20-Year-Old Louis CK Performs Stand Up (1987)

in Comedy, Video - Arts & Culture | June 9th, 2014

Ever been tak­en aback by a vin­tage pho­to of a Face­book friend? “Look how young he was! An infant!” If you’re a mem­ber of come­di­an Louis CK’s gen­er­a­tion, it’s like­ly that at some point, the per­son in the pho­to was you.

Louis mod­el 1987, above, is close to unrec­og­niz­able, with a full head of red hair and a trim bel­ly. His joke-based rou­tine isn’t howl­ing­ly fun­ny, but nei­ther is it shame­ful. He’s con­fi­dent, at his ease with the audi­ence, but the life expe­ri­ence that would inform his lat­er work was not yet a thing.

A few years fur­ther along, above, one can see that com­ic per­sona com­ing into focus. The sad sack phys­i­cal­i­ty that gives it weight came lat­er. Suf­fice to say, that hair­brush joke is no longer a present tense propo­si­tion.

What struck me were the famil­iar back walls of those lit­tle com­e­dy club stages. Louis has been work­ing those crum­my lit­tle stages for such a long time. No won­der he’s on famil­iar terms with the door guys at the Com­e­dy Cel­lar, the club he’s most often shown fre­quent­ing in his char­ac­ter-dri­ven, self-pro­duced, large­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal TV show.

As he gen­er­ous­ly advised an 18-year-old aspi­rant on the Google news­group “alt.comedy.standup”:

Go on stage as often as pos­si­ble.  Any stage any­where.  Don’t lis­ten to any­one about any­thing.  Just keep get­ting up there and try to be fun­ny, hon­est and orig­i­nal.

Know that it’s not going to be easy.  Know that it’s going to take a long time to be good or great. Don’t focus on the career climb­ing.  Focus on the get­ting fun­nier.  The sec­ond you are bitch­ing about what anoth­er com­ic is get­ting you are going in the com­plete­ly wrong direc­tion.  No one is get­ting your gig or your mon­ey.

Keep in mind that you are in for a looooong haul of ups and downs and noth­ing and some­thing.  It takes at least 15 years, usu­al­ly more, to make a great com­ic.  Most flame out before they get there.

And yes, be polite and cour­te­ous to every sin­gle per­son you deal with. Not because that will make you a bet­ter come­di­an, but because you’re sup­posed to do that.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author of sev­en books, includ­ing No Touch Mon­key! And Oth­er Trav­el Lessons Learned Too Late. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sur­re­al Short Films of Louis C.K., 1993–1999

Sein­feld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Ger­vais Dis­sect the Craft of Com­e­dy (NSFW)

How the Great George Car­lin Showed Louis CK the Way to Suc­cess (NSFW)

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Free Textbooks: Computer Science

in | June 8th, 2014

Free text­books (aka open text­books) writ­ten by knowl­edgable schol­ars are a rel­a­tive­ly new phe­nom­e­non. Below, find a meta list of Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Text­books, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion 200 Free Text­books: A Meta Col­lec­tion. Also see our online col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

