Gift Giving Traditions Around the World in a Handy Infographic

in Life | December 20th, 2012

This inter­ac­tive map from Cloud 9 Liv­ing offers some poten­tial­ly help­ful tid­bits on gift giv­ing tra­di­tions around the world. For exam­ple, if you’re think­ing of giv­ing a clock as a gift in Chi­na, think again. It’s con­sid­ered bad luck. Or, if you head to Rus­sia, remem­ber to give bou­quets with an uneven num­ber of flow­ers. Even-flow­ered bou­quets are for funer­als. And, when in Swe­den, you can’t go wrong with a bot­tle of liquor. Click through to see the info­graph­ic in larg­er for­mat.

David Bowie’s First American Fan Letter And His Evolving Views of the U.S. (1967–1997)

in Music | December 20th, 2012

David Bowie’s rela­tion­ship with Amer­i­ca has typ­i­fied the outsider’s view: an ambiva­lence rang­ing from fas­ci­na­tion to fear that he expressed in a reply to his first let­ter from a U.S. fan in 1967 (click to read in large for­mat). The fan, intre­pid 14-year-old San­dra Dodd, had got­ten her hands on an advance copy of Bowie’s first album and writ­ten him to praise his work and offer to start a fan club for him state­side. Bowie’s response is very inter­est­ing. We’ve writ­ten before about his rise from obscure R&B and folk singer to Zig­gy Star­dust, which required him to shake off a nat­ur­al shy­ness to inhab­it his break­out per­sona. In the let­ter, the 20-year-old Bowie ini­tial­ly comes off as a naïve, slight­ly self-involved young pop singer. Then, after answer­ing the usu­al fan queries—what’s his real name, birth­day, height—he turns to the sub­ject of the U.S., a coun­try he had yet to vis­it. Bowie writes:

I hope one day to get to Amer­i­ca. My man­ag­er tells me lots about it as he has been there many times with oth­er acts he man­ages. I was watch­ing an old film on TV the oth­er night called “No Down Pay­ment” a great film, but rather depress­ing if it is a true reflec­tion of The Amer­i­can Way Of Life. How­ev­er, short­ly after that they showed a doc­u­men­tary about Robert Frost the Amer­i­can poet, filmed main­ly at his home in Ver­mont, and that evened the score. I am sure that that is near­er the real Amer­i­ca.

Draw­ing his impres­sions from movies, Bowie ref­er­ences two views. The first, Mar­tin Ritt’s 1957 No Down Pay­ment, is full of the banal­i­ty and melo­dra­ma we’ve come to expect from Mad Men, mak­ing inci­sive cri­tiques of mid-50s cul­tur­al prob­lems sim­mer­ing under the sur­face of the sub­urbs like alco­holism, racism, and infi­deli­ty. As one fan writes, the film depict­ed what “no one want­ed to see… a soiled Amer­i­can Dream,” or what Bowie cap­i­tal­izes as “The Amer­i­can Way Of Life.”

The oth­er view Bowie takes of the States comes from a film on Robert Frost—most like­ly 1963’s Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quar­rel With the World. Lit­tle won­der this film “evened the score” for the lyri­cal young song­writer, who choos­es in his let­ter to believe it rep­re­sents the “real Amer­i­ca,” a sen­ti­ment he would not hold for long.

Flash for­ward to 1984, and Bowie is an inter­na­tion­al pop star. Most fans would argue his best work was far behind him, but the 80s saw him break out into more main­stream film roles in The Ele­phant Man and Labyrinth that kept him at the fore­front of Amer­i­can pop cul­ture. His sound­track work was mem­o­rable as well, although the track below “This is Not Amer­i­ca,” writ­ten with Pat Methe­ny for The Fal­con and the Snow­man doesn’t get much atten­tion these days. Bowie’s impres­sion­is­tic lyrics–which Methe­ny called “pro­found and meaningful”–show him in mourn­ing for the coun­try that puz­zled his younger self:

