Henri Matisse Illustrates Baudelaire’s Censored Poetry Collection, Les Fleurs du Mal

in Art, Poetry | September 24th, 2014

We pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Hen­ri Matis­se’s illus­tra­tions for a 1935 edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses. If the Odyssey-themed etch­ings he did for that book sur­prised you, have a look at his illus­tra­tions for Charles Baude­laire’s poet­ry col­lec­tion Les Fleurs du mal, first pub­lished in 1857. Accord­ing to Henri-Matisse.net, the book (avail­able in French and Eng­lish in our col­lec­tion of 600 Free eBooks) had “been illus­trat­ed over the years by a vari­ety of major artists, includ­ing Emile Bernard, Charles Despi­au, Jacob Epstein, Gus­tave Rodin, Georges Rouault, and Pierre-Yes Tré­mois. Each inter­pret­ed select­ed poems more or less faith­ful­ly. Matisse took a dif­fer­ent approach in the 1947 edi­tion pub­lished by La Bib­lio­thèque Française.” As you can see from the exam­ples pro­vid­ed here, he went an even more uncon­ven­tion­al route this time, accom­pa­ny­ing Baude­laire’s poems with noth­ing but por­trai­ture.

The edi­tion’s 33 por­traits, includ­ing one of Matisse him­self and one of Baude­laire, cap­ture a vari­ety of sub­jects, most­ly women — also a source of inspi­ra­tion for the poet. How­ev­er, as the site that bears his name makes clear, “Matisse did not indulge in the bio­graph­i­cal fal­lac­i­es of the lit­er­ary crit­ics of his day who attempt­ed to under­stand Baude­laire by asso­ci­at­ing each poem with the woman who may have inspired it. Thus, his gallery of facial por­traits pro­vides an accom­pa­ni­ment rather than an imi­ta­tive ren­di­tion of select­ed poems.” Would that more illus­tra­tors of lit­er­a­ture fol­low his exam­ple and make a break from pure lit­er­al­ism, allow­ing the mean­ing of the rela­tion­ship between text and image to cohere in the read­er-view­er’s mind. You might say that Matisse pio­neered, in oth­er words, the most poet­ic pos­si­ble method of illus­trat­ing poet­ry.

Since it is Banned Books Week, it’s per­haps worth not­ing that Baude­laire’s Les Fleurs du Mal was quick­ly cen­sored in France. Yale’s Mod­ernism Lab web­site notes that, two months after its pub­li­ca­tion in 1857, a French court “banned six of Baudelaire’s erot­ic poems, two of them on les­bian themes and the oth­er four het­ero­sex­u­al but mild­ly sado-masochis­tic. The ban was not offi­cial­ly lift­ed until 1949, by which time Baude­laire had achieved ‘clas­sic’ sta­tus as among the most impor­tant influ­ences on mod­ern lit­er­a­ture in France and through­out Europe.” A sec­ond expur­gat­ed (or as Baude­laire called it “muti­lat­ed”) edi­tion was pub­lished in 1861. Pre­sum­ably Matisse illus­trat­ed that edi­tion in 1947. If you want to buy one of the 300 copies with Matis­se’s illus­tra­tions, you will have to shell out about $7500.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates 1935 Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Hear Gertrude Stein Read Works Inspired by Matisse, Picas­so, and T.S. Eliot (1934)

Vin­tage Film: Watch Hen­ri Matisse Sketch and Make His Famous Cut-Outs (1946)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture 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.

Cartoonists Draw Their Famous Cartoon Characters While Blindfolded (1947)

in Comics/Cartoons | September 24th, 2014

At some point in your life, no doubt, you’ve thought that you have done some­thing so many times that you could do it with your eyes closed — be it change a dia­per, make cof­fee, dri­ve to work or per­form a minor sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure. Not that this would nec­es­sar­i­ly be a good idea (espe­cial­ly that last one) but there’s some­thing about rep­e­ti­tion, rou­tine and mus­cle mem­o­ry that makes a task so famil­iar that sight seems super­flu­ous.

In 1947, LIFE Mag­a­zine asked some of the most famous car­toon­ists around to draw their com­ic strip char­ac­ters blind­fold­ed. The results are fas­ci­nat­ing, look­ing a bit like the out­come of a clin­i­cal test on artists before and after tak­ing illic­it sub­stances. (See our pre­vi­ous post: Artist Draws Nine Por­traits on LSD Dur­ing 1950s Research Exper­i­ment.)