• A Byte of Python, by Swa­roop C H
• A First Course in Elec­tri­cal and Com­put­er Engi­neer­ing by Louis Scharf, Col­orado State
• Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Foun­da­tions of Com­pu­ta­tion­al Agents by David Poole and Alan Mack­worth, Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia
• Bits, Sig­nals, and Pack­ets: An Intro­duc­tion to Dig­i­tal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Net­works by Hari Bal­akr­ish­nan, Christo­pher Ter­man, and George Vergh­ese, MIT
• Code Like a Python­ista: Idiomat­ic Python, by David Goodger
• Com­pu­ta­tion­al Geom­e­try by Nicholas M. Patrikalakis, Takashi Maekawa, MIT
• Dig­i­tal Cir­cuit Projects: An Overview of Dig­i­tal Cir­cuits Through Imple­ment­ing Inte­grat­ed Cir­cuits by Charles W. Kann, Get­tys­burg Col­lege
• Dive into Python, by Mark Pil­grim
• Foun­da­tions of Com­put­er Sci­ence by Al Aho (Colum­bia) and Jeff Ull­man (Stan­ford)
• High Per­for­mance Com­put­ing by Charles Sev­er­ance, Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan
• How to Design Pro­grams: An Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­ing and Pro­gram­ming, Mul­ti­ple Authors
• How to Think Like a Com­put­er Sci­en­tist: C ++ ( PDF) by Allen B. Downey, Olin Col­lege
• How to Think Like a Com­put­er Sci­en­tist: Java by Allen B. Downey, Olin Col­lege
• How to Think Like a Com­put­er Sci­en­tist: Python by Allen B. Downey, Olin Col­lege
• Imple­ment­ing a One Address CPU in Logisim by Charles W. Kann III, Get­tys­burg Col­lege
• Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy and the Net­worked Econ­o­my by Patrick McK­e­own, Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia
• Infor­ma­tion The­o­ry, Infer­ence, and Learn­ing Algo­rithms by David MacK­ay, Cam­bridge
• Intro­duc­tion To MIPS Assem­bly Lan­guage Pro­gram­ming by Charles W. Kann III, Get­tys­burg Col­lege
• Neur­al Net­works and Deep Learn­ing, by Michael Nielsen, Research Fel­low at the Recurse Cen­ter
• Pat­terns for Begin­ning Pro­gram­mers (with Exam­ples in Java), by David Bern­stein, James Madi­son Uni­ver­si­ty
• Phi­los­o­phy of Com­put­er Sci­ence by William J. Rapa­port, Uni­ver­si­ty at Buf­fa­lo, The State Uni­ver­si­ty of New York
• Prin­ci­ples of Com­put­er Sys­tem Design: An Intro­duc­tion (Part II) by Jerome Saltzer and M. Frans Kaashoek.
• Prin­ci­ples of Pro­gram­ming Lan­guages by Grad Stu­dents, Johns Hop­kins
• Pro­gram­ming Lan­guages: Appli­ca­tion and Inter­pre­ta­tion by Dr. Shri­ram Krish­na­murthi, Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.
• Pro­log and Nat­ur­al-Lan­guage Analy­sis by Fer­nan­do C. N. Pereira and Stu­art M. Shieber, U Penn & Har­vard
• Python for Infor­mat­ics: Explor­ing Infor­ma­tion by Charles Sev­er­ance, Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan
• Struc­ture and Inter­pre­ta­tion of Com­put­er Pro­grams by Jer­ry Suss­man & Julie Suss­man
• Teach Your­self Word­Per­fect Mac by John Rethorst
• The Prince­ton Bit­coin Text­book by Arvind Narayanan (Prince­ton) and col­leagues

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David Gilmour & David Bowie Sing “Comfortably Numb” Live (2006)

in Music | June 6th, 2014

David Bowie and David Gilmour singing “Com­fort­ably Numb” togeth­er? Yes, thank you. Filmed at the Roy­al Albert Hall, the clip above shows the two per­form­ing at the end of Gilmour’s 2006 Euro­pean solo tour in sup­port of his solo album On an Island. Dur­ing two oth­er nights in the same venue, Gilmour was joined by David Cros­by, Gra­ham Nash, and Robert Wyatt, and the footage saw release as a DVD titled Remem­ber That Night: “It goes with­out say­ing,” writes All­mu­sic of the disc, “that it is stun­ning, both visu­al­ly and aural­ly; how could any Pink Floyd-relat­ed project fail to be? […] but it is Gilmour’s show, and no star can out­shine him.” Maybe, but Bowie’s pret­ty riv­et­ing singing what may be the most spell­bind­ing of Gilmour and Roger Waters’ col­lab­o­ra­tions on Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Gilmour played sev­er­al Floyd clas­sics dur­ing the Roy­al Albert Hall stint. Gilmour and band play Pink Floyd’s “Breathe,” “Time,” and “Shine on You Crazy Dia­mond” in addi­tion to songs from On an Island, “a most­ly laid-back, utter­ly ele­gant Eng­lish record,” writes Thom Jurek. Laid-back and ele­gant might also describe the stage show—its star and his guests some­what less ani­mat­ed than in their heyday—but Gilmour’s solos soar, and the light show, true to form, is a dra­mat­ic com­ple­ment to an equal­ly dra­mat­ic set in which clas­sic Floyd seems to mix seam­less­ly with the first col­lec­tion of orig­i­nal songs Gilmour had released in 22 years.

