The Long-Lost Illustrated Production Stills from the Set of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

in Film | January 12th, 2015

Remem­ber court­room sketch artists? The mere fact that they did what they did cap­tured my imag­i­na­tion as a kid, rep­re­sent­ing as it seemed one of the few remain­ing ves­tiges of an old­er, more askew Amer­i­ca, one bound by few­er yet stricter rules and all the more fas­ci­nat­ing a com­po­nent of his­to­ry for it. These draw­ings of the shoot of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey remind me of court­room sketch­es, albeit on some styl­is­tic lev­els more than oth­ers. And inter­est­ing­ly, just as court reporters once had to use sketch artists because of the sup­posed dis­tur­bance cam­eras would cause in the court­room, these draw­ings result from the pur­suit of some­thing less trou­ble­some to a set than a reg­u­lar still pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

From 2001 onwards, Kubrick cre­at­ed illus­trat­ed pro­duc­tion stills of what hap­pened on his set, rather than hav­ing a pho­tog­ra­ph­er take noisy and dis­tract­ing pho­tographs. The illus­tra­tions, doc­u­ment­ing for the media what hap­pened in front of the cam­era as well as behind it, would then be sent out in press kits to pub­li­ca­tions and oth­er media out­lets that could pro­mote the film.

Enter, in 1966, Eng­lish mag­a­zine illus­tra­tor Bri­an Sanders (now per­haps best known for the pas­tich­es of that decade he’s done for Mad Men), hired to turn up to the 2001 shoot and qui­et­ly draw what he saw. None of these images, how­ev­er — or the rest of those fea­tured at Kubrick­o­nia — appeared any­where until the actu­al year 2001, when The Inde­pen­dent’s mag­a­zine used them in an arti­cle. Cinephiles now and again wish for the return of illus­trat­ed movie posters, and some­times we do occa­sion­al­ly see a new one, but look­ing at what Sanders came up with for 2001, I can’t help but pon­der the still-unre­al­ized poten­tial of the illus­trat­ed pro­duc­tion still. You can see more illus­tra­tions — once lost and now found — here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Howard Johnson’s Presents a Children’s Menu Fea­tur­ing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Gets a Brand New Trail­er to Cel­e­brate Its Dig­i­tal Re-Release

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

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.

A Look Inside Charlie Hebdo, Their Creative Process & the Making of a Fateful Cartoon

in Comics/Cartoons, Current Affairs | January 10th, 2015

A week ago, Char­lie Heb­do was any­thing but a house­hold name. On Wednes­day, after the appalling ter­ror­ist attacks in Paris, all of that changed.

We all now have Char­lie Heb­do on the tip of our tongues. We’ve seen sam­ples of their satir­i­cal car­toons. And we’ve read about the news out­lets too afraid to print them. But what do we still know about Char­lie Heb­do — about the actu­al car­toon­ists who made the news­pa­per tick, their satir­i­cal ambi­tions and their cre­ative process? Not very much.

The short doc­u­men­tary above, filmed at Char­lie Heb­do in 2006 by Jerôme Lam­bert and Philippe Picard, helps fill in some of these blanks. The clip shows sev­er­al of the car­toon­ists and edi­tors mur­dered ear­li­er this week —  Jean Cabut (aka Cabu), Bernard Verl­hac (aka Tig­nous) and Georges Wolin­s­ki — mak­ing a fate­ful deci­sion: Would they put a satir­i­cal image of Muham­mad on the cov­er of their news­pa­per?

The Char­lie Heb­do car­toon­ists turned “provo­ca­tion and bad taste” (to use Lam­bert and Picard’s words) into a par­tic­u­lar­ly French form of polit­i­cal satire. As the French trans­la­tor Arthur Gold­ham­mer explained it ear­li­er this week, “There is an old Parisian tra­di­tion of cheeky humour that respects noth­ing and no one,” which goes back to the French Rev­o­lu­tion. “It’s an anar­chic pop­ulist form of obscen­i­ty that aims to cut down any­thing that would erect itself as ven­er­a­ble, sacred or pow­er­ful,” and it is direct­ed against “author­i­ty in gen­er­al, against hier­ar­chy and against the pre­sump­tion that any indi­vid­ual or group has exclu­sive pos­ses­sion of the truth.” That tra­di­tion will con­tin­ue next week when Char­lie Heb­do and its sur­viv­ing staff plan to pub­lish one mil­lion copies of their next edi­tion.