Chic Young’s blind­fold­ed ver­sion of Dag­wood Bum­stead is all dynam­ic lines and spi­rals, look­ing a bit like a doo­dle from an Ital­ian Futur­ist. Chester Gould’s blind attempt at Dick Tra­cy’s chis­eled pro­file looks not all that dif­fer­ent from the sight­ed ver­sion. And Mil­ton Can­iff’s Steve Canyon has all the ele­ments there — the flinty eyes, the wavy hair – but it’s all jum­bled togeth­er.

You can see more such draw­ings here.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ger­tie the Dinosaur: The Moth­er of all Car­toon Char­ac­ters

Vis­it the World of Lit­tle Nemo Artist Win­sor McCay: Three Clas­sic Ani­ma­tions and a Google Doo­dle

How Walt Dis­ney Car­toons are Made

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 one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail Censorship Letter: We Want to Retain “Fart in Your General Direction”

in Comedy | September 24th, 2014

If any­one could make toi­let humor fun­ny past the age of 14, it was Mon­ty Python. Min­ing equal­ly the halls of acad­e­mia and the grade school yard, there was no reg­is­ter too high or too low for the mas­ter­ful British satirists. And when it came time for them to release their sec­ond film in 1975—Arthurian spoof Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail—the troop fought in vain to reach an audi­ence of all ages. Unlike today’s many rat­ings gra­da­tions, the British Board of Film Clas­si­fi­ca­tion (BBFC) then had a very sim­ple clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem: AA for 14 and over, and A for ages 5–14. Hop­ing to increase the film’s audi­ence, pro­duc­er Mark Forstater wrote the let­ter above to fel­low pro­duc­er Michael White a few days after a Twick­en­ham screen­ing attend­ed by BBFC mem­ber Tony Ker­pel, who sug­gest­ed a few cuts to bring the film an A rat­ing.

In the let­ter, Forstater lists Kerpel’s rec­om­men­da­tions:

Lose as many shits as pos­si­ble
Take Jesus Christ out, if pos­si­ble
Lose “I fart in your gen­er­al direc­tion”
Lose “the oral sex”
Lose “oh, fuck off”
Lose “We make cas­tanets out of your tes­ti­cles”

Two of these lines you no doubt rec­og­nize as uttered by the obnox­ious mock­ing French guard the Grail questers encounter on their jour­ney. Played by John Cleese, the French­man gets some of the best lines in the film, includ­ing the offend­ing “fart” and “tes­ti­cles” bits (at 2:15 and 6:05 in the clip above). Forstater must have had a keen sense of just how funny—therefore how necessary—these lines were. In his sug­ges­tions to White, he writes,

I would like to get back to the Cen­sor and agree to lose the shits, take the odd Jesus Christ out and lose Oh fuck off, but to retain ‘fart in your gen­er­al direc­tion’, ‘cas­tanets of your tes­ti­cles’ and ‘oral sex’ and ask him for an ‘A’ rat­ing on that basis.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for Britain’s Python-lov­ing kids and for the film’s investors, the AA rat­ing stuck, at least until 2006, when it was re-rat­ed for ages 12 and below in a the­atri­cal re-release. This by con­trast to its U.S. sta­tus, where the movie first scored a PG rat­ing and was lat­er upgrad­ed to PG-13 (which didn’t exist in 1975) for its Blu-ray release. Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail has received a vari­ety of mature rat­ings in var­i­ous coun­tries and—we should men­tion, since it’s Banned Books Week—has been entire­ly banned in Malaysia.

Anoth­er com­e­dy team encoun­tered sim­i­lar dif­fi­cul­ties with film rat­ings. The South Park duo—similarly adept at pitch­ing pot­ty jokes to grown-ups—ended up with an R for the fea­ture length Big­ger, Longer & Uncut, though cen­sors orig­i­nal­ly want­ed an NC-17. See the cuts the MPAA rec­om­mend­ed for that film in Matt Stone’s leg­endary response memo to the rat­ings board and read the full tran­script of the Python let­ter at Let­ters of Note.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch All of Ter­ry Gilliam’s Mon­ty Python Ani­ma­tions in a Row

Mon­ty Python Sings “The Philosopher’s Song,” Reveal­ing the Drink­ing Habits of Great Euro­pean Thinkers

Clas­sic Mon­ty Python: Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw Engage in a Hilar­i­ous Bat­tle of Wits

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

Steven Soderbergh Creates Silent, Black & White Recut of Raiders of the Lost Ark to Explain the Art of “Staging”

in Film | September 24th, 2014

Since offi­cial­ly retir­ing from film­mak­ing last year, Steven Soder­bergh has filled his time writ­ing Twit­ter novel­las, cre­at­ing mashups of Alfred Hitch­cock and Gus Van Sant Psy­cho films, and post­ing a log of all the films, TV shows and books he immersed him­self in in 2009.

