But at one point, he did call his own efforts obscure — or at least those efforts required to estab­lish and run the label Obscure Records, which he did between 1975 and 1978. In that short peri­od, Obscure Records man­aged to put out ten albums, from Gavin Bryars’ The Sink­ing of the Titan­ic (cat­a­log no. 1) to Michael Nyman’s Decay Music (no. 6) to Harold Bud­d’s Pavil­ion of Dreams (no. 10), all of which we might broad­ly cat­e­go­rize as “con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music,” with a strong bent toward new com­po­si­tion­al tech­niques and what we’d now call ambi­ent tex­tures.

“The label pro­vid­ed a venue for exper­i­men­tal music,” says Ubuwe­b’s Obscure Records page, “and its asso­ci­a­tion with Eno gave increased pub­lic expo­sure to its com­posers and musi­cians.” There, you freely can lis­ten to all ten Obscure releas­es — which, I sup­pose, effec­tive­ly makes them obscure no more — although they don’t include the famous­ly detailed orig­i­nal lin­er notes “ana­lyz­ing the com­po­si­tions and pro­vid­ing a biog­ra­phy of the com­pos­er.”

Though he most­ly act­ed as pro­duc­er on Obscure record­ings, Eno also used the label to put out his sem­i­nal 1975 solo album Dis­creet Music (no. 3),  which con­tains a com­po­si­tion made using the then unheard-of tech­nique of run­ning sev­er­al tape loops simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and let­ting the sound record­ed on them run grad­u­al­ly out of sync. Obscure’s fifth release, Jan Steele and John Cage’s 1976 Voic­es and Instru­ments, fea­tures “The Won­der­ful Wid­ow Of Eigh­teen Springs,” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture as inter­pret­ed by Joey Ramone.

This may seem col­or­ful enough for any label’s life­time, but Eno did have an eleventh Obscure record planned. It ulti­mate­ly made more sense, how­ev­er, to found an entire­ly new oper­a­tion to put out this work, a cer­tain Music for Air­ports. It came out as the flag­ship release from Eno’s Ambi­ent Records — and the rest, my friends, is pop­u­lar-exper­i­men­tal music his­to­ry.

Albums from Obscure Records can be sam­pled over at UBU.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie & Bri­an Eno’s Col­lab­o­ra­tion on “Warsza­wa” Reimag­ined in Com­ic Ani­ma­tion

Jump Start Your Cre­ative Process with Bri­an Eno’s “Oblique Strate­gies”

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

How David Byrne and Bri­an Eno Make Music Togeth­er: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapt­ed from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

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

Take a Super Slow Motion Look at What Happens Inside a DSLR Camera

in Photography | February 2nd, 2015

With the naked eye, it’s near­ly impos­si­ble to see what hap­pens inside a DSLR cam­era when the shut­ter acti­vates. But all of that changes when you use a high speed cam­era — the Phan­tom Flex — to slow things down to 10,000fps. Above, you can see The Slow Mo Guys do their thing. It’s fun to watch, and you’ll prob­a­bly learn a few things about how a cam­era works.

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!

In Lost Letter, Allen Ginsberg Tells The Paris Review He Tried LSD Again & Experienced “No Snake Universe Hallucinations” (1966)

in Life | February 2nd, 2015

(click for larg­er ver­sion)

In June 1965, Allen Gins­berg was inter­viewed at length by fel­low poet Tom Clark. They touched on such top­ics as poet­ic meter, William S. Bur­roughs, and Blake’s “The Sick Rose.” When the con­ver­sa­tion turned to hal­lu­cino­gens, Gins­berg, a famous­ly ear­ly adopter of LSD, describes a vision so omi­nous it could’ve turned an entire gen­er­a­tion off drugs:

If I close my eyes on hal­lu­cino­gens, I get a vision of great scaly drag­ons in out­er space, they’re wind­ing slow­ly and eat­ing their own tails. Some­times my skin and all the room seem sparkling with scales, and it’s all made out of ser­pent stuff. And as if the whole illu­sion of life were made of rep­tile dream.

He also men­tioned that drugs made him barf. That alone seems a per­sua­sive rea­son to stop tak­ing them.

Despite his strong desire to con­tin­ue his pur­suit of ever high­er lev­els of con­scious­ness, the cons were begin­ning to out­weigh the pros.

It took near­ly a year for the Paris Review to pub­lish the inter­view. So long that the sub­ject felt the need to revise his ear­li­er state­ments, via the type­writ­ten let­ter above.

His post-inter­view psy­che­del­ic excur­sions appear to have tran­spired in the sort of benign uni­verse typ­i­cal­ly imag­ined by a preschool­er with a big box of crayons: “tiny jew­eled vio­let flow­ers,” “giant green waves,” a “great yel­low sun.” Oth­er­wise known as Big Sur on acid.

The lev­el of good­ness present in those lat­er trips was such strong med­i­cine, Gins­berg decid­ed to exper­i­ment fur­ther, direct­ing some of his good vibes toward then-Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John­son, who was under­go­ing surgery to remove his gall blad­der. Love thy ene­my, and all of that.