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:

Pink Floyd Plays With Their Brand New Singer & Gui­tarist David Gilmour on French TV (1968)

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

Watch Pink Floyd Play Live in the Ruins of Pom­peii (1972)

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

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In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Internet, 3D Printers and Trained Monkey Servants

in Literature, Science | June 6th, 2014

“If by some mir­a­cle some prophet could describe the future exact­ly as it was going to take place, his pre­dic­tions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched that every­one would laugh him to scorn.”

That was Sir Arthur C. Clarke, sci­ence fic­tion author best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey, describ­ing the inher­ent fol­ly of pre­dict­ing the future in a 1964 BBC doc­u­men­tary. Of course, he then goes on to do exact­ly that – with remark­able, unnerv­ing accu­ra­cy. Part one of the doc­u­men­tary is above. Part two is below.

The piece opens with a gener­ic nar­ra­tion that describes a dio­ra­ma of future soci­ety at the GM pavil­ion at the 1964 World Fair. Per­haps because it was a more inno­cent time or maybe because it was spon­sored by an automak­er, this vision of the future is touch­ing­ly obliv­i­ous to any­thing relat­ed to cli­mate change. Machines with laser guns will clear jun­gles in hours flat and peo­ple will live in domed com­mu­ni­ties on the ice caps. (Ice caps in the future. Hilar­i­ous.)

Then the reedy, bespec­ta­cled author appears and starts to describe how he thinks the world in fifty years (i.e. 2014) will look. And this is where the movie starts to feel uncan­ny. He talks about how the advance­ment of tran­sis­tors and satel­lites will rad­i­cal­ly alter our under­stand­ing of phys­i­cal space.

These things will make pos­si­ble a world in which we can be in instant con­tact wher­ev­er we may be. Where we can con­tact our friends any­where on earth, even if we don’t know their actu­al phys­i­cal loca­tion. It will be pos­si­ble in that age, pos­si­bly 50 years from now, for a man to con­duct his busi­ness from Tahi­ti or Bali just as well as he could from Lon­don.

For the record, I’m writ­ing this post in a cof­fee shop in Los Ange­les, hun­dreds of miles from the mas­sive Open Cul­ture head­quar­ters in Palo Alto, but I could just as eas­i­ly be writ­ing this on a beach in Sri Lan­ka or a hotel room in Dubrovnik. Clarke sounds here less like some pie-in-the-sky futur­ist than an aspi­ra­tional lifestyle guru like Tim Fer­ris.

Clarke then describes how med­i­cine might change. “One day, we might have brain sur­geons in Edin­burgh oper­at­ing on patients in New Zealand.” The long-dis­tance vir­tu­al surgery first was pio­neered back in 2001 and it con­tin­ues to improve as inter­net speeds increase.

And he pre­dicts that at some point sci­ence will invent a “repli­cat­ing device” that would cre­ate an exact copy of any­thing. That sounds an awful lot like a 3D print­er. Clarke warns that this inven­tion might cause mas­sive soci­etal dis­rup­tion. “Con­front­ed by such a device, our present soci­ety would prob­a­bly sink into a kind of glut­to­nous bar­barism. Since every­one would want unlim­it­ed quan­ti­ties of every­thing.” In oth­er words, 3D print­ers might turn the world into Black Fri­day at Wal­mart.