The video above, put online by The New York Times, is cou­pled with a short op-ed by Lam­bert and Picard. You can read it here.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox.

Wonderfully Kitschy Propaganda Posters Champion the Chinese Space Program (1962–2003)

in Art, History, Science | January 9th, 2015

A joint oper­a­tion of five par­tic­i­pat­ing coun­tries and the Euro­pean Space Agency, the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion is an enor­mous achieve­ment of human coop­er­a­tion across ide­o­log­i­cal and nation­al bound­aries. Gen­er­a­tions of peo­ple born in the nineties and beyond will have grown up with the ISS as a sym­bol of the tri­umph of STEM edu­ca­tion and decades of space trav­el and research. What they will not have expe­ri­enced is some­thing that seems almost fun­da­men­tal to the cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal land­scape of the Boomers and Gen Xers—the Cold War space race. But it is worth not­ing that while Rus­sia is one of the most promi­nent part­ners in ISS oper­a­tions, cur­rent Com­mu­nist repub­lic Chi­na has vir­tu­al­ly no pres­ence on it at all.

But this does not mean that Chi­na has been absent from the space race—quite the con­trary. While it seems to those of us who wit­nessed the excit­ing inter­stel­lar com­pe­ti­tion between super­pow­ers that the only play­ers were the big two, the Chi­nese entered the race in the 1960s and launched their first satel­lite in 1970. This craft, writes space his­to­ry enthu­si­ast Sven Grahn, “would lead to Chi­na being a major play­er in the com­mer­cial space field.”

Since its launch into orbit, the satel­lite has con­tin­u­ous­ly broad­cast a song called Dong Fang Hong, a eulo­gy for Mao Zedong (which “effec­tive­ly replaced the Nation­al Anthem” dur­ing the Cul­tur­al Revolution—hear the broad­cast here). The satel­lite, now referred to, after its song, as DFH‑1 (or CHINA‑1), marked a sig­nif­i­cant break­through for the Chi­nese space pro­gram, spear­head­ed by rock­et engi­neer Qian Xue­sen, who had been pre­vi­ous­ly expelled from the Jet Propul­sion Lab in Pasade­na for sus­pect­ed Com­mu­nist sym­pa­thies.

Before DFH‑1, the nation­al imag­i­na­tion was primed for the prospect of Chi­nese space flight by images like the poster just above, titled “Roam­ing out­er space in an air­ship,” and designed by Zhang Rui­heng in 1962. This strik­ing piece of work comes to us from Chi­nese Posters, a com­pendi­um of images of “pro­pa­gan­da, pol­i­tics, his­to­ry, art.” Images like this one and that of a Chi­nese taiko­naut at the top—“Bringing his play­mates to the stars”—from 1980, appro­pri­ate imagery from the tra­di­tion­al nian­hua, or New Years pic­ture.

This fan­ci­ful style, which “catered to the tastes and beliefs in the coun­try­side,” became the “most impor­tant influ­ence on the pro­pa­gan­da posters pro­duced by the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty,” who began using it in the 1940s. The poster above, “Lit­tle guests in the Moon Palace,” dates from the ear­ly 1970s, after the launch of DFH‑1 and its sis­ter satel­lite SJ‑I (CHINA‑2).

As you can see from the 1989 poster above—“Heaven increas­es the years, man gets older”—the CCP con­tin­ued to use the nian­hua style well into the eight­ies, but in the fol­low­ing decades, they began to move away from it and toward more mil­i­taris­tic imagery, like that in the image below from 2002. With dif­fer­ent col­ors and sym­bols, it would look right at home on the wall of an armed forces recruit­ing sta­tion in any small town, U.S.A.

Like many U.S. advo­cates for space trav­el and explo­ration, such as the increas­ing­ly vis­i­ble Neil deGrasse Tyson, the CCP has used space as a means of pro­mot­ing sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­cy. In the poster below, “Uphold sci­ence, erad­i­cate super­sti­tion,” space imagery is used to bring much-per­se­cut­ed Falon Gong adher­ents “back into the fold” and to oppose sci­ence to reli­gious super­sti­tion.

