French Café Adds Extra Charge for Rude Customers
A couple of days ago, we highlighted a delightfully Illustrated Etiquette Guide Explaining How to Ride the Paris Metro in a Civilized Way. It comes to you courtesy of the RATP, the government organization that makes the subways and trains run in Paris (sometimes on time).
Let’s now head 600 miles south, to the Riviera city of Nice, where some café owners opted for another way to keep bad behavior in check. At the Petite Syrah, they’ve implemented a simple pricing scheme that works like this:
If you ask for “a coffee” (it’s most likely an espresso), it will run you 7 euros, or $9.50.
If you ask for a “coffee please,” the charge drops to €4.25/$5.80.
But if you start your order by saying “Hello, may I have a coffee, please,” the bill becomes a manageable €1.40.
Now, truth be told, the pricing scheme is more carrot than stick. The café’s manager readily admits that he has never actually charged any of the punitive higher prices. But that’s not to say that the scheme doesn’t work. According to manager/owner Fabrice Pepino, regular customers quickly took note of the sign and began to “say, ‘Hello, your highness, will you serve me one of your beautiful coffees.” Eh voilà, no more coffee jerks.
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Read More...New Art Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses Features All 265,000 Words Written by Hand on Big Wooden Poles
This week, Stephen Gertz, the editor of Book Tryst, has on display an Incredible Art Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Here’s how he describes the ambitious project:
James Joyce completed his novel, Ulysses, on October 30, 1921. Ninety years later, on October 30, 2011, Charlene Matthews, the Los Angeles-based book artist and bookbinder recently the subject of a profile in Studios magazine, began work on an extraordinary edition of the book, based upon Sylvia Beach’s true first edition with all its typos included.
Two years later, on October 30, 2013, she completed it: the entire text of Ulysses — all of its approximately 265,000 words in eighteen episodes — transcribed by hand onto thirty-eight seven-foot tall, two-inch diameter poles: Ulysses as a landscape to physically move through; the novel as literary grove, Ulysses as trees of of life with language as fragrant, hallucinatory bark, and trunks reaching toward the sky.
Head over to Booktryst to look over a gallery of images and learn more about Matthews’ grand undertaking. And if you’d like a nice introduction to Ulysses, please see some of the instructive material we’ve listed below.
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James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book
Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Podcast
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Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses
Read More...See Peter O’Toole Talk Hamlet with Orson Welles (1963) and Play Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (1986)
To write an obituary for Peter O’Toole, who died this past Sunday, I would pick no other writer than New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. Luckily, the New Yorker had the same inclination. In his “postscript” piece on O’Toole, Lane references one of my favorite pieces of television talk, viewable above. “To watch O’Toole and Orson Welles on the BBC’s Monitor program, in 1963, as they ruminate at length on Hamlet and his father’s ghost,” he writes, “is to realize what a real talk show is, or what it could be, when the airwaves were still haunted by the grand talkers. What takes you slightly aback, however, is not that O’Toole seems willing and able to discuss seventeenth-century Catholic doctrines of the afterlife but that, with his dicky bow, dark shirt, and thick-rimmed black spectacles, he looks like a man in disguise.” Lane points out what even some of us O’Toole fans never quite realized: “scan his filmography and you see how seldom he made an impact in modern garb, and what elegant shelter he sought in period dress.”
Even filmgoers who’ve seen only O’Toole’s most famous performances in lavish, wider-than-widescreen historical films — Lane highlights his title role, a master work of tensely focused flamboyance, in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and his turn as gentle Reginald Johnson, tutor of the title character in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor — recognize the strength he drew from stepping into the past and its haze of myth. O’Toole enjoyed some of his finest performative hours, his most dedicated followers say, when he stepped all the way back into the sixteenth century, to the time of Shakespeare. Remarking on his tendency to play other nationalities — the English Lawrence, the Scottish Johnson — Lane observes that “he was Irish, as tall and slim and unsnappable as a Malacca cane, and one regret, for his moviegoing fans, was that they saw and heard far less of O’Toole the Celt than their theatre-loving counterparts were privileged to enjoy.” Just above, you can at least hear one more instance of the theatrical, and Shakespearean, O’Toole in action — not, alas, as an Irishman, but as an Italian: Petruchio, the strong-willed (and feminist-loathed) suitor at the heart of The Taming of the Shrew. Note that this performance, a production of Living Shakespeare in 1986, uses an abridged version of the play, but O’Toole himself certainly sounds in full form.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.
Read More...Hand-Colored Photographs of 19th Century Japan
This week, The Public Domain Review (PDR) posted a series hand-colored albumine prints (“a process which used the albumen found in egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper) from 19th century Japan. They date back to 1880.
Some of the prints, like the one below, certainly have a foreign quality to them. They feel far away in terms of time and place. But others (like the shot above) feel remarkably close, something we can all relate to today.