I won­der if John­son ever found out he had a rabid­ly anti-war Beat Poet (and “mass­es of green bulb-head­ed Kelp veg­etable-snake under­sea beings”) pray­ing for his recov­ery.

Appar­ent­ly it worked.

The com­plete June 1965 inter­view can be read in the Paris Review’s archives. Those who’ve grown unac­cus­tomed to read­ing couri­er font as exe­cut­ed by a mid­cen­tu­ry man­u­al type­writer will find the com­plete text of Gins­berg’s let­ter below.

June 2, 1966

To read­ers of Paris Review:

Re LSD, Psy­locib­in [sic], etc., Paris Review #37 p. 46: “So I couldn’t go any fur­ther. I may lat­er on occa­sion, if I feel more reas­sur­ance.”

Between occa­sion of inter­view with Thomas Clark June ’65 and pub­li­ca­tion May ’66 more reas­sur­ance came. I tried small dos­es of LSD twice in seclud­ed tree and ocean cliff haven at Big Sur. No mon­ster vibra­tion, no snake uni­verse hal­lu­ci­na­tions. Many tiny jew­eled vio­let flow­ers along the path of a liv­ing brook that looked like Blake’s illus­tra­tion for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacif­ic watery shore, Orlovsky danc­ing naked like Shi­va long-haired before giant green waves, titan­ic cliffs that Wordsworth men­tioned in his own Sub­lime, great yel­low sun veiled with mist hang­ing over the planet’s ocean­ic hori­zon. No harm. Pres­i­dent John­son that day went into the Val­ley of Shad­ow oper­at­ing room because of his gall blad­der & Berkley’s Viet­nam Day Com­mit­tee was prepar­ing anx­ious man­i­festoes for our march toward Oak­land police and Hell’s Angels. Real­iz­ing that more vile words from me would send out phys­i­cal vibra­tions into the atmos­phere that might curse poor Johnson’s flesh and fur­ther unbal­ance his soul, I knelt on the sand sur­round­ed by mass­es of green bulb-head­ed Kelp veg­etable-snake under­sea beings washed up by last night’s tem­pest, and prayed for the President’s tran­quil health. Since there has been so much leg­isla­tive mis-com­pre­hen­sion of the LSD boon I regret that my unedit­ed ambiva­lence in Thomas Clark’s tape tran­script inter­view was pub­lished want­i­ng this foot­note.

Your obe­di­ent ser­vant

Allen Gins­berg, aetat 40

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celes­tial Home­work”: A Read­ing List for His Class “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Famous­ly Cen­sored Beat Poem, Howl (1959)

Allen Gins­berg Reads a Poem He Wrote on LSD to William F. Buck­ley

Allen Gins­berg & The Clash Per­form the Punk Poem “Cap­i­tal Air,” Live Onstage in Times Square (1981)

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

Cinematic Experiment: What Happens When The Bicycle Thief’s Director and Gone With the Wind’s Producer Edit the Same Film

in Film | February 2nd, 2015

When we get deep enough into our enthu­si­asm for film, cinephiles start spec­u­lat­ing in ways that might strike non-cinephiles as, well, unusu­al. The video essay­ist kogana­da, for exam­ple, states in the video above his desire to “build a time machine and trav­el to Italy cir­ca 1952” and “ask Vit­to­rio de Sica to make a film using Hol­ly­wood actors like Mont­gomery Clift and Jen­nifer Jones, and then team de Sica up with a Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­er, the kind that likes to impose his will and sen­si­bil­i­ty onto a film — some­one like David O. Selznick. In bring­ing these two worlds of cin­e­ma togeth­er, I’d hope for a clash in cin­e­ma so great that it would result in two cuts of the same film, one by de Sica and the oth­er by Selznick.”

This may sound like the spec­u­la­tion of a fan­boy, albeit a high­brow fan­boy, but you can hard­ly call it idle spec­u­la­tion. This video essay, as you can see, actu­al­ly man­ages to screen, side-by-side, scenes from what real­ly do look like two dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the same ear­ly-1950s film, one cut in the clas­sic Hol­ly­wood style, and one cut in the Ital­ian neo­re­al­ist style. This “exper­i­ment” in cin­e­ma illu­mi­nates the rhythms, emphases, and val­ues of both kinds of film­mak­ing, adding nuance to the con­cep­tion of one as clear-eyed, method­i­cal, and uncom­pro­mis­ing, and the oth­er as ide­al­ized, flam­boy­ant, and crowd-pleas­ing.