Some of his oth­er ideas are just weird. Clarke pro­pos­es to tame and train armies of chim­panzees to cook, clean and do society’s grunt work. “We can cer­tain­ly solve our ser­vant prob­lem with the help of the mon­key king­dom. “ Plan­et of the Apes wouldn’t come out for anoth­er four years so Clarke could be for­giv­en for not real­iz­ing that that is one ter­ri­ble idea. On the oth­er hand, it’s hard to see how hir­ing mon­keys could pos­si­bly make the cus­tomer ser­vice at Time Warn­er Cable any worse than it already is.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arthur C. Clarke Nar­rates Film on Mandelbrot’s Frac­tals; David Gilmour Pro­vides the Sound­track

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics on the Web: Hux­ley, Orwell, Asi­mov, Gaiman & Beyond

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.

 

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The 5 Essential Rules of Film Noir

in Film | June 5th, 2014

“That’s life. Whichev­er way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you.” – Al Robert (Tom Neal), Detour

Film Noir. When you think that phrase, the mind is imme­di­ate­ly drawn to images of leg­gy ice queens, rum­bled losers in fedo­ras, guns, neon and cer­tain dead­pan cyn­i­cism. Film Noir wasn’t a self con­scious move­ment in the way the French New Wave was. It wasn’t a brand name like a Mar­vel super­hero epic. But it did tap into some­thing dark in the Amer­i­can post­war zeit­geist and became for a spell huge­ly pop­u­lar. It also cre­at­ed some of the most unfor­get­table images in film his­to­ry.

Film Noir hit its zenith in the late ‘40s, a time when vet­er­ans were return­ing home in droves after hav­ing wit­nessed unimag­in­able hor­rors. Under the weight of war trau­ma, men felt the brit­tle veneer of tra­di­tion­al mas­culin­i­ty – strong, sto­ic and dom­i­nant — crack and crum­ble. Film Noir tapped into this anx­i­ety. It’s no acci­dent that film schol­ars have called Film Noir the male weepy.

Above is a BBC doc­u­men­tary about the genre that lays out its rules. The movie fea­tures inter­views with direc­tor Paul Schrad­er, cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Roger Deakins and George Pele­canos who both wrote and pro­duced The Wire. Check it out.

Rule #1: Choose a Dame with a Past and a Hero with No Future

The noir pro­tag­o­nist is inevitably some hap­less schmuck who is doomed, suck­ered to death or ignominy by lust, greed or some dark­er sub­ter­ranean self-destruc­tive urge. And inevitably the cat­a­lyst for this fall is a dame. Usu­al­ly blonde. Always gor­geous. The femme fatale is inevitably the cen­ter of the movie and fre­quent­ly its antag­o­nist. Film Noir blunt­ly lays bare what wasn’t dis­cussed in polite soci­ety; that the way for a woman to get pow­er in Amer­i­can soci­ety was through sex. The gen­der dynam­ics in this genre are the stuff that has launched hun­dreds of PhD dis­ser­ta­tions.

Rule #2: Use No Fic­tion But Pulp Fic­tion

Stu­dios rushed to adapt the pulp works of Ray­mond Chan­dler, James M. Cain and par­tic­u­lar­ly Dashiell Ham­mett, the first true hard­boiled writer. Hammett’s nov­els like Red Har­vest and The Mal­tese Fal­con are terse, vio­lent and cyn­i­cal; they con­tain the DNA of the Film Noir.

Rule #3: See Amer­i­ca Through a Stranger’s Eyes

The rise of Nazism in Ger­many forced hun­dreds of writ­ers, film­mak­ers and com­posers like Fritz Lang, Robert Siod­mak and Bil­ly Wilder to the sun-dap­pled shores of Los Ange­les. With them, they brought the aes­thet­ics of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism — cant­ed cam­era angles, stark light­ing and grotesque shad­ows. It was a look that merged seam­less­ly with the bleak, ele­men­tal sto­ries of Noir. They also brought with them a war-weary foreigner’s sense of the coun­try, one that saw the bru­tal­i­ty and cor­rup­tion of Amer­i­ca beneath the patri­ot­ic bunting.

Rule #4: Make It Any Col­or As Long As It’s Black

They wouldn’t call it Film Noir if the movies didn’t use a lot of black.