Although some of the imagery may sug­gest oth­er­wise, the Chi­nese space pro­gram has devel­oped along sim­i­lar lines as the U.S.’s, and has been put to sim­i­lar uses. These include the use of space explo­ration as a means of uni­fy­ing nation­al­ist sen­ti­ment, dri­ving sup­port for sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy fund­ing and research, and push­ing a vision of sci­en­tif­ic progress as the nation­al ethos. In 2012, the same year that Sal­ly Ride—first Amer­i­can woman in space—passed away, Chi­na began select­ing its first female taiko­naut, mak­ing their space pro­gram a venue for increas­ing gen­der equal­i­ty as well.

It was only very recent­ly that the Chi­nese space pro­gram suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed its first manned mis­sion, send­ing its first taiko­naut, Yang Liewei, abord the Shen­zhou 5 in a low earth orbit mis­sion. Although the achievement—as you can see in the poster above com­mem­o­rat­ing a vis­it of the taiko­naut to Hong Kong—marked a moment of sig­nif­i­cant nation­al pride, there was one encour­ag­ing sign for the future of inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion: though you can­not see it in the pho­to, Yang wore the flag of the Unit­ed Nations in addi­tion to that of the People’s Repub­lic of Chi­na.

See more of these fas­ci­nat­ing works of pro­pa­gan­da at Chi­nese Posters

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Sovi­et Artists Envi­sion a Com­mu­nist Utopia in Out­er Space

Astro­naut Suni­ta Williams Gives an Exten­sive Tour of the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

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

You’ve Never Heard Carl Sagan Say “Billions” Like This Before

in Astronomy, Television | January 9th, 2015

Nobody likes the way an entire human life can get reduced to a sound bite, but even if you know absolute­ly noth­ing else about Carl Sagan, you know that he said the words “bil­lions and bil­lions.” Or rather, you think you know it; in real­i­ty (and in accor­dance with the “Play it again, Sam” prin­ci­ple), the famous astronomer and sci­ence pop­u­lar­iz­er nev­er actu­al­ly said quite those words on tele­vi­sion. A posthu­mous essay col­lec­tion used them as its title, but the pub­lic only latched on to the catch­phrase — or catch half-phrase, any­way — in 1980, when John­ny Car­son used it in a Tonight Show par­o­dy of Sagan’s broad­cast per­sona. But if you want to hear the real Sagan invok­ing very large num­bers in his char­ac­ter­is­tic into­na­tion, have we got the video for you.

At the top of the post, you’ll find a super­cut of each and every one of his uses of “mil­lion,” “bil­lion,” “tril­lion,” and even “quadrillion” dur­ing the entire­ty of his acclaimed tele­vi­sion series Cos­mos — to a beat. Alter­na­tive­ly, using sim­i­lar source mate­r­i­al to an entire­ly dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ic end, the sound clip above con­tains just one instance of Sagan say­ing “bil­lion” — but stretched out to an hour in length, which turns it into a sort of drone­like ambi­ent music. A not just out­ward- but for­ward-think­ing sci­en­tif­ic vision­ary like Sagan sure­ly under­stood more about what lies ahead for human­i­ty than the rest of us do, but could he pos­si­bly have fore­seen us using our tech­nol­o­gy for stuff like this? Still, he prob­a­bly would’ve dug it.

via Kot­tke/io9

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan’s Orig­i­nal Cos­mos Series on YouTube: The 1980 Show That Inspired a Gen­er­a­tion of Sci­en­tists

Carl Sagan Presents Six Lec­tures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar Sys­tem … For Kids (1977)

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Carl Sagan’s Under­grad Read­ing List: 40 Essen­tial Texts for a Well-Round­ed Thinker

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing & Arthur C. Clarke Dis­cuss God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else

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.

Three Essential Dadaist Films: Groundbreaking Works by Hans Richter, Man Ray & Marcel Duchamp

in Art, Film | January 8th, 2015

Icon­o­clas­tic art move­ments need manifestos—to explain them­selves, per­haps, to announce them­selves, sure­ly, but also, per­haps, to soft­en the blow of the work that is to come. In the case of Dadaism, the man­i­festo issued by Tris­tan Tzara in 1918 presents us with a curi­ous para­dox. Tzara expounds at length in sev­er­al thou­sand words on the idea that “DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING.” In so doing, he tells us quite a bit about what Dada is, and what it is not. It is decid­ed­ly not, he writes, uni­fied by any for­mal the­o­ry: “We have enough cubist and futur­ist acad­e­mies: lab­o­ra­to­ries of for­mal ideas.” It is no friend to the artis­tic estab­lish­ment: “Is the aim of art to make mon­ey and cajole the nice nice bour­geois?” It is cer­tain­ly not “art for art’s sake”: “A work of art should not be beau­ty in itself, for beau­ty is dead.”

So what is this anti art about then? “Spon­tane­ity,” “Active sim­plic­i­ty,” “Dis­gust,” “to lick the penum­bra and float in the big mouth filled with hon­ey and excre­ment.” And many more such provo­ca­tions and images. No man­i­festo is any sub­sti­tute for the work itself, but if any comes close to repli­cat­ing its sub­ject, it is Tzara’s. Immerse your­self in it, and you may be bet­ter pre­pared for Dada artists like Hans Richter, Man Ray, and Mar­cel Duchamp. All three rep­re­sent Dadaism—whatever it is—in at least two ways: 1. Each reject­ed “nice nice bour­geois” cul­tur­al con­ven­tions, oppos­ing them force­ful­ly, and play­ful­ly, in ways both polit­i­cal and aes­thet­ic. 2. Nei­ther con­fined him­self to any one medi­um or school—experimenting freely with paint­ing, sculp­ture, pho­tog­ra­phy, per­for­mance and con­cep­tu­al art, and—for our pur­pos­es today—with film.

At the top of the post, see Hans Richter’s 1927 short film Ghosts Before Break­fast. Here, writes Lori Zim­mer of Art Nerd, “fly­ing hats, float­ing neck ties, [and] stacked guns” illus­trate the state­ment at the film’s open­ing that “even objects revolt against reg­i­men­ta­tion.” We have here a silent cut because, the title informs us, “The Nazis destroyed the sound ver­sion of this film as ‘degen­er­ate art.’” (The film’s orig­i­nal sound con­sist­ed of a sound­track by com­pos­er Paul Hin­demith.) The use of stop-motion ani­ma­tion and inge­nious edit­ing accords with the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art’s con­tention that “the con­flu­ence of tech­nol­o­gy and aes­thet­ic exper­i­men­ta­tion” that film offered “suit­ed the Dadaists’ pas­sion for the machine-made object.” In Richter’s short, such objects refuse to coop­er­ate and play nice with their mak­ers.

Just above, see Man Ray’s short film Le Retour à la Rai­son (“Return to Rea­son”). (The piano score, record­ed live in 2011 in St. Peters­burg, is by Dmitri Shu­bin.) The title of this film, I think, should be read iron­i­cal­ly. Man Ray’s “pure cin­e­ma” active­ly resist­ed the “rea­son” of con­ven­tion­al film pro­duc­tion, with its lin­ear nar­ra­tive log­ic and real­ist com­pla­cen­cy. One might watch his films with the words of Tzara’s man­i­festo in mind: “Log­ic is a com­pli­ca­tion. Log­ic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their for­mal exte­ri­or, toward illu­so­ry ends and cen­tres. Its chains kill, it is an enor­mous cen­tipede sti­fling inde­pen­dence.” In a pre­vi­ous post, Mike Springer described the film as “basi­cal­ly a kinet­ic exten­sion of Man Ray’s still pho­tog­ra­phy,” uti­liz­ing “ani­mat­ed pho­tograms, a tech­nique in which opaque, or par­tial­ly opaque, objects are arranged direct­ly on top of a sheet of pho­to­graph­ic paper and exposed to light.”

Man Ray shared a “fra­ter­nal friend­ship” and an artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty with per­haps the most renowned, or infa­mous, of the Dadaists, Mar­cel Duchamp. In addi­tion to star­ring as him­self in a few films, and co-writ­ing the fea­ture length Dadaist film Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, Duchamp made his own direc­to­r­i­al con­tri­bu­tions, begin­ning in 1926 with Anémic Ciné­ma, above. (I sug­gest view­ing it with the added, non-orig­i­nal music mut­ed.) Cre­at­ed in Man Ray’s stu­dio, the film con­sists of a series of spin­ning disks, some con­tain­ing French phras­es which may be untrans­lat­able. The whole reel is rem­i­nis­cent of stock scenes of hyp­no­tism in sen­sa­tion­al­ist “bour­geois” movies.

Are Richter, Man Ray, and Ducham­p’s films—in Tzara’s words—“like a rag­ing wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers… prepar­ing the great spec­ta­cle of dis­as­ter, con­fla­gra­tion and decom­po­si­tion”? Such hyper­bol­ic expres­sions only serve to under­line what Ducham­p’s disks set in motion: progress is an illu­sion: “after all every­one dances to his own per­son­al boom­boom, and… the writer is enti­tled to his boom­boom.” If Dadaism cham­pi­ons solip­sism, it also cham­pi­ons the right of artists to their own per­son­al “boom­boom.” In its anar­chic rejec­tion of codes of “progress, law, moral­i­ty and all oth­er fine qual­i­ties,” Dada opened the door for per­son­al free­dom of expres­sion as wide as it would swing, prepar­ing the way for all the sit­u­a­tion­ists, yip­pies, and punks to come.

You can find the films above list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

Man Ray and the Ciné­ma Pur: Four Sur­re­al­ist Films From the 1920s

The ABCs of Dada Explains the Anar­chic, Irra­tional “Anti-Art” Move­ment of Dadaism

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

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

Three Actresses from Downton Abbey Play a Raunchy Card Game (NSFW)

in Comedy, Random | January 8th, 2015

Over the hol­i­days, the cast of Down­ton Abbey let their hair down a bit when they released a nine-minute par­o­dy of the ITV show. It stars George Clooney, and there’s even a lit­tle cameo by Jere­my Piv­en. It’s quite fun­ny. Don’t miss it.

Now comes some­thing even more relaxed. The video above fea­tures three actress­es from Down­ton Abbey —  Lau­ra Carmichael (Lady Edith), Les­ley Nicol (Mrs. Pat­more), and Phyl­lis Logan (Mrs. Hugh­es) — play­ing “Cards Against Human­i­ty.” The game’s own web site bills it as “a par­ty game for hor­ri­ble peo­ple.” While I’m sure that Mr. Car­son would be com­plete­ly scan­dal­ized by the scene above — it’s def­i­nite­ly Not Safe for Work — I guess we could mild­ly cel­e­brate the fact that “Cards Against Human­i­ty” has been released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, and you can down­load the game for free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Par­o­dy of Down­ton Abbey Fea­tures George Clooney & the Cast of the Show

Willie Nel­son Shows You a Delight­ful Card Trick

Three Films Capture 1940s New York, Chicago & Los Angeles in Vivid Color

in History | January 8th, 2015

“Cit­i­zen­ship of this city in itself made for a bond beyond class,” writes the redoubtable Welsh writer of place Jan Mor­ris in Man­hat­tan ’45, her book-length love let­ter to New York City in the imme­di­ate after­math of the Sec­ond World War. “To be a cit­i­zen of Man­hat­tan was an achieve­ment in itself — it had tak­en guts and enter­prise, if not on your own part, at least on your fore­bears.’ The pres­sures of the place, its com­pe­ti­tion, its pace, its haz­ards, even the fun of it, demand­ed spe­cial qual­i­ties of its peo­ple, and gave them a par­tic­u­lar affin­i­ty for one anoth­er. They were all an elite!”

Four years into the time of which Mor­ris so rap­tur­ous­ly writes, out came Metro Gold­wyn May­er’s Mighty Man­hat­tan – New York’s Won­der City, a fine Tech­ni­col­or accom­pa­ni­ment to her tex­tu­al appre­ci­a­tion. The clip at the top of the post, nar­rat­ed by “Voice of the Globe” James Patrick, shifts straight into full mid­cen­tu­ry tri­umphal gear, extolling such clas­sic works of Man­hat­tan Man as Wall Street, the Flat­iron Build­ing, the ele­vat­ed train, the Brook­lyn Bridge, the New York Pub­lic Library, and of course, the Empire State Build­ing. (It also shows a sight that, for all the gee-whizzing it must have elicit­ed at the time, we all hope will nev­er return: Cen­tral Park with cars in it.)

“Not so long ago Chicagoans were con­vinced that their city would soon be the great­est and most famous on Earth, out­rank­ing New York, Lon­don, and Paris, the cen­tre of a new world, the boss city of the uni­verse,” Mor­ris writes else­where. Today, “the blind­est lover of Chica­go would not claim for the place the sta­tus of a uni­ver­sal metrop­o­lis. Too much of the old grand assertive­ness has been lost. Nobody pre­tends Chica­go has over­tak­en New York; instead there is a provin­cial accep­tance of infe­ri­or­i­ty, a res­ig­na­tion, cou­pled with a mild regret for the old days of brag and beef.”

For a sense of that brag and beef — and giv­en the footage of the stock­yards, take the lat­ter lit­er­al­ly — have a look at the half-hour film above: Chica­go, pro­duced by the Chica­go board of edu­ca­tion in 1945 or 1946. After Chicagoan Jeff Alt­man, who works in film post-pro­duc­tion, found it at a south side estate sale, he did a bit of a restora­tion on it and post­ed it to the inter­net. “It’s hard to say the pur­pose of the film,” Alt­man writes. “It could be geared towards tourism or to entice com­pa­nies to come to Chica­go. This film could have just been used in the class­room. I’m not entire­ly sure. The great thing is all the dif­fer­ent views of the city they give.”

“Los Ange­les is the know-how city,” Mor­ris writes in anoth­er essay. “Remem­ber know-how? It was one of the vogue words of the for­ties and fifties, now rather out of fash­ion. It reflect­ed a whole cli­mate and tone of Amer­i­can opti­mism. It stood for skill and expe­ri­ence indeed, but it also expressed the cer­tain­ty that Amer­i­ca’s par­tic­u­lar genius, the genius for applied log­ic, for sys­tems, was inex­orably the her­ald of progress.” At that time, Los Ange­les did­n’t need so much boos­t­er­ism — it was boos­t­er­ism. The South­ern Cal­i­forn­ian metrop­o­lis began boom­ing in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, and that boom would­n’t end until well after the war, if indeed it has end­ed yet.

Many of its new arrivals, the vast major­i­ty of whom came from else­where in the Unit­ed States until the late 1960s, could­n’t have helped but felt enticed by scenes like the ones in the clip just above, which shows off the Sun­set Strip in the late 40s or ear­ly 50s. Los Ange­les has changed, as has every Amer­i­can city: build­ings have grown taller, pop­u­la­tions have den­si­fied, and you see a wider vari­ety of faces and hear a wider vari­ety of lan­guages on the streets than ever before. Some, espe­cial­ly Youtube com­menters, bemoan this, but to my mind, things have got con­sid­er­ably more inter­est­ing as a result. Vin­tage footage like this — and espe­cial­ly vin­tage footage in unusu­al­ly vivid col­or like this — reminds us that, as fas­ci­nat­ing a past as our cities have, their future looks rich­er still.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion Lets You Fly Through 17th Cen­tu­ry Lon­don

Lon­don Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Lay­ered Onto Footage from 2013

Paris Through Pen­tax: Short Film Lets You See a Great City Through a Dif­fer­ent Lens

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

1927 Lon­don Shown in Mov­ing Col­or

A Drone’s Eye View of Los Ange­les, New York, Lon­don, Bangkok & Mex­i­co City

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.

The Origins of Spinal Tap: Watch the 20 Minute Short Film Created to Pitch the Classic Mockumentary

in Film, Music | January 7th, 2015

When This is Spinal Tap came out over 30 years ago, it went over a lot of people’s heads. “Every­body thought it was a real band,” recalled direc­tor Rob Rein­er. “Every­one said, ‘Why would you make a movie about a band that no one has heard of?’”

It’s hard to believe that lines like “You can’t dust for vom­it” failed to come off as any­thing but a joke. But, to be fair, Hol­ly­wood come­dies were gen­er­al­ly straight-for­ward affairs in the ‘80s. Think Blues Broth­ers or Fletch. Fake doc­u­men­taries weren’t a thing. And This is Spinal Tap looks and feels exact­ly like a rock doc­u­men­tary– the hagio­graph­ic voiceover, the shaky cam­era, the awk­ward inter­views.

The movie was just as unscript­ed as rock docs like Don’t Look Back, The Song Remains the Same and The Kids Are All Right. The film is not only a par­o­dy of the gen­er­al­ly overblown silli­ness of rock and roll, it is also, as Newsweek’s David Ansen notes, “a satire of the doc­u­men­tary form itself, com­plete with per­fect­ly fad­ed clips from old TV shows of the band in its mod and flower-child incar­na­tions.”