Now comes his lat­est side project: On his web site, extension765.com, Soder­bergh presents a short les­son in “stag­ing,” a term that refers in cin­e­ma “to how all the var­i­ous ele­ments of a giv­en scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coor­di­nat­ed.” He tells us: “I oper­ate under the the­o­ry a movie should work with the sound off, and under that the­o­ry, stag­ing becomes para­mount.”

To illus­trate his point, he takes the entire­ty of Steven Spiel­berg’s 1981 film, The Raiders of the Lost Ark; turns it into a silent, black & white film (watch it here); and then adds this com­men­tary:

So I want you to watch this movie and think only about stag­ing, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of move­ment are, what the cut­ting pat­terns are. See if you can repro­duce the thought process that result­ed in these choic­es by ask­ing your­self: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actu­al­ly is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and col­or from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visu­al stag­ing aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not say­ing I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just say­ing this is what I do when I try to learn about stag­ing, and this film­mak­er for­got more about stag­ing by the time he made his first fea­ture than I know to this day (for exam­ple, no mat­ter how fast the cuts come, you always know exact­ly where you are—that’s high lev­el visu­al math shit).

Ok, that’s prob­a­bly enough film school for today…

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitchcock’s Sev­en-Minute Edit­ing Mas­ter Class

Wern­er Herzog’s Rogue Film School: Apply & Learn the Art of Gueril­la Film­mak­ing & Lock-Pick­ing

Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teach­ing List of 87 Essen­tial Films Every Aspir­ing Direc­tor Should See

Longform’s New, Free App Lets You Read Great Journalism from Your Favorite Publishers

in iPad, iPhone, Magazines, Media | September 23rd, 2014

If you have man­aged to keep your atten­tion span intact dur­ing this dis­tract­ing infor­ma­tion age, then you’re almost cer­tain­ly famil­iar with Longform.org, a web site that makes it easy to find some­thing great to read online, espe­cial­ly if you like read­ing infor­ma­tive, well-craft­ed works of non-fic­tion. Last week, Long­form enhanced its ser­vice with the release of a new, free app for iPhone and iPad. It’s the “only 100% free app that fil­ters out the inter­net junk and deliv­ers noth­ing but smart, in-depth reads.” And, draw­ing on mate­r­i­al from 1,000 pub­lish­ers, the app lets read­ers “cre­ate their own cus­tom feeds of high qual­i­ty, fea­ture-length jour­nal­ism,” and then read it all on the go. It’s a mis­sion that cer­tain­ly aligns with ours, so we’re more than hap­py to give the new app a plug.

Sign up for our dai­ly email and, once a day, we’ll bun­dle all of our dai­ly posts and drop them in your inbox, in an easy-to-read for­mat. You don’t have to come to us; we’ll come to you!

Readers Predict in 1936 Which Novelists Would Still Be Widely Read in the Year 2000

in Books, Literature | September 23rd, 2014

Few know as much about our incom­pe­tence at pre­dict­ing our own future as Matt Novak, author of the site Pale­o­fu­ture, “a blog that looks into the future that nev­er was.” Not long ago, I inter­viewed him on my pod­cast Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture; ever since, I’ve invari­ably found out that all the smartest dis­sec­tions of just how lit­tle we under­stand about our future some­how involve him. And not just those — also the smartest dis­sec­tions of how lit­tle we’ve always under­stood about our future. Take, for exam­ple, the year 1936, when, in Novak’s words, “a quar­ter­ly mag­a­zine for book col­lec­tors called The Colophon polled its read­ers to pick the ten authors whose works would be con­sid­ered clas­sics in the year 2000.” They named the fol­low­ing:

• Sin­clair Lewis
• Willa Cather
• Eugene O’Neill
• Edna St. Vin­cent Mil­lay
• Robert Frost
• Theodore Dreis­er
• James Truslow Adams
• George San­tayana
• Stephen Vin­cent Benét
• James Branch Cabell