Rule #5: It Ain’t What You say It’s the Way That you Say it

The Hayes code lim­it­ed how bawdy and vio­lent Film Noir could get. So film­mak­ers got cre­ative, using off-screen space and lots and lots of euphemisms. Check out what Lau­ren Bacall says to Humphrey Bog­a­rt in The Big Sleep.

Speak­ing of hors­es, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a lit­tle first, see if they’re front run­ners or come from behind, find out what their hole card is, what makes them run.

It’s pret­ty obvi­ous she isn’t talk­ing about hors­es. And if you want to see just how las­civ­i­ous her deliv­ery is, watch the film above.

And if you want to watch more Film Noirs, don’t miss our col­lec­tion of 36 Free Film Noir Movies, which fea­tures clas­sic movies by John Hus­ton, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Ida Lupino and many oth­ers. It’s part of our big­ger col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Fritz Lang’s Cen­sored Noir Film, Scar­let Street, Star­ring the Great Edward G. Robin­son (1945)

Detour: The Cheap, Rushed Piece of 1940s Film Noir Nobody Ever For­gets

Watch D.O.A., Rudolph Maté’s “Inno­v­a­tive and Down­right Twist­ed” Noir Film (1950)

The Third Man: Film Noir Clas­sic on YouTube

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.

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David Foster Wallace Subscribes to the The Believer Magazine with a Little Humor & Snark (2003)

in Literature | June 5th, 2014

Found­ed by Dave Eggers in 1998, McSweeney’s ini­tal­ly began as a lit­er­ary jour­nal that pub­lished only works reject­ed by oth­er mag­a­zines. But, almost imme­di­ate­ly, the jour­nal start­ed pub­lish­ing, it likes to say, “pieces pri­mar­i­ly writ­ten with McSweeney’s in mind.” Since then, McSweeney’s has also launched McSweeney’s Quar­ter­ly and The Believ­er, not to men­tion lots of fic­tion, non­fic­tion, poet­ry, and chil­dren’s books.

Cre­at­ed in 2003, The Believ­er, writes the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter blog, “has become a month­ly art and cul­ture mag­a­zine fea­tur­ing con­tent unim­ped­ed by arbi­trary word lim­its and high­light­ing schemat­ic draw­ings, illus­tra­tions by Tony Mil­lion­aire, and reg­u­lar columns by Nick Horn­by, Greil Mar­cus, and Jack Pen­darvis.” “The Believ­er attracts remark­able writ­ers and remark­able read­ers. David Fos­ter Wallace’s sub­scrip­tion post­card for The Believ­er is evi­dence that they’re some­times both.” Fos­ter Wal­lace sat down for a long inter­view with the mag­a­zine, and per­son­al­ly sub­scribed to the jour­nal, fill­ing out the sub­scrip­tion post­card by hand. It’s believed that the humor­ous post­card — click the image to view it in a larg­er for­mat — once hung on the wall of The Believ­er’s edi­tor Andrew Leland. It now resides in the new­ly-opened McSweeney’s archive at the Ran­som Cen­ter in Austin, Texas. There, vis­i­tors can also find a David Fos­ter Wal­lace archive, with lots of inter­est­ing DFW mate­r­i­al that we’ve high­light­ed in years past. For your con­ve­nience, we’ve high­light­ed a few of our favorite items right below:

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

Read Two Poems David Fos­ter Wal­lace Wrote Dur­ing His Ele­men­tary School Days

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in Eng­lish

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Love of Lan­guage Revealed by the Books in His Per­son­al Library

via Bib­liok­lept/Dan­ger­ous Minds

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Introducing Ergo, the New Open Philosophy Journal

in e-books, Philosophy | June 4th, 2014

The new open phi­los­o­phy jour­nal, Ergo, was “cre­at­ed in response to a need for gen­er­al phi­los­o­phy jour­nals that are effi­cient, open access, inclu­sive, and trans­par­ent.” Tra­di­tion­al phi­los­o­phy jour­nals move slow­ly, tak­ing some­where between 5 and 9 months to tell schol­ars whether their sub­mis­sions will be accept­ed or not. They over­whelm­ing­ly favor work writ­ten by white men. And they cater to meta­physics and epis­te­mol­o­gy, while giv­ing less atten­tion to the phi­los­o­phy of mind, ethics, and polit­i­cal the­o­ry.