A lit­tle piece of you
The lit­tle peace in me
Will die
For this is not Amer­i­ca

Blos­som fails to bloom
This sea­son
Promise not to stare
Too long
For this is not a mir­a­cle

And again, move for­ward to 1997, thir­ty years after Bowie’s let­ter above, and we find him in a jaun­diced mood in “I’m Afraid of Amer­i­cans” from his album Earth­ling (the song orig­i­nal­ly appeared on what may be one of the most cyn­i­cal films ever made, Show­girls). Bowie explained the gen­e­sis of the song in a press release:

I’m Afraid of Amer­i­cans’ was writ­ten by myself and Eno. It’s not as tru­ly hos­tile about Amer­i­cans as say “Born in the USA”: it’s mere­ly sar­don­ic. I was trav­el­ing in Java when the first McDon­alds went up: it was like, “for fuck­’s sake.” The inva­sion by any homog­e­nized cul­ture is so depress­ing, the erec­tion of anoth­er Dis­ney World in, say, Umbria, Italy, more so. It stran­gles the indige­nous cul­ture and nar­rows expres­sion of life.

The cul­tur­al homog­e­niza­tion that so depressed the young Bowie in No Down Pay­ment is now a glob­al phe­nom­e­non, and the well-trav­eled, world­ly Bowie seems to har­bor few illu­sions when he sings:

John­ny’s in Amer­i­ca
No tricks at the wheel
No one needs any­one
They don’t even just pre­tend

In the award-win­ning video, Trent Reznor plays a Travis Bick­le-like fig­ure, a men­ac­ing crea­ture of alien­ation and unpro­voked, ran­dom vio­lence and Bowie a para­noid out­sider run­ning from what he per­ceives as cit­i­zens attack­ing each oth­er on every street­corner. Stripped of the 50s veneer, it’s a coun­try where peo­ple “don’t even pre­tend”; the vio­lence and mis­an­thropy are now on full dis­play. It’s a view of Amer­i­ca that hasn’t dimmed since the mid-nineties. It’s sim­ply moved out of the city and spilled out into the once self-con­tained sub­urbs. These three arti­facts show Bowie’s evo­lu­tion in rela­tion to a coun­try that he hoped to find the best in, that near­ly always embraced him, and that came to freak him out and piss him off in lat­er years.

via Let­ters of Note

Josh Jones is a writer and schol­ar cur­rent­ly com­plet­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion on land­scape, lit­er­a­ture, and labor.

Introducing KA Lite: An Offline Version of the Khan Academy That Runs on Almost Anything

in Education, K-12, Online Courses, Technology | December 19th, 2012

Salman Khan’s mod­el for free online edu­ca­tion hinges on the micro lecture—brief tuto­ri­als on near­ly every sub­ject under the sun—delivered through YouTube. Launched in 2006, the Khan Acad­e­my now has a library of 3000 videos. That’s not bad, espe­cial­ly for a site with the ele­vat­ed goal of pro­vid­ing a “free world-class edu­ca­tion for any­one any­where.” With the help of hun­dreds of vol­un­teers, the site’s con­tent is acces­si­ble in 18 lan­guages. But even with all of that effort, Khan does­n’t achieve the glob­al reach that it promis­es. The fact is that only 35 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion has access to the inter­net, which puts the idea of online learn­ing behind a vir­tu­al fire­wall for many peo­ple.

Enter Khan Acad­e­my Lite, oth­er­wise called KA Lite. This new ser­vice tries to work around that fire­wall. Soft­ware devel­op­er Jamie Alexan­dre and a team from UCSD devel­oped an offline ver­sion of Khan’s learn­ing mod­el that can run on just about any­thing. Once you down­load the KA Lite soft­ware and install it on a Lin­ux or Win­dows serv­er, stu­dents can start watch­ing Khan videos and exer­cis­es on computers/devices as tiny and cheap as the $35 Rasp­ber­ry Pi. Actu­al­ly, the whole serv­er can be run on the Rasp­ber­ry Pi!

You can down­load the soft­ware here and find instal­la­tion instruc­tions here. Jamie Alexan­dre offers his own intro­duc­tion to KA Lite here.

Khan Acad­e­my Lite sits nice­ly along­side the free apps released for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch ear­li­er this year. Be sure to check them out.

Find more K‑12 Resources in our col­lec­tion of 200 Free Kids Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Web­sites & More

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Offers Advice on How to Be Yourself and Achieve Your Own Greatness

in Life, Science | December 19th, 2012

What­ev­er else it is—mordant self-mock­ery, sum­ma­tion of a life’s work in thought—Friedrich Nietzsche’s last pub­lished book, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, is a pro­found­ly Roman­tic text, oper­at­ing on the premise that an indi­vid­ual who suf­fers for phi­los­o­phy, for art, for truth, is hero­ic, even (or espe­cial­ly) when anti-hero­ic, brood­ing, Byron­ic. Niet­zsche states one of the pur­pos­es of his strange lit­tle book as an impre­ca­tion: Hear me! For I am such and such. Above all, do not mis­take me for some­one else!

Over a cen­tu­ry after this work’s pub­li­ca­tion, a cry of pop cul­ture with its love of sim­u­lacra might be: Please mis­take me for some­one else, espe­cial­ly some­one wealthy and famous and pret­ti­er than I am! Maybe this ethos reached its zenith with Facebook’s celebri­ty look-alike day, which inspired a site called myheritage.com to use face recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy for users who didn’t look enough like any­one famous to fig­ure out for them­selves who they want­ed to be. Sil­ly harm­less trend, yes, but a lit­tle sad too, since it shows how many peo­ple suf­fer from a sense that their iden­ti­ties are dwarfed into insignif­i­cance by a famous stranger who slight­ly resem­bles them. (Anoth­er, more humor­ous meme, goes some­thing like “Always be your­self, unless you can be Bat­man. Always be Bat­man”).

I offer these pop-soci­o­log­i­cal rumi­na­tions as con­text for the great Neil deGrasse Tyson’s response above to a ques­tion he receives quite a bit: “What can I do to be you?” On the one hand, it must be very flat­ter­ing to be asked this ques­tion, even though Tyson seems a pret­ty mod­est per­son. On the oth­er hand, the ques­tion is pathet­ic, I believe, for the rea­sons I sketched out above. Why be Neil deGrasse Tyson when you can be your­self? Unless you don’t believe you’re worth becom­ing. Tyson’s answer is also Roman­tic; he says, “I think the great­est of peo­ple in soci­ety carve nich­es that rep­re­sent a unique expres­sion of their com­bi­na­tion of tal­ents.” For Tyson that has meant tak­ing a set of aca­d­e­m­ic and career accom­plish­ments and using them as a plat­form for express­ing a com­bi­na­tion of tal­ents that only he has, which is to say that no one can be Neil deGrasse Tyson but Neil deGrasse Tyson. He uses the exam­ple of Michael Jor­dan, who honed his supe­ri­or tal­ent from nat­ur­al abil­i­ties, for sure, but who also cre­at­ed his own cat­e­go­ry through a tal­ent for being him­self, a com­bi­na­tion of per­son­al style, win­ning per­son­al­i­ty, lead­er­ship qual­i­ties, etc.

So what are we to con­clude from this?  Always be your­self, unless you can be Michael Jor­dan? Well, I think the gist of Tyson’s short talk is that there is no default or tem­plate for what you can become, or as he puts it, “what I do day-to-day is not the ful­fill­ment of some pre-exist­ing job descrip­tion.” And while “just be your­self” may sound like trite advice to peo­ple strug­gling to find an iden­ti­ty, Tyson sets it out as a task, not a fait accom­pli. “The task,” he says, “is to find the unique com­bi­na­tion of facts that apply to you. Then peo­ple will beat a path to your door.” It’s not a task to take on light­ly, or in Niet­zsche’s hyper­bol­ic words, it is “the heav­i­est demand ever put on mankind.”

The video above is an excerpt from a longer inter­view Neil deGrasse Tyson did for Big Think. The full inter­view is avail­able here.

Josh Jones is a writer and schol­ar cur­rent­ly com­plet­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion on land, lit­er­a­ture, and labor.

PBS Short Video “Bad Behavior Online” Takes on the Phenomenon of Cyberbullying

in Current Affairs, K-12, Law, Media | December 19th, 2012

Inter­net trolls are very touchy peo­ple. Some­times their rage is tar­get­ed at pub­lic fig­ures, insti­tu­tions, or groups who do and say hor­ri­ble things (the West­boro Bap­tist Church comes to mind). More often, the phe­nom­e­non of “trolling” is a free-for-all of absur­dist online pranks or ver­bal abuse direct­ed at any­one and every­one. And far too often, online abuse is specif­i­cal­ly direct­ed at vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple or vic­tims of tragedy. But, as you’ll see from the com­ments on the above video from PBS’s Off­book series (if you care to peruse them) almost noth­ing makes the inter­net angri­er than dis­cus­sions of trolling itself, since so many peo­ple see these con­ver­sa­tions as pre­ludes to cen­sor­ship or nan­ny­ish and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al reg­u­la­tion.

The researchers in the above video don’t, how­ev­er, make any rec­om­men­da­tions for curb­ing speech. Whit­ney Phillips, a lec­tur­er at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, allows for the poten­tial of trolling to open up dia­logues that would oth­er­wise be smoth­ered by taboos. Har­vard University’s Andy Sel­l­ars makes an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion between pub­lic speech reg­u­lat­ed by the gov­ern­ment and that restrict­ed by pri­vate enti­ties, like online ser­vice providers—an impor­tant legal dis­tinc­tion in first amend­ment cas­es (he cites the recent fra­cas over the inflam­ma­to­ry “Inno­cence of Mus­lims” video). Sel­l­ars points out that, at the moment, the author­i­ty for reg­u­lat­ing online speech rests with cor­po­ra­tions (who, unfor­tu­nate­ly, do bow to gov­ern­ment pres­sure, espe­cial­ly abroad). Attempts to reg­u­late the inter­net by the gov­ern­ment have been ham-hand­ed, unpop­u­lar, and most­ly dri­ven by the prof­it-motives of the record­ing and film indus­tries, and Sel­l­ars does­n’t address them.

Some attempts at leg­is­la­tion have specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed the cher­ished cul­ture of online anonymi­ty in order to deal with the ugly phe­nom­e­non of cyber­bul­ly­ing. Sel­l­ars defends the impor­tance of anonymi­ty, say­ing it pro­tects vic­tims of real world abuse and oppres­sion from being iden­ti­fied and tar­get­ed if they speak out on safe spaces on the inter­net. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, anonymi­ty can also enable what Fordham’s Alice Mar­wick calls the “online dis­in­hi­bi­tion effect,” a psy­cho­log­i­cal term for the free­dom trolls feel to say abu­sive things online that they would nev­er say in per­son.

Mar­wick dis­cuss­es this effect in the con­text of what she calls “aggres­sive speech acts” but allows that the preva­lence of bul­ly­ing on Face­book, which ties online iden­ti­ties to real names and faces, acts as a counter-exam­ple to the the­o­ry that anonymi­ty is sole­ly respon­si­ble for online abuse. She frames her research as tak­ing a look at our cul­tur­al val­ues and “see­ing how those play out in tech­ni­cal spaces” and points out that an exclu­sive focus on cyber­bul­ly­ing ignores the range of oth­er, offline behav­iors gen­er­al­ly present in—most dis­turbing­ly—cas­es of sui­cide fol­low­ing online bul­ly­ing. While the advo­ca­cy group Cyber­bul­ly­ing Research Cen­ter has adopt­ed the term “cyber­bul­li­cide,” defined as “sui­cide indi­rect­ly or direct­ly influ­enced by expe­ri­ences with online aggres­sion,” and offers pol­i­cy sug­ges­tions to deal with the prob­lem, Mar­wick is more cir­cum­spect. She calls these cas­es “com­pli­cat­ed” and says that they don’t war­rant restrict­ing con­tent but instead improv­ing respons­es to kids who need help.

Com­pli­cat­ed is pre­cise­ly the word for the tan­gle of issues relat­ing to inter­net speech. After watch­ing the bal­anced, if cur­so­ry, dis­cus­sion above, how­ev­er, I found the respons­es of the trolls baf­fling and lack­ing all pro­por­tion, since no one in the video calls for leg­is­la­tion to lim­it online speech. But that’s instruc­tive. Trolling is a per­va­sive hum sur­round­ing almost all pop­u­lar online con­tent. Some­times it’s polit­i­cal­ly point­ed, some­times it’s clever or sur­re­al­ly fun­ny, some­times it’s just low-lev­el noise, and some­times it’s a kind of rage-filled ado­les­cent vicious­ness that is gen­uine­ly unset­tling and hard to under­stand.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Watch 125 Korean Feature Films Free Online, Thanks to the Korean Film Archive

in Archives, Film | December 18th, 2012

If you’ve kept up even casu­al­ly inter­na­tion­al view­ing habits over the past fif­teen years, you’ve watched a Kore­an movie or two. Maybe you’ve enjoyed the unusu­al tonal mix­ture of Bong Joon-ho’s polit­i­cal satire/monster extrav­a­gan­za The Host, the elab­o­rate grotesque­ness of Park Chan-wook’s revenge thriller Old­boy, or the slick Hol­ly­wood pas­tiche of Kang Je-gyu’s North-ver­sus-South heap of spy-ver­sus-spy action Shiri. But look just beyond those high-pro­file inter­na­tion­al Kore­an block­busters and you’ll find the most vibrant, adven­tur­ous cin­e­mat­ic cul­ture active today.

Upon dis­cov­er­ing it, I per­son­al­ly got excit­ed enough to move to a Kore­an neigh­bor­hood, study the Kore­an lan­guage, and dig deep for knowl­edge about the Kore­an film­mak­ers whose names even cinephiles rarely bring up out­side Asia. You’ll find it rather eas­i­er to immerse your­self, now that the Kore­an Film Archive has come to Youtube. (NOTE: To acti­vate Eng­lish sub­ti­tles, make sure to hit the “CC” but­ton on the low­er right of the play­er.)

The Archive has uploaded many a notable film, includ­ing Im Kwon-taek’s Sopy­on­je, which sur­prised the coun­try by both rekin­dling inter­est in the tra­di­tion­al music of pan­sori and by break­ing box-office records despite play­ing on only three screens. The Kore­an Film Archive offers three more films by Im, one of Kore­an cin­e­ma’s most respect­ed elder states­men, and nine oth­er films from the nineties. You can also watch selec­tions from the eight­ies, sev­en­ties, six­ties, fifties and for­ties, as well as sev­er­al from oth­er Kore­an auteurs like the trans­gres­sive Kim Ki-young and the pro­lif­ic Shin Sang-ok. It par­tic­u­lar­ly thrilled me to find The Day the Pig Fell Into a Well, the very first pic­ture from Hong Sang­soo, a direc­tor acclaimed by crit­ics world­wide as a comedic for­mal exper­i­menter, in essence Kore­a’s Woody Allen. If you don’t know quite what to feel thrilled by here, read Kore­an film spe­cial­ist Dar­cy Paque­t’s “Short His­to­ry of Kore­an Film,” then lis­ten to my inter­view with him about his book Kore­an Cin­e­ma: Break­ing the Waves. If you love film, you’ll cer­tain­ly find films to love from Korea.