At first glance, this list might not look so embar­rass­ing. Nobel lau­re­ate Sin­clair Lewis remains oft-ref­er­enced, if much more so for Bab­bitt (Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats – Read Online Now), his 1922 indict­ment of a busi­ness-blink­ered Amer­i­ca, than for It Can’t Hap­pen Here, his best­selling Hitler satire from the year before the poll. Most Amer­i­cans pass­ing through high school Eng­lish still bump into Willa Cather, Robert Frost (four of whose vol­umes you can find in our col­lec­tion Free eBooks), and per­haps Eugene O’Neill (like­wise) and Theodore Dreis­er (espe­cial­ly through Sis­ter Car­rie: Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats – Read Online Now) as well.

Some of us may also remem­ber Stephen Vin­cent Benét’s epic Civ­il War poem John Brown’s Body from our school days, but it would take a well-read soul indeed to nod in agree­ment with such selec­tions as New Eng­land his­to­ri­an James Truslow Adams and now lit­tle-read (though once Sin­clair- and Dreis­er-acclaimed) fan­ta­sist James Branch Cabell. The well-remem­bered George San­tayana still looks like a judg­ment call to me, but what of absent famous names like F. Scott Fitzger­ald, William Faulkn­er, Ernest Hem­ing­way, or maybe James Joyce? The Colophon’s edi­tors includ­ed Hem­ing­way on their own list, but which writ­ers do you think stand as the Fitzger­alds and Faulkn­ers of today — or, more to the point, of the year 2078? Care to put your guess on record? Feel free to make your pre­dic­tions in the com­ments sec­tion below.

via @ElectricLit/Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

The 25 Best Non-Fic­tion Books Ever: Read­ers’ Picks

The Books You Think Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read: Crime and Pun­ish­ment, Moby-Dick & Beyond (Many Free Online)

600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture 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.

Winston Churchill’s Paintings: Great Statesman, Surprisingly Good Artist

in Art, History | September 23rd, 2014

Win­ston Churchill is one of those colos­sal fig­ures who read­i­ly qual­i­fies for that unfash­ion­able moniker of The Great Man of His­to­ry. This was a guy who warned of Hitler’s threat long before it seemed polite to do so. Through his polit­i­cal acu­men and bril­liant ora­to­ry skills, the two-time prime min­is­ter ral­lied his demor­al­ized coun­try to face down the mas­sive, seem­ing­ly unstop­pable Ger­man army. Beyond that, he won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture, for, among oth­er works, his six vol­ume series on the Sec­ond World War. And, on top of all that, Churchill was also a pas­sion­ate painter. And unlike George W. Bush’s touch­ing­ly awk­ward attempts, Churchill’s paint­ings were actu­al­ly pret­ty good. You can see a few above and below and even more here. (Click on the images to view them in a larg­er for­mat.)

For Churchill, paint­ing was the best way to men­tal­ly step away from what had to be a titan­i­cal­ly stress­ful job. “Paint­ing is com­plete as a dis­trac­tion,” he wrote in 1948. “I know of noth­ing which, with­out exhaust­ing the body, more entire­ly absorbs the mind. What­ev­er the wor­ries of the hour or the threats of the future, once the pic­ture has begun to flow along, there is no room for them in the men­tal screen.”

Churchill turned to paint­ing at a low point in his life. After an inva­sion of Gal­lipoli, which he in part orches­trat­ed, went spec­tac­u­lar­ly wrong in 1915, he resigned from his gov­ern­ment posi­tion (First Lord of the Admi­ral­ty) in dis­grace. “I had great anx­i­ety and no means of reliev­ing it,” he wrote. Then he dis­cov­ered the joys of putting paint to can­vas. Over the next 48 years, he cranked out some 500 paint­ings, most­ly land­scapes. Oil was his pre­ferred medi­um and, judg­ing from his oeu­vre, Claude Mon­et, Vin­cent Van Gogh and William Turn­er were big influ­ences. “When I get to heav­en I mean to spend a con­sid­er­able por­tion of my first mil­lion years in paint­ing,” he wrote. “And so get to the bot­tom of the sub­ject.”