Enter Ergo, the new open jour­nal cre­at­ed by The Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, which just pub­lished its first issue online. The aver­age time-to-deci­sion was 21 days, with the jour­nal reject­ing 93% of the sub­mis­sions. The first five accept­ed arti­cles cov­ered Epis­te­mol­o­gy (twice), His­to­ry of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, Phi­los­o­phy of Biol­o­gy, and Phi­los­o­phy of Mind. And, as the edi­tors seem acute­ly aware, the first sub­mis­sions were still dom­i­nat­ed by men. (Get more back­ground on the jour­nal here.)

All of the arti­cles are free to read­ers (while authors retain copy­right under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.) You can find more free pub­li­ca­tions by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan in our pre­vi­ous post: 15 Free eBooks on New Media Stud­ies & the Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

110 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Clas­sic Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

An Intro­duc­tion to the Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy of Isa­iah Berlin Through His Free Writ­ings & Audio Lec­tures

Phi­los­o­phy with a South­ern Drawl: Rick Rod­er­ick Teach­es Der­ri­da, Fou­cault, Sartre and Oth­ers

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Illustrations of The Lord of the Rings in Russian Iconography Style (1993)

in Art, Books, Literature | June 4th, 2014

Giv­en the detail with which J.R.R. Tolkien describes his fan­tas­ti­cal yet earth­i­ly ground­ed char­ac­ters and land­scapes, you’d think illus­tra­tors would have an easy time putting pic­tures to the words. You might even assume that any artist who tried his or her hand at the job would pro­duce more or less the same visu­al inter­pre­ta­tion. And yet the his­to­ry of illus­trat­ed edi­tions of The Hob­bit and the Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy has­n’t gone that way at all. Dif­fer­ent pub­lish­ers at dif­fer­ent times and dif­fer­ent places have com­mis­sioned very styl­is­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent things. We have shown you exam­ples of Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy as well as what Where the Wild Things Are author Mau­rice Sendak could come up with. And, in March, we fea­tured a play­ful­ly visu­al­ized Sovi­et LOTR edi­tion from 1976. Now, take a look at the large set of images here, pulled from a 1993 edi­tion illus­trat­ed by Sergey Yuhi­mov (more infor­ma­tion, albeit in Russ­ian, here and here), and you’ll get the sense that the Rus­sians may have a knack for visu­al­iz­ing the goings-on of Mid­dle-Earth.

Still, the illus­tra­tions from Rus­si­a’s Hob­bit and almost 30-years-new­er Lord of the Rings could hard­ly share less of a sen­si­bil­i­ty. A Metafil­ter post on the lat­ter draw a num­ber of attempt­ed descrip­tions by Tolkien fans: “LOTR trans­lat­ed almost as Chris­t­ian iconog­ra­phy.” “They leap around about 1000 years of art his­to­ry.” “Mad, but also charm­ing.” “They would make great tarot cards.”

Objec­tions may arise to the accu­ra­cy of the char­ac­ters por­trayed — as always — as well as the artist’s adher­ence (or lack there­of) to the traits of one peri­od of art or anoth­er, but we can hard­ly ignore what an aes­thet­ic impact these illus­tra­tions make even just on first glance. Some of the Metafil­ter com­menters express their wish­es for The Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn (“used in Russ­ian pri­ma­ry school cur­ric­u­la, or was dur­ing the Com­mu­nist era”) illus­trat­ed this way, or maybe a Lord of the Rings “in the style of Hierony­mus Bosch.” But from these vivid, styl­is­ti­cal­ly Medieval, reli­gious-icon-sat­u­rat­ed images, I per­son­al­ly take away one con­clu­sion: when the idea first came to find a direc­tor to bring Tolkien to the screen, they real­ly should’ve hired Andrei Tarkovsky.