Accord­ing to Google, which helped put the col­lec­tion on YouTube, there are some oth­er high­lights you won’t want to miss. They include A Home­town in Heart, made in the ear­ly years of Kore­an Inde­pen­dence, and also A Coach­man, the first Kore­an film to win awards inter­na­tion­al­ly. Many oth­er titles like Aim­less Bul­let and The Bare­foot­ed Young are avail­able in HD.

The films men­tioned above will be list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Donald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Other Disney Propaganda Cartoons from World War II

in Animation, Film, History | December 18th, 2012

Dur­ing World War II, all hands were on deck, even in Hol­ly­wood. Many of Amer­i­ca and Britain’s finest film­mak­ers, from Hitch­cock to Frank Capra, were recruit­ed to cre­ate pro­pa­gan­da films to sup­port the war effort. And the same went for Walt Dis­ney, who turned his lov­able car­toon char­ac­ters into good patri­ots.

In 1942, Dis­ney released “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” an anti-Nazi pro­pa­gan­da movie that bol­stered sup­port for the war, and even­tu­al­ly won the Acad­e­my Award for Best Ani­mat­ed Short Film. Then, a year lat­er, came The Spir­it of ’43, which fea­tures Don­ald Duck help­ing Amer­i­cans to under­stand why they need to pay their tax­es. Oth­er wartime Dis­ney shorts include Don­ald Gets Draft­ed (1942), The Old Army Game (1943), and Com­man­do Duck (1944). They all appear below.

The Spir­it of ’43

Don­ald Gets Draft­ed

The Old Army Game

Com­man­do Duck

Note: Der Fuehrer’s Face and The Spir­it of ’43 appear in the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry Of Men­stru­a­tion: Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

How Dis­ney Car­toons Are Made

Disney’s Oscar-Win­ning Adven­tures in Music

A Year of Grateful Dead Tunes Up in a Mashup

in Music | December 17th, 2012

Even­tu­al­ly some­one had to do it.

Michael David Mur­phy cre­at­ed Tun­ing ’77, a “seam­less audio super­cut of an entire year of the Grate­ful Dead tun­ing their instru­ments, live on stage.” The mix uses every pub­licly avail­able record­ing from 1977, and it’s real­ly all a pre­lude to this: 8,976 Free Grate­ful Dead Con­cert Record­ings in the Inter­net Archive. You can lis­ten to Tun­ing ’77 here or below. It runs 92 min­utes.

via Boing­Bo­ing

James Brown Brings Down the House at the Paris Olympia, 1971

in Music | December 17th, 2012

Here’s an amaz­ing film that cap­tures the excite­ment and raw ener­gy of James Brown in his prime.

The footage was tak­en on March 8, 1971, dur­ing a series of con­certs Brown and his band gave at the Olympia the­ater in Paris. It offers a rare glimpse of the orig­i­nal line­up of the J.B.‘s, the group Brown formed in 1970, about two years after the breakup of the Famous Flames.

The line­up includes William “Boot­sy” Collins on bass and his old­er broth­er Phelps “Cat­fish” Collins on lead gui­tar, both of whom would leave the band a few months lat­er. Famous Flames founder Bob­by Byrd, who essen­tial­ly dis­cov­ered Brown in 1952, serves as organ­ist, back­up singer and mas­ter of cer­e­monies. The rest of the band are: Hear­lon “Cheese” Mar­tin on gui­tar, St. Clair Pinck­ney on tenor sax­o­phone, Dar­ryl “Hasaan” Jami­son and Clay­ton “Chick­en” Gun­nells on trum­pet, Fred Wes­ley on trom­bone, and John “Jabo” Starks and Don Juan “Tiger” Mar­tin on drums.