So has kog­o­na­da actu­al­ly built this time machine and com­mis­sioned two cuts of the same pic­ture from the direc­tor of Bicy­cle Thieves and the pro­duc­er of Gone with the Wind? Not quite, but film his­to­ry has pro­vid­ed him with the next best thing: 1954’s Ter­mi­nal Sta­tion and The Indis­cre­tion of an Amer­i­can Wife. De Sica “was one of the world’s most cel­e­brat­ed film­mak­ers when David O. Selznick com­mis­sioned Ter­mi­nal Sta­tion from him and his screen­writ­ing part­ner, Cesare Zavat­ti­ni,” writes crit­ic Dave Kehr in a Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion essay. But the pro­duc­tion soon hit some seri­ous snags. Cri­te­ri­on goes on to add:

The trou­bled col­lab­o­ra­tion between direc­tor Vit­to­rio De Sica and pro­duc­er David O. Selznick result­ed in two cuts of the same film. De Sica’s ver­sion, Ter­mi­nal Sta­tion, was screened at a length of one-and-a-half hours, but after dis­ap­point­ing pre­views, Selznick severe­ly re-edit­ed it and changed the title to Indis­cre­tion of an Amer­i­can Wife with­out De Sica’s per­mis­sion.

Though Kehr finds de Sica’s take on the mate­r­i­al “immea­sur­ably supe­ri­or” to Selznick­’s, he adds that “both have quite dis­tinct emo­tion­al and dra­mat­ic qual­i­ties, and it is fas­ci­nat­ing to see how iden­ti­cal mate­r­i­al can be pushed and pulled, whol­ly through the post­pro­duc­tion process, in two rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tions.” Even casu­al cinephiles stand to learn a lot from a back-to-back view­ing of Ter­mi­nal Sta­tion and The Indis­cre­tion of an Amer­i­can Wife, but only in this video essay’s five min­utes can we see them so care­ful­ly com­pared and con­trast­ed side-by-side. Briefly but dense­ly, it reveals to us the nature of both clas­sic Hol­ly­wood and Ital­ian neo­re­al­ism — no time trav­el required.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Crit­ics Pick the Top 100 Movies of All Time in the Pages of Cahiers du Ciné­ma

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

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

What Questions Would Stephen Fry Ask God at the Pearly Gates?

in Life, Religion | February 2nd, 2015

Sev­er­al years ago, an inter­view­er asked Stephen Fry to look back­ward — to reflect on his life and answer this ques­tion, “What do you wish you had known when you were 18”? What lessons would you draw in hind­sight?  Some of his answers includ­ed:

• Don’t set goals for your­self, par­tic­u­lar­ly mate­r­i­al ones. They’re dis­as­trous and will keep you from becom­ing who you real­ly are.
• Keep your ego in check. You’ll be bet­ter liked, and more oppor­tu­ni­ties will come your way.
• Get out­side your com­fort zone by trav­el­ing to dis­tant lands and read­ing books in a serendip­i­tous way.
• Be a giv­er, not a tak­er. It’s more reward­ing.

In the clip above, Gay Byrne, a broad­cast­er with RTÉ, now asks Fry to look for­ward and answer anoth­er ques­tion: Sup­pose there is a God, and you arrive at the Pearly Gates, what would you say to him, her or it? Fry, an avowed sec­u­lar human­ist, isn’t throw­ing God any soft­balls: Why cre­ate a world where kids have bone can­cer? Why cre­ate insects that bur­row into chil­dren’s eyes and ren­der them blind? Why cre­ate a world with so much pain, mis­ery and injus­tice in it? As he answers these ques­tions, and con­cludes that such a God (were it to exist) would be noth­ing short of mani­a­cal, Byrne’s face con­torts, reveal­ing his dis­com­fort. You can watch oth­er scenes from the inter­view here, and catch Fry’s ani­mat­ed primers on sec­u­lar human­ism here.

via The Dai­ly Beast

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry: What I Wish I Knew When I Was 18

Stephen Fry Explains Human­ism in 4 Ani­mat­ed Videos: Hap­pi­ness, Truth and the Mean­ing of Life & Death

Free Online Reli­gion Cours­es

Marlene Dietrich Plays the Musical Saw (aka the Singing Saw) to Entertain the Troops During WWII

in Film, Music | February 2nd, 2015

It’s not my favorite Mar­lene Diet­rich gem on the inter­net. No, that would be her tem­pera­men­tal screen test for The Blue Angel  (1930). But it’s still a pre­cious find. Above, we have an audio clip fea­tur­ing Diet­rich, one of the tow­er­ing movie stars of ear­ly cin­e­ma, play­ing the musi­cal saw. Andrea James writes over at Boing­Bo­ing: “Diet­rich always want­ed to be a clas­si­cal musi­cian. Since her cabaret act and film career left lit­tle time for her to do the required prac­tice, she played the musi­cal saw instead. Through­out World War II she wowed USO audi­ences with the nov­el­ty.” And that’s what we get a taste of here. In oth­er clips avail­able on Youtube, you can find Diet­rich play­ing her “singing saw,” and again play­ing the musi­cal saw on the radio, cir­ca 1945.

via

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernest Hemingway’s “Love Let­ter” to His “Dear­est Kraut,” Mar­lene Diet­rich (1955)

Mar­lene Dietrich’s Tem­pera­men­tal Screen Test for The Blue Angel

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics