Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist, has a new book coming out this fall. This time, it’s a children’s book called The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True. Interviewed in Der Spiegel in March, Dawkins talked a little about what he hoped to accomplish here, saying:
Each chapter is a question like: What is an earthquake? What is a rainbow? What is the sun? Each chapter begins with a series of myths seemingly answering those questions, and then I counter that with explanations about the true nature of things. There is something very cheap about magic in the supernatural sense, like turning a frog into a prince with a magic wand. Reality has a grander, poetic magic of its own, which I hope I can get across.
Already you can see some preliminary artwork for the book. We have one cover design above, and another one here. We’ll have more on the book when it comes out…
Romance and realism are mixed together in surprising and unforgettable ways in Jacques Demy’s 1964 masterpiece, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. At first glance the film appears to be another piece of escapist fluff—a brightly colored musical about a beautiful girl who falls in love with a handsome young man. But as the story unfolds, those fairy tale trappings—the colors, the melodies, the impossibly beautiful faces—carry a gathering weight of irony.
As film critic A.O. Scott of the New York Times says in the video above, the film is one of the most romantic ever made, yet at the same time the story is “pure kitchen sink realism, suitable maybe for a Raymond Carver story or a Bruce Springsteen song.” It features Catherine Deneuve as a 17-year-old girl who works in her mother’s umbrella shop and falls in love with a 20-year-old garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. “All of the characters face very difficult, very real problems,” says Scott, “and all of them try to do the right thing, which turns out to be pretty definitively unromantic.”
Unlike Hollywood musicals, in which the characters speak dialogue and periodically break into song, every word in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is sung. The film received the Palme d’Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, and was an international hit. Despite all the success, the film has been widely misunderstood, as Pauline Kael lamented during a 2000 interview. “One of the sad things about our time, I think,” Kael said, “is that so many people find a movie like that frivolous and negligible. They don’t see the beauty in it, but it’s a lovely film—original and fine.”
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg has recently become available for free viewing on the Internet, and we have added it to our archive of free movies. You can watch it here.
The site hosts more than 80 videos, most of them stellar, which means you could end up killing the whole day. Don’t say we didn’t w‑w-w-arn you (sorry).
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
The culture wars wage on. Almost twenty years after the great Murphy Brown debate, we’re still going at it. But now, instead of debating the pros and cons of single motherhood, the focus has turned to whether Michelle Obama erred in inviting the rapper Common to the White House Poetry Night last week. (See his actual performance here.) Critics point to this 2007 YouTube video, A Letter to the Law, though they don’t necessarily listen until the very end. And they also flag his sympathetic words directed toward Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur), an ex-Black Panther, convicted of killing a New Jersey police officer in 1973. This all built up to the latest Jon Stewart — Bill O’Reilly faceoff, which drilled down to the question: Did the First Lady make a major gaffe? Or is this another case of selective outrage? Part 1 is above; Part II is here…
Nick Risinger, an amateur astronomer from Seattle, quit his day job last year, packed his bags and cameras, and began a 60,000 mile journey, moving across the American West and down to the western Cape of South Africa (twice). His voyage would end with a 5000-megapixel photograph of the entire night sky, produced from 37,440 separate exposures, and it yields a staggering 360-degree view of the Milky Way. Even better, the image now lives online in an interactive format, giving you the ability to wander through the cosmos.
For more on this, be sure to visit Photopic Sky Survey. Here Risinger gives you the personal and technical backstory on his project, and also gives you the chance to purchase photos, or even lend financial support to the sky survey.
What can we say about Gary Shteyngart? The novelist appeared last year in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue (which listed authors “who capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction.”) He teaches writing at Columbia University and counts James Franco as one of his students. And he’s willing to hustle a little to sell a book. When his novel Super Sad True Love Story came out last summer (find NYTimes review here), the quirky Leningrad-born author (key to understanding what comes next) released a satirical, self-deprecating trailer to promote his book. Jeffrey Eugenides, Jay McInerney, Edmund White, Mary Gaitskill and Franco himself all get in on the joke … which gets better as it goes along.
Shteyngart’s book just came out in paperback last week. To mark the occasion, Fresh Air re-aired an interview with him (sans accent) last week. His book is also available as an audio download via Audible.com, and here’s how you can snag a free copy…
Over at Metafilter, Kári Tulinius has a posted a nice selection of experimental short films by the great Japanese animator and manga artist Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka died in 1989, and although he’s most famous in the US for children’s cartoons like Astro-Boy and Kimbo the White Lion (better known to everyone but the Walt Disney Company’s lawyers as The Lion King), his achievements extended well beyond those two US hits. In his home country, The God of Manga is rightly considered a national treasure, and his massive body of work includes a manga adaptation of Crime and Punishment, a 12-volume fantasy saga about immortality, and the world’s first feature-length animated porn movie.
These shorts provide an excellent introduction to Tezuka’s many moods and styles, from the innocent whimsy of Mermaid (1964), about a boy who falls in love with a mermaid at sea.…
… to the caustic humor of Memory (1964), a biting meditation on our rose-tinted view of the past:
…to the light exuberance of Jumping (1984):
… and finally the full-blown apocalyptic darkness of Push (1987), as relevant now as it was 25 years go — if not more so:
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
Playing in Toronto last week, Paul Simon did something, well, awesome. A fan asks him to play “Duncan,” his 1972 classic, and lets him know that she learned to play guitar to that song. So Simon agrees. And, even better, he invites her on stage to take over guitar and vocals. Nervous, almost hyperventilating, she hesitantly gets going, as does the crowd. From there, a big feelin’ groovy moment unfolds, and it just gets better as it goes along. Kudos to NPR’s All Songs Considered for making this great find …
Just last month, Bob Dylan played his first concert in China at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing. It wasn’t exactly a big show. Roughly 2,000 people attended, but it became a big affair at home when NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a caustic op-ed, accusing Dylan of playing a censored set stripped of his revolutionary anthems. In short, she declared, Dylan went to China and sold out his 60s soul:
Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a‑Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.
Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.
Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.
Now, in a note to fans, Dylan took the rare step of responding to these (and other) accusations in a short letter published yesterday. He writes:
As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.
I’m guessing this response will only partly satisfy Dowd. Perhaps Dylan didn’t change his set to please the apparatchiks. But did he miss an opportunity to make the right statement? Just maybe. But no matter, we’re putting this behind us and getting ready for Dylan’s 70th birthday on May 24. We still love him, warts and all…
There is no exact date for this silent home movie shot at the Reseda, CA home of Stan Laurel’s daughter, Lois. But the year must have been 1956, because, during that year, Oliver Hardy, the other member of the great comic duo, lost more than 150 pounds, resulting in a complete change of his outward appearance. Hardy had a mild heart attack in 1954 and started looking after his health. But letters by Stan Laurel indicate that Oliver was also suffering from cancer. In September 1956 — probably not long after this movie was made — Oliver suffered a major stroke, which left him unable to speak and confined to bed for several months. Then, at the beginning of August 1957, he had two more strokes and slipped into a coma from which he never recovered. He died on August 7 that year.
Exactly one week after Oliver’s death, Stan gave a rare radio interview and recounted the moment when he and Oliver met for the first time. The full, one-hour interview can be enjoyed here. Stan died on 23 February 1965 after suffering a heart attack of his own. He was buried at Forest Park Memorial Park in Burbank. Footage from the funeral shows celebrities such as Dick Van Dyke, Buster Keaton and George Chandler in attendance. Stan’s friend Dick Van Dyke delivered this moving eulogy.
In this superb time lapse video, Dominic Boudreault presents five urban cities — Montreal, Quebec City, Chicago, Toronto, and New York City — and what he calls the “the duality between city and nature.”
Most fascinating is the high vantage point from which much of the footage was shot: watch the colorful lights adorning the Empire State Building, and just a minute later, cars shooting down the freeway next to Lake Michigan in snowy Chicago. The City Limits was shot in late 2010, early 2011.
Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.
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