According to the PDR, the pictures came to reside in the Dutch National Archive as a result of the centuries-long commercial relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese. More vintage pix can be viewed here.
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Read More...Morgan Freeman Masterfully Recites Nelson Mandela’s Favorite Poem, “Invictus”
Nelson Mandela, who died on December 5, 2013, had spent more than a quarter of his life serving time in various jails. While behind bars for the 18-year period between 1962 and 1980, the anti-apartheid revolutionary educated both himself and others to prepare for the advent of multiracial equality in South Africa. During his confinement at the Robben Island prison, Mandela studied law by correspondence at the University of London, learned Afrikaans to foster a rapport with jailhouse wardens, and was instrumental in launching the “University of Robben Island”, where prisoners possessing expertise in particular fields presented lectures to their fellow inmates.
Mandela’s stay, however, was frequently marred by demeaning and deplorable treatment. Initially, black prisoners were humiliated by being given shorts, commonly worn by children, rather than full-length pants as uniforms. Mandela was also forbidden from wearing sunglasses when forced to labor at a limestone quarry, and the harsh reflections from the rocks damaged his vision. The quarry dust also damaged his tear ducts, which made it impossible for him to cry until receiving corrective surgery in 1994. Perhaps the most painful moments arrived in the late 1960s, when Mandela lost his mother and firstborn son, and was denied permission to attend their funerals.
In spite of these ordeals, Mandela persevered. In an interview with Charlie Rose, above, Morgan Freeman discusses Mandela’s reliance on William Ernest Henley’s 1875 poem, “Invictus,” to keep his hope alive:
“That poem was his favorite… When he lost courage, when he felt like just giving up — just lie down and not get up again — he would recite it. And it would give him what he needed to keep going.”
Freeman, who played Mandela in the 2009 film Invictus, also provides a solemn and dignified recitation of the poem beginning at 3:51. Although the poem is best known for providing succour to Mandela in times of despair, its words of courage have served as inspiration to countless others. Famous figures who have drawn hope from “Invictus” include the father of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during his struggle for Burmese independence and tennis champion Andre Agassi. Rumor has it that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was also quite fond of it. We’ve included the full text for “Invictus” below:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
H/T to Bruno, one of our readers, for sending this video our way.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
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Find “Invictus” in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.
Read More...Watch Kids’ Priceless Reactions to Hearing the Timeless Music of The Beatles
Yesterday, John McMillian, assistant professor of history at Georgia State University, appeared on KQED’s Forum in San Francisco (listen here) to talk about his new book Beatles vs. Stones. It offers a new look at how the two British bands co-existed, often helped one another, and strategically defined themselves against each other. The Beatles were everyman’s band. Wholesome, clean-cut, witty, the Fab Four appealed to the young and the old, the rich and the poor. The Stones, trying to make a name for themselves in the wake of Beatlemania, positioned themselves as the anti-Beatles. As the journalist Tom Wolfe once wrote, “The Beatles want to hold your hand, but the Stones want to burn down your town.”
50 years later, The Beatles still have a nearly universal appeal. The Boomers and their now middle-aged children haven’t let dust gather on The Beatles’ discography. And, if you plunk the grandchildren in front of old Beatles’ videos, they’ll love what they see. Just watch above.
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Read More...1976 Film Blank Generation Documents CBGB Scene with Patti Smith, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie & More
Fans of bratty New York punk-turned-serious writer Richard Hell or schlocky German horror director Ulli Lommel or—why not—both, will likely know of Lommel’s 1980 Blank Generation, a film unremarkable except for its casting of Hell and his excellent Voidoids as feature players. (Their debut 1977 album and single are also called Blank Generation.) The movie, as a reviewer puts it, “seems as if each member of the production was under the impression they were working on a different film than the rest of their collaborators…. You can’t help but think that something more watchable could be produced out of the raw footage with a good editor.”
One might approach an earlier film, also called Blank Generation—the raw 1976 documentary about the budding New York punk scene above—with similar expectations of coherent production and narrative clarity. But this would be mistaken. The first Blank Generation is a film that rewards no expectations, except perhaps expecting to be constantly disoriented. But that would seem to me a given for a genuine document of what Lydia Lunch christened “No Wave,” the deliberately tasteless 70s hybrid of punk, rock, new wave, noise, free jazz, and jarring combination of amateur and professional experimentation that came to define the sound of downtown for decades to come.