So how good was he? Not­ed Eng­lish artist and roy­al por­traitist Sir Oswald Bir­ley was quite impressed by the Prime Minister’s abil­i­ties. “If Churchill had giv­en the time to art that he has giv­en to pol­i­tics, he would have been by all odds the world’s great­est painter.” Of course, Bir­ley was also reg­u­lar­ly employed by Churchill, so you might want to take that state­ment with a grain of salt. David Coombs, who co-authored the book Sir Win­ston Churchill: His Life and His Paint­ings, offered a more even-hand­ed assess­ment. “When he’s very good, he’s very, very good, but some­times, he’s hor­rid.”

Top: Marl­bor­ough Tapes­tries at Blenheim

Mid­dle: Pont du Gard

Bot­tom: The Har­bour at St. Jean Cap Fer­rat

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Col­or Footage of Win­ston Churchill’s Funer­al in 1965

Ani­mat­ed: Win­ston Churchill’s Top 10 Say­ings About Fail­ure, Courage, Set­backs, Haters & Suc­cess

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 one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Hear Allen Ginsberg Teach “Literary History of the Beats”: Audio Lectures from His 1977 & 1981 Naropa Courses

in Poetry | September 22nd, 2014

Image by Michiel Hendryckx, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It’s not often one gets the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take a course on a major lit­er­ary move­ment taught by a found­ing mem­ber of that move­ment. Imag­ine sit­ting in on lec­tures on Roman­tic poet­ry taught by John Keats or William Wordsworth? It may be the case, how­ev­er, that the Roman­tic poets would have a hard time of it in the cut­throat world of pro­fes­sion­al­ized aca­d­e­m­ic poet­ry, a world Allen Gins­berg helped cre­ate in 1974 with the found­ing of his Jack Ker­ouac School of Dis­em­bod­ied Poet­ics at Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty, almost twen­ty years after he brought hip mod­ern poet­ry to the mass­es with the wild­ly pop­u­lar City Lights paper­back edi­tion of Howl and Oth­er Poems. (Here you can lis­ten to the first record­ing of Gins­berg read­ing that famous poem.)

Dis­missed by the mod­ernist old guard as “vac­u­ous self-pro­mot­ers” in their time, the Beats’ leg­end often por­trays them as paragons of artis­tic integri­ty. There’s no rea­son they couldn’t be both in some sense. The anti-author­i­tar­i­an pranks and pos­es gained them noto­ri­ety for mat­ters of style, and their ded­i­ca­tion to rad­i­cal­iz­ing Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture pro­vid­ed the sub­stance.

As the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets writes, “there is a clear work eth­ic that rever­ber­ates in their lives and in their writ­ing, and in the eyes of many read­ers and crit­ics, the Beats fos­tered a sus­tained, authen­tic, and com­pelling attack on post-World War II Amer­i­can Cul­ture,” reject­ing both “the stul­ti­fy­ing mate­ri­al­ism and con­formism of the cold war era” and “the high­ly wrought and con­trolled aes­thet­ic of mod­ernist stal­warts.”

Thanks to the archives at Naropa, we can hear Gins­berg him­self lec­ture on both the style and sub­stance of Beat lit­er­ary cul­ture in a series of lec­tures he deliv­ered in 1977 for his sum­mer course called “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats.” We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured the exten­sive “spe­cial­ized read­ing list” Gins­berg hand­ed stu­dents for that class, which he titled “Celes­tial Home­work.” In the first series of lectures—divided in 18 parts in the archive—hear him dis­cuss the list. The Naropa archive describes the first lec­ture as div­ing “right into the 40’s lives of Gins­berg, Ker­ouac, Bur­roughs, Her­bert Huncke, and oth­ers liv­ing in NYC at that time. From con­sum­ing Ben­zadrine inhalers to the dis­cov­ery of the void, Gins­berg’s account and analy­ses are enter­tain­ing and live­ly as well as insight­ful.” Hear part one of that talk at the top of the post, and part two just above.

Gins­berg focus­es on the 40s as the peri­od of Beat ori­gins in his 1977 class. Anoth­er sec­tion of the course—taught in 1981—cov­ers the 50s, with top­ics such as “Bur­roughs’ rec­om­mend­ed read­ing lists,” “Bur­roughs on drugs and soci­ety,” and “the found­ing of the study of seman­tics.” Hear the first lec­ture in that series just above.

Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Image above was tak­en by Marce­lo Noah.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

“Expan­sive Poet­ics” by Allen Gins­berg: A Free Course from 1981

13 Lec­tures from Allen Ginsberg’s “His­to­ry of Poet­ry” Course (1975)

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

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

Let’s Learn Japanese: Two Classic Video Series to Get You Started in the Language

in Language Lessons | September 22nd, 2014

Say the name “Yan-san” to any­one who’s stud­ied Japan­ese in the last thir­ty years, and you’ll prob­a­bly get a reac­tion of delight­ed recog­ni­tion. It means that, inside or out­side the class­room, they stud­ied with Let’s Learn Japan­ese, a series of edu­ca­tion­al videos pro­duced by the Japan Foun­da­tion. The first “sea­son,” if you like, came out in 1984, the time of an enor­mous Asian eco­nom­ic bub­ble that made the world’s future look Japan­ese, send­ing the lan­guage straight to the top of every inter­na­tion­al busi­ness-mind­ed stu­den­t’s to-do-list. (Sound famil­iar, cur­rent strug­glers with Man­darin?) Its hero, a young man of delib­er­ate­ly ambigu­ous nation­al­i­ty named Yan — the Japan­ese all address him with the every­day hon­orif­ic -san — turns up in Japan for a few years of life in Tokyo and works at an archi­tec­ture firm, helped along by his host fam­i­ly the Katos, his eager­ly team-play­ing co-work­ers (one of whom intro­duces him­self, in Eng­lish, with the phase, “We are friends — okay?”), and a vari­ety of help­ful cit­i­zens and pro­fes­sion­als all across the Land of the Ris­ing Sun.

This may sound like dull stuff — the stuff of run-of-the-mill lan­guage-learn­ing videos — but Let’s Learn Japan­ese raised the bar for this sort of thing, in terms of not just pro­duc­tion val­ue and teach­ing effec­tive­ness but sheer rewatch­a­bil­i­ty. In addi­tion to Yan-san’s life among the Japan­ese peo­ple, Let’s Learn Japan­ese also offers instruc­tion­al seg­ments led by Mary Althaus, still a pro­fes­sor at Toky­o’s Tsu­da Col­lege, and imag­i­na­tive illus­tra­tive skits per­formed by the inde­fati­ga­ble trio of Mine, Kai­hō, and Sug­i­hara. In the more advanced Sea­son 2, released over a decade lat­er in 1995, they’ve become the eeri­ly sim­i­lar Kodama, Andō, and Koy­ana­gi, and Yan-san has become a grad­u­ate stu­dent with girl­friend trou­bles. Hav­ing watched all 52 episodes sev­er­al times through, I can vouch for both its enter­tain­ment val­ue and its effec­tive­ness. (It also spurred me to start vol­un­teer­ing at the Japan Foun­da­tion, Los Ange­les.) So can the for­eign­ers who give a hero’s wel­come to star Nick Muhrin (who, last I heard, still lives in Japan) when they run into him. I know I’ve learned enough to buy Yan-san a drink.

You can find more use­ful Japan­ese-learn­ing mate­ri­als to sup­ple­ment all this in our archive of free lan­guage lessons. It includes resources rang­ing from the For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute’s dig­i­tized text­books and tapes to pod­casts like the life abroad-ori­ent­ed Japanesepod101 [iTunes Free — Feed] and the ani­me-geared Japan­cast [iTunes Free — Feed]. 皆さんがんばって！

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Learn Japan­ese Free

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

Woody Allen Lives the “Deli­cious Life” in Ear­ly-80s Japan­ese Com­mer­cials

Wim Wen­ders Vis­its, Mar­vels at a Japan­ese Fake Food Work­shop

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture 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.

Butterfly Lands on Flutist’s Face During Flute Competition: The Show Must Go On

in Music, Random | September 22nd, 2014

Last Mon­day, Yukie Ota, a Japan­ese born flutist now liv­ing in Chica­go, was per­form­ing in the first round of the Carl Nielsen Inter­na­tion­al Flute Com­pe­ti­tion in Den­mark, when a but­ter­fly flit­ted across the stage and land­ed, rather incon­ve­nient­ly, on the bridge of her nose. Not miss­ing a beat — er, a note — Ota took a quick glance at the crit­ter, and played on, unfazed. On the mer­its of her per­for­mance, Ota made it to the final round of the com­pe­ti­tion held on Sat­ur­day. She even­tu­al­ly lost out to Sébas­t­ian Jacot, who appar­ent­ly played the entire com­pe­ti­tion with a dam­aged flute. In oth­er news, you can check out Vladimir Nabokov’s delight­ful but­ter­fly draw­ings here.

via NPR H/T Mike S.

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