You can see a gallery of images in four parts: Part 1 — Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Our thanks go to @zeljka8 for help­ing find back­ground infor­ma­tion for these illus­tra­tions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sovi­et-Era Illus­tra­tions Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit (1976)

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

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

Two Beau­ti­ful­ly-Craft­ed Russ­ian Ani­ma­tions of Chekhov’s Clas­sic Children’s Sto­ry “Kash­tan­ka”

Watch Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Win­nie the Pooh, Cre­at­ed by the Inno­v­a­tive Ani­ma­tor Fyo­dor Khitruk

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.

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Philip Seymour Hoffman Contemplates Happiness in New Animated Video

in Animation, Life | June 4th, 2014

The ani­mat­ed video series Blank on Blank returns with a pre­vi­ous­ly unaired inter­view with Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man, the tal­ent­ed actor who died of a hero­in over­dose ear­li­er this year. The audio, record­ed at the Rubin Muse­um of Art in Decem­ber, 2012, fea­tures Hoff­man in con­ver­sa­tion with philoso­pher Simon Critch­ley. The top­ic is hap­pi­ness — some­thing that Hoff­man is care­ful to dis­tin­guish from hedo­nis­tic plea­sure. “I would def­i­nite­ly say plea­sure is not hap­pi­ness, because I kill plea­sure.” “I take too much of it and make it unplea­sur­able. Like too much cof­fee and you are mis­er­able.” “There is no plea­sure that I haven’t actu­al­ly made myself sick on.”  Wrestling with the con­cept, the actor tells Critchely that he found hap­pi­ness in one thing — the time he spent with his chil­dren, “When I see them enjoy each oth­er in front of me, and then they let me enjoy them in turn, that brings a feel­ing which I would say is hap­pi­ness.” But that feel­ing, as pow­er­ful as it is, proves ephemer­al. It does­n’t last. So when it comes around, don’t miss it.

You can watch the com­plete unan­i­mat­ed inter­view below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mihaly Czik­szent­mi­ha­lyi Explains Why the Source of Hap­pi­ness Lies in Cre­ativ­i­ty and Flow, Not Mon­ey

Hitch­cock on Hap­pi­ness

A Guide to Hap­pi­ness: Alain de Bot­ton Shows How Six Great Philoso­phers Can Change Your Life

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Free: Download 30,000 Images from The Museum of New Zealand (All in High Resolution)

in Art, Museums | June 3rd, 2014

Last month, The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art announced some­thing we all wel­comed. They made more than 400,000 images of art in the Museum’s col­lec­tion free to down­load. Before that, we also wit­nessed oth­er major art muse­ums launch­ing their own open art ini­tia­tives: 87,000 images from the Get­ty in L.A., 125,000 Dutch mas­ter­pieces from the Rijksmu­se­um in the Nether­lands, 35,000 artis­tic images from the Nation­al Gallery in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and 57,000 works of art put on vir­tu­al dis­play by Google Art Project. 

Now comes anoth­er 30,000 images from the Muse­um of New Zealand. On their blog, they write: “Today we are extreme­ly hap­py to let you know about our lat­est devel­op­ment; over 30,000 images down­load­able, for free, in the high­est res­o­lu­tion we have them.” “Over 14,000 images are avail­able under a Cre­ative Com­mons licence CC BY-NC-ND,” (which means you can make non-com­mer­cial use of these images, so long as you give attri­bu­tion to the artist.) “But even bet­ter are the 17,000 images that are down­load­able for any use, any use at all. These images have no known copy­right restric­tions.” Find more infor­ma­tion on this open art ini­tia­tive here. Or enter the col­lec­tions right here.

Up top, you will find the pho­to­graph called “Cleopa­tra in Domain Crick­et Ground,” tak­en in Auck­land, by Robert Wal­rond, in 1914.

The sec­ond image is from a series called “Five cats,” made in Chi­na dur­ing the late 18th cen­tu­ry, by an unknown artist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: The Guggen­heim Puts 99 Mod­ern Art Books Online

Down­load Hun­dreds of Free Art Cat­a­logs from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

LA Coun­ty Muse­um Makes 20,000 Artis­tic Images Avail­able for Free Down­load

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