Shot and directed by frequent Lunch and Patti Smith collaborator Ivan Kral and pioneering indie filmmaker Amos Poe, the documentary features Smith, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Television, The Heartbreakers, Wayne/Jayne County, and pretty much everyone else on the CBGB’s scene at the time. The Austin Film Society sums it up well. Kral and Poe’s Blank Generation
exemplified a punkish attitude toward film structure with handheld zooms, angled compositions, floodlight lighting, extreme close-ups, elliptical editing, flash pans, and a general in-your-face and “up-yours” stance. Sound and image purposely do not synch. In many cases music and image were recorded on separate nights—more economical because of the high cost of raw film stock with sound, but also an aesthetic nod to Jean-Luc Godard who had slashed the umbilical cord uniting sound and image. Out of the French New Wave came the New York No Wave.
The influence is evident, though it’s not particularly useful context. Really, all you need to know is contained within the frame: in the lilting rasp of Patti Smith’s “Gloria,” in close-up shots of Joey Ramone’s crotch and filthy sneakers, in the youthful David Byrne’s jangly acoustic guitar and the sleazy lounge-punk of Television’s tribute to Iggy Pop, “Little Johnny Jewel.” Of course later No Wave stalwarts like Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Swans, Sonic Youth, John Zorn, DNA, and Mars don’t appear—but some get their due elsewhere. And while the Hell/Lommel film might be worth a watch for curiosity’s sake, the first Blank Generation is a truly incredible historical document that deserves repeated viewing.
It’ll get added to our collection of 600 Free Movies Online.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Yakov Smirnoff Remembers “The Soviet Department of Jokes” & Other Staples of Communist Comedy
Yakov Smirnoff has the distinction of being the most famous Russian comic in America. He’s also the only Russian comic in America (ba-dum-dum). But seriously: In his mid-80s heyday, he had the market cornered on Soviet humor in the U.S. Whatever demand there was, Smirnoff supplied it, singlehandedly, as a fixture in ads, TV show and film appearances, comedy specials, late-night talk shows…. His was the only face of Russian humor anyone knew in the 80s (unless we’re counting Ivan Drago). Smirnoff even warranted a Family Guy reference, which pretty much cements his reputation as endlessly recyclable pop culture syndication fodder.
And yet, post-Soviet Russia, it’s hard to imagine there’s a place for Yakov Smirnoff, since corny jokes at the expense of end-stage Russian communism were not only his bread and butter, but his whole comedic menu, such that Marc Maron introduces Smirnoff as a guest on his WTF Podcast above with: “that guy, with his hook, that certainly isn’t relevant anymore. How does a guy like that survive?” Ouch. But what a hook it was, says Maron: a wonderstruck immigrant exclaiming “What a country!” as he took in each new capitalist marvel. He was like a real-life version of one of Andy Kaufman’s characters, or a pre-Borat Eastern European innocent abroad. The act carried him beyond his mid-eighties 15 minutes of fame and through a 20-year career entertaining middle-class Americans in Branson, Missouri.
But was there much demand for Smirnoff’s brand of humor even at his peak? If you didn’t have the great fortune of living through the 80s, you might be surprised at just how popular his sort of thing could be—“a Russian comic talking about how great America was.” But it wasn’t only Smirnoff’s persona that flattered our sense of economic, political, and moral superiority. A whole genre of Soviet jokes had a prominent place in the discourse, with knee-slappers about KGB surveillance and bread lines and other privations commonly tossed around at dinner parties. Even Ronald Reagan tried his hand at it, as you can see here. Reagan’s delivery was never my cup of tea, but you can also see Smirnoff do his impression of Reagan telling the same joke in the video at the top of the post.
And while revisiting Smirnoff’s not exactly meteoric rise to fame in the U.S. is fun for its own sake, what’s even more interesting are Smirnoff’s serious reminiscences of his time growing up and working as a comic in Russia. The serious Smirnoff is full of psychological insights (he has a masters degree in the subject from Penn) and sociological anecdotes about life under a repressive communist regime—though he never misses a chance for some of the old Smirnoff material, complete with his honking, donkey-like laughter.
For example, about twenty minutes into his WTF interview, Smirnoff discuss the serious subject of joke approval in the Soviet Union. That’s right, in all seriousness, he tells us, comics were required to submit their material to a Department of Jokes. Smirnoff also once spoke expansively on the subject in a 1985 Chicago Tribune piece on him at his peak.
Yep. There’s a Department of Jokes. Actually, the Ministry of Culture has a very big department of humor. I’m serious now. Once a year they censor your material, and then you have to stay with what they have approved. You can‘t improvise or do anything like that. You write out your material and mail it to them, and they send it back to you with corrections. After that, you stay with it for a year.
It is perhaps for this reason that comics in Soviet Russia borrowed liberally from each other, rarely did original material, and never, ever improvised. Says Smirnoff: “I would do some original material, but that would be unusual. Also, it was OK for comedians to borrow—if one of the big comedians went on television and did a monolog, next day 10 or 20 other comedians would do the same thing in clubs. That wasn’t considered stealing.”