And then there’s the fact that, for a fake band, Spinal Tap knew how to rock — albeit to com­plete­ly idi­ot­ic lyrics. Christo­pher Guest, Michael McK­ean and Har­ry Shear­er, the actors who make up the core of the band, actu­al­ly played all the music in the movie. And after the cult suc­cess of the film, they went on to play con­certs. Can you real­ly call Spinal Tap a fake band if they wowed audi­ences in Wem­b­ley Sta­di­um?

But the genius stroke of the movie was to mix in pain and dread with the humor. As we’re laugh­ing at David St. Hub­bins and com­pa­ny fret­ting over an 18-inch Stone­henge prop, we also wince in sym­pa­thy. Sting report­ed­ly told Rob Rein­er that he watch­es the movie every time he is about to go on tour. “Every time I watch it, I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry.”

Spinal Tap made its first appear­ance in 1979, five years before the movie pre­miered. It was on a short-lived ABC SCTV-like com­e­dy series called The T.V. Show that starred Rein­er. You can see Guest, McK­ean and Shear­er and com­pa­ny rock­ing out to the tune “Rock n Roll Night­mare” right above. Though the per­for­mance is not near­ly as tight or fun­ny as their sub­se­quent appear­ances, all of the ideas are there. The bloat­ed pre­ten­tious­ness. The sil­ly lyrics. The sil­li­er out­fits. By the way, that bot­tle-wield­ing key­boardist in the clip is Loudon Wain­wright III.

A cou­ple years lat­er, Rein­er and com­pa­ny decid­ed to revis­it Spinal Tap with the idea of mak­ing a mock­u­men­tary. As Rein­er recount­ed in an inter­view with Sound Opin­ions:

They gave us the mon­ey and we real­ized that there was no way in screen­play form that we could cap­ture what this would be. Because it was going to be a doc­u­men­tary. So I said to the guy, give us the mon­ey you were going to give us to write the screen­play and I’ll make you a lit­tle bit of the film. And we made like 20 min­utes of this film. We had back­stage footage. We had con­cert footage. Inter­view stuff.

You can watch the whole demo film (Spinal Tap: The Final Tour) up top in two parts. The hair might be dif­fer­ent and some of the gags might not land with the same punch, but the chem­istry, the con­cept and the com­e­dy are all there. In fact, some clips from the demo, par­tic­u­lar­ly the inter­views, made their way into the final cut of the movie.

Sad­ly, the demo failed to impress the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny. “The guy [at the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny] said, ‘I don’t like this.’ So we went around for years to get it made. And final­ly, we were able to put it togeth­er for a cou­ple of mil­lion bucks.”

You can watch Rein­er recount the mak­ing and lega­cy of This is Spinal Tap below. Spinal Tap: The Final Tour will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ian Rub­bish (aka Fred Armisen) Inter­views the Clash in Spinal Tap-Inspired Mock­u­men­tary

Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel Pro­motes World’s Largest Online Gui­tar Les­son

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.

Free: Play 2,400 Vintage Computer Games in Your Web Browser

in Video Games | January 7th, 2015

Had I known as a grade-school­er that the day would come when I could play all the com­put­er games I then want­ed to, any­where I want­ed to, with­out pay­ing for them, installing them, or even wait­ing any sig­nif­i­cant amount of time for them, I would have sim­ply put myself into cryo­genic sleep, set­ting the year of awak­en­ing to 2015. The Inter­net Archive, which had already made over 900 clas­sic arcade and con­sole games avail­able, has made all this pos­si­ble with their MS-DOS games col­lec­tion, which con­tains much, if not every­thing, you remem­ber from child­hood — if your child­hood, like mine, revolved around com­put­er games released between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. The youth-reliv­ing gamers of Metafil­ter have already descend­ed upon the col­lec­tion, pulling out such acknowl­edged clas­sics as Prince of Per­sia, Lem­mings, Scorched Earth, and Waste­land. (More than a few have also dug up true obscu­ri­ties — Tongue of the Fat­man, any­one?)