The film was appar­ent­ly shot dur­ing one per­for­mance, even though Brown is intro­duced twice and wears dif­fer­ent cloth­ing. Accord­ing to reports, Brown took a break between “Sun­ny” and “It’s a New Day” while Byrd’s wife, Vic­ki Ander­son, sang two songs that were cut from the film. Audio from the con­cert was released in 1992 as Love Pow­er Peace: Live at the Olympia, Paris 1971. Here’s the set list from the film ver­sion, which dif­fers slight­ly from the LP:

1. Intro­duc­tion
2. Broth­er Rapp
3. Ain’t It Funky Now
4. Geor­gia On My Mind
5. Sun­ny
6. It’s a New Day
7. Bewil­dered
8. Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine
9. Try Me
10. Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag/I Got You (I Feel Good)/I Got the Feel­in’ (med­ley)
11. Give It Up or Turn It a Loose
12. It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World
13. Please, Please, Please
14. Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine (reprise)
15. Super Bad
16. Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved
17. Soul Pow­er
18. Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved (finale)

h/t Ryan Jet­ten

Relat­ed con­tent:

Clas­sic Ray Charles Per­for­mance: ‘What’d I Say’ Live in Paris, 1968

The Queen of Soul Con­quers Europe: Aretha Franklin in Ams­ter­dam, 1968

Eraserhead Stories: David Lynch on the Making of His Famously Nightmarish Movie

in Film | December 17th, 2012

Not only does the doc­u­men­tary Eraser­head Sto­ries offer as much infor­ma­tion as you’ll find any­where on the mak­ing of David Lynch’s first fea­ture film, it has a few Lynchi­an qual­i­ties of its own. For almost an hour and a half, David Lynch sits down behind a micro­phone and rem­i­nisces about the six years his rag­tag team spent putting the movie togeth­er. But he does it in black-and-white, in front of a cur­tain, smok­ing, like some­thing out of an ear­ly-1950s tele­vi­sion broad­cast. The ambi­ent dull roar of an ill wind appears, inter­mit­tent­ly and inex­plic­a­bly, on the sound­track. Pho­tographs flash by, sup­port­ing some of Lynch’s inspir­ing, ardu­ous, and bizarre rec­ol­lec­tions. Many of his sto­ries deal with the nuts and bolts of bring­ing one’s finan­cial­ly impov­er­ished but cre­ative­ly over­flow­ing ear­ly movies into real­i­ty. Oth­ers involve tubs filled with milk, sets cov­ered in peas, dead cats impreg­nat­ed with tar, and the ghost of oil tycoon Edward L. Dohe­ny.

Lynch’s fans, and even his detrac­tors — per­haps espe­cial­ly his detrac­tors — will tell you that his films could have come from the mind of no oth­er direc­tor. But Eraser­head Sto­ries gives you a clear idea about the kind of ded­i­cat­ed, famil­ial pro­duc­tion atmos­phere it takes to get an idea suc­cess­ful­ly out of Lynch’s brain and onto cel­lu­loid. On Eraser­head’s inter­mit­tent­ly active, often-mov­ing shoot, every­one had to work sev­er­al jobs: Lynch chuck­ling­ly remem­bers trow­el­ing a great deal of plas­ter along­side star Jack Nance, and he gives col­lab­o­ra­tor Cather­ine Coul­son a call to talk about all the myr­i­ad tasks she han­dled. Though the unusu­al visu­al, aur­al, and nar­ra­tive require­ments of Eraser­head meant nobody had any easy work, Lynch and his team man­aged to fin­ish the pic­ture and live every cre­ative film­mak­er’s dream: to make a movie which does­n’t com­pro­mise, which no view­er for­gets, and toward which nobody feels neu­tral. H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed con­tent:

What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Cam­era and 52 Sec­onds of Film

David Lynch’s New ‘Crazy Clown Time’ Video: Intense Psy­chot­ic Back­yard Crazi­ness (NSFW)

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

David Lynch and Inter­pol Team Up on Short Film

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.