It also turns out that serious Yakov Smirnoff explains the comic stylings of his persona, the cornball character:
It was old jokes, more vaudeville type of humor. More like English-style comedy. Or like Henny Youngman. One-liners or stories that have been told over and over again but they’re still funny. No improvisation comedy. You don’t improvise. You don’t tell stories about yourself the way American comics do.
So it turns out that a lot of those bad jokes about Russia at the tail end of the Cold War actually descended from the source. Take this one from Smirnoff:
A funeral procession is going by, and they’re walking a goat behind the coffin. A guy comes over and says, “Why are you walking a goat behind the coffin?” The other guys says, “That goat killed my mother-in-law.” The first guy says, “Can I borrow this goat for a week?” The second guy says, “You see all these people in the procession? They’re all waiting. Get in line.”
See? It’s a joke about standing in line! Also, about mothers-in-law, which must be a truly universal subject. Find more of Smirnoff’s insights into Soviet humor and joke censorship at the full Chicago Tribune interview piece and on Maron’s WTF podcast.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Filmmaker Kirby Ferguson Explains How Apple’s iPhone Was A Remixed Creation
In Everything is a Remix, digital filmmaker Kirby Ferguson has created a four-part serialized ode to remixing as innovation. Ferguson sees all artistic pursuits as derivative of their predecessors to some degree, and in parts 1 and 2, he methodically demonstrates how creative endeavors considered revolutionary in their fields are often highly reliant on the groundwork laid by their forerunners. It’s all about “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Heavy metal pioneers Led Zeppelin were thoroughly indebted to the blues, borrowing liberally from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” on “Lemon Song,” while Star Wars’ shots can be matched, with a surprisingly high degree of correspondence, to scenes from Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa films.
Ferguson believes that all creation is the result of copying, transformation, and combination, and the series’ third and fourth installments show Apple to be the ideal example of this process. Xerox had initially developed the scroll bar, pop-up menus, and the desktop-inspired interface. Apple, however, copied Xerox’s work, transformed the interface by simplifying the user experience, and combined the computer with the idea of a home appliance, yielding its iconic Macintosh model. It was Apple’s lower price point and focus on everyday usability that made the Macintosh vastly more popular.
In the most recent addition to the Everything is a Remix series, above, Ferguson returns to Apple, and uses its iPhone as a standalone case study in innovation. Apart from the sizeable engineering problem of creating a viable multi-touch screen, Apple was forced into uncharted waters in phone design by removing the iPhone’s keypad and replacing it with screen area. To make the novel device seem accessible to consumers, Apple incorporated elements of old technologies: users saw a reel to reel tape deck in the podcast app, heard typewriter clicks when they entered text, and flipped virtual pages in iBooks. Ferguson demonstrates that it is precisely the coupling of the iPhone’s peculiar new touch screen with familiar visuals and interfaces that allowed Apple to woo a leading share of customers to its phone.
The most interesting development arrived by 2010, when multi-touch screens had become a smartphone standard, and Apple was forced to innovate in different ways. No longer needing to familiarize users with the technology, the company was free to work solely within the medium, which allowed the latest iteration of its mobile operating system, iOS 7, to have dramatically fewer features grounded in real-world design. Instead of looking for material inspiration in tapes and typewriters, Apple assessed its competitors and integrated their phones’ best attributes into iOS 7. This new iOS borrowed its control center and pull-down notifications features from the Android operating system, while its multitasking paid homage to Windows, Android, and perhaps even Palm Pre phones. The visuals, too, were dramatically simpler, flatter, and less realistic, in line with a style that’s become largely associated with the Windows phone. All in all, just another example of remixing as innovation.
To watch Ferguson’s complete series on remixing as a form of creativity and innovation, as well as more of his work, head to our previous post Everything is a Remix.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
Read More...How to Follow Open Culture Posts: Daily Email & RSS Are Gold, Twitter Is an Option, Forget About Facebook
Readers often ask us, “What’s the best way to make sure that I don’t miss any of your posts?” The answer, right now, is pretty clear: Sign up for our daily email. Each day, you will receive an email that tidily wraps up everything we’ve featured on the site over a 24 hour period. Faithfully it will appear in your inbox each day. The other great option is our trusty RSS feed: https://feeds.feedburner.com/OpenCulture
You can always follow us on Twitter (or Google Plus), where we highlight our daily posts, plus many other cultural curiosities found on the web. The only downside is that a river of material flows through Twitter, so you’ll have to keep a pretty close eye on things to spot our posts.
Finally there’s Facebook, but you can almost forget about that. Although nearly a quarter million people have liked our Facebook page, Facebook has historically shown our posts to a fraction of that audience (something they’re candid about). And because of a new algorithm change, the fraction is getting substantially smaller. The unfortunate bottom line is that you can’t rely on Facebook to give you what you want. But you can rely on our daily email and our feed. They’re 100% guaranteed. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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