Right there at the Inter­net Archive, you can play genre-defin­ing first-per­son shoot­ers like Wolfen­stein 3D, plat­form­ers like Com­man­der Keen, dri­ving games like Lam­borgh­i­ni Amer­i­can Chal­lenge, sim­u­la­tors like Sim­C­i­ty (which played sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle part in mak­ing me into the city-obsessed adult whose words you now read, though I would­n’t mind revis­it­ing it), strat­e­gy games like Dune and its more pop­u­lar sequel, and class­room favorites/cultural touch­stones like The Ore­gon Trail.

At this point, even those not expe­ri­enc­ing a Prous­t­ian onrush of child­hood mem­o­ry may feel a tad over­whelmed, so why not have a look at the Inter­net Archive’s MS-DOS Show­case, “a hand-picked set of selec­tions from the MS-DOS Soft­ware Library of the Inter­net Archive,” cho­sen because “they rep­re­sent major parts of the MS-DOS sto­ry, because they are par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive, and” — in the case of the best of these games, the most legit­i­mate rea­son of all — “because they’re fun.” The games can all be played in your brows­er. If you run into any prob­lems, please read the Inter­net Archive’s FAQ.

h/t to our loy­al read­er Daniel B.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Dou­glas Adams in 1984

Learn to Write Through a Video Game Inspired by the Roman­tic Poets: Shel­ley, Byron, Keats

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.

Mœbius Illustrates Dante’s Paradiso

in Art, Literature | January 6th, 2015

Sal­vador Dalí, Gus­tave Doré, Alber­to Mar­ti­ni, San­dro Bot­ti­cel­li, the ear­li­er and less-rec­og­nized Pri­amo del­la Quer­cia and Gio­van­ni di Pao­lo — all of these artists have tried their hand at illus­trat­ing Dante Alighier­i’s Divine Com­e­dy. We have, in turn, fea­tured all their efforts, each of a strik­ing­ly dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty and aes­thet­ic inter­pre­ta­tion of the har­row­ing jour­ney out of the mor­tal realm and into the under­world described by this much-stud­ied, much-trans­lat­ed, and just plain much-read 14th-cen­tu­ry text. But none of those artists, despite the rich­ness of their visions, spoke direct­ly to the late 20th and ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry. For a tru­ly mod­ern Divine Com­e­dy, behold the work of Jean Giraud, bet­ter known as Mœbius.

Mœbius, who passed out of this mor­tal realm him­self in 2012, made his name with comics like Blue­ber­ry, Arzach, and The Air­tight Garage of Jer­ry Cor­nelius — though to call these works, which belong simul­ta­ne­ous­ly to the fields of sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy while tran­scend­ing the both of them, noth­ing more than “comics” belies the artist’s abil­i­ty to escape their con­ven­tions of sto­ry­telling and com­po­si­tion as if he’d nev­er encoun­tered them in the first place.

The dis­tinc­tive results attract­ed a fair few col­lab­o­ra­tors, both actu­al and hope­ful; you may remem­ber our post on his sto­ry­boards and con­cept art for Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky’s nev­er-real­ized adap­ta­tion of Dune, but he also lent his hand to such com­plet­ed motion pic­tures as Alien, The Abyss, and The Fifth Ele­ment.

“In 1999, Nuages Gallery in Milan pub­lished three illus­trat­ed edi­tions of Infer­no, Pur­ga­to­rio, and Par­adiso,” says Bow­doin’s Dante Today. Nuages select­ed a dif­fer­ent illus­tra­tor for each, result­ing in L’In­fer­no di Loren­zo Mat­tot­ti, Il Pur­ga­to­rio di Mil­ton Glaser (who, though he would have pre­ferred the Infer­no, still pro­duced an also strik­ing­ly mod­ern take on Dante), and, final­ly, Il Par­adiso di Mœbius. We’ve includ­ed three pieces of the lat­ter’s art­work here, but if you’d like more insight into the mind that cre­at­ed them, have a look at In Search of Mœbius, the BBC doc­u­men­tary we fea­tured after the artist’s death — a death that means, among oth­er loss­es, that our world will nev­er see the Divine Com­e­dy ani­mat­ed film it needs.

You can find works by Dante in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks col­lec­tions. A Yale course called Dante in Trans­la­tion appears on our mega list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Red­dit

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Botticelli’s 92 Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

Gus­tave Doré’s Dra­mat­ic Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

Alber­to Martini’s Haunt­ing Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1901–1944)

Sal­vador Dalí’s 100 Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s The Divine Com­e­dy

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

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 @colinmarshallor on Face­book.