Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) might be over three hours long but you never feel bored. The action scenes never fail to thrill and the characters are so well developed that you genuinely grieve when they die. The epic is so brilliantly realized that it’s no surprise that filmmakers everywhere took note. In The Magnificent Seven(1960), a direct remake of Seven Samurai, Hollywood swapped out katanas for six-shooters and recast the movie as a Western. Other films from The Guns of Navarro to the Bollywood blockbuster Sholay to even Pixar’s A Bug’s Life have drawn heavily from Kurosawa’s masterpiece.
Add to this list Toshifumi Takizawa’s 26-episode animated TV series Samurai 7. The set up is identical to the original — masterless samurais are hired to protect a village from a ruthless gang of bandits — and many of the characters in the animated series have the same names as characters in the original film. But the total running time of the TV show is three times longer than that of Kurosawa’s film, so Takizawa took a few liberties.
The show’s opening scene, for instance, features a massive interstellar battle involving lasers and spaceships. There’s a rusting, elephantine megalopolis straight out of Blade Runner. And also there are robots. The bandits, as it turns out, are more metallic than human, and Kikuchiyo, who was played brilliantly as a drunken wild man by Toshiro Mifune, is in this iteration a grumpy, poorly-constructed cyborg who wields a chainsaw-like sword. The series even has Kirara, a cow-eyed teenaged priestess who sports a midriff-baring kimono.
Either the story elements above sound completely preposterous or totally awesome. If you’re in the former category, you can watch the trailer for Kurosawa’s film below. If you’re in the latter category – and the show is a lot of fun – then you can watch episode 1 above, and catch the rest 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. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
The University of the Arts’ most recent grads are lucky ducks to have had a speaker as engaging as cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry delivering their commencement’s keynote address.
Barry kept things lively by mixing in some tried and true material from other public appearances, including her Filipino grandmother’s belief in the aswang, a poem set to music (here “Cotton Song” by Harlem Renaissance poet, Jean Toomer) and the story of the collaborative cartoon, “Chicken Attack by Jack.”
This last anecdote contains a strong indictment of contemporary society’s screen addiction, and it is heartening to see the graduates—members of the last generation to pre-date the Internet—listening so attentively, no one texting or tweeting as the camera pans the crowd.
When Barry exhorted them to shout out the names of their three most inspiring teachers on the count of three, most did!
For me, this was the most thrilling moment, though I also appreciated the advice on the best time to schedule oral surgery, and a blissful untruth about Evergreen State College’s application process circa the mid-70s.
Not your typical commencement speech… those lucky, lucky ducks!
Readers, we invite you to get in the spirit and celebrate the Class of 2015 by “shouting” the names of your most inspirational teachers in the comment section below.
Isaac Asimov, one of the most prolific creators in science-fiction history, wrote or edited more than 500 books in his lifetime, including the high-profile ones we all recognize like I, Robot and the Foundation series (hear a version dramatized here). But which piece of this massive body of work did Asimov himself consider his favorite? Always a fan of clarity, the man didn’t leave that issue shrouded in mystery: the honor belongs to “The Last Question,” which first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly. It’s now available inIsaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1.
“Why is it my favorite?” Asimov later wrote. “For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn’t have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer.” But it also had, and continues to have, “the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they ‘think’ I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don’t remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably ‘The Last Question.’ ”
You certainly won’t forget who wrote the story if you can hear it read by Leonard Nimoy, surely the most distinctive sci-fi narrator of our time, in the video just above. Nimoy first read “The Last Question” aloud for an adaptation staged at Michigan State University’s Abrams Planetarium in 1966, a production that first moved Asimov himself to consider ranking its source material among his best works. Of course, the story would have received none of this retrospective attention, from its author or others, if not for its intellectual content, which comes through vividly no matter how you take it in.
Look past the more entertainingly dated elements — expressions like “for Pete’s sake,” enormous central computers that print all their output on paper slips, an early reference to “highballs” — and you find plenty of elements that qualify as eternal: the ever more rapid expansion of humanity, the ever more rapid progress of technology, and the seemingly ever-faltering ability of the former to maintain dominance over the latter. Within the story’s nine pages, Asimov even digs into scientific concepts like entropy and the heat death of the universe as well as philosophical concepts like the true nature of “forever” and the origin of life, the universe, and everything. If you read only one of Asimov’s stories, he’d surely approve if you made it “The Last Question.” (And if you read two, why not “The Last Answer”?). Find these readings added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com, including ones written by Isaac Asimov? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.
At 24, some five years before publishing his breakout book, Hell’s Angels, and nearly a decade before branding himself a “gonzo journalist,” the young Hunter S. Thompson was an anonymous freelancer looking to make a name for himself. The year was 1962. Fidel Castro had marched into Havana three years earlier, and the story of the decade — the expanding frontier of the Cold War — was playing out in Latin America. It occurred to Thompson that a hungry cub reporter could build a reputation covering it.
Thompson’s epiphany coincided with the launch of the National Observer, a mildly experimental weekly newspaper published by the Dow Jones Company. Thompson sent a letter introducing himself, said he was headed to South America, and got an invite to submit any stories he wrote along the way. He arrived in Colombia in May of 1962 and, over the course of the next year, traveled through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. The Observer published some 20 of his stories from or about South America, most of which focused on the continent’s culture and politics, and on how these were affected by a Cold War–era U.S. foreign policy centered around aid and containment.
Six of Thompson’s South America pieces were anthologized in his 1979 collection The Great Shark Hunt(some in a slightly altered form); the rest have been essentially lost for more than 50 years, readable only in a few libraries’ microform collections of the Observer, which folded in 1977. I dug up the whole series while researching my book, The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America(get a copy here). From the outset, I intended to post the articles online somewhere following the book’s publication, so that other readers and researchers can easily access them — and now that the book’s been on shelves for a year, it seemed like time to make good.
As I write in the book — and as I’ve described in The Atlantic and elsewhere — Thompson’s South American reportage offers a glimpse at his emerging style. This is sharp, witty participatory journalism with a keen eye for the absurdities of South American life in the 1960s . The pieces are a mix of straightforward news reporting and more narrative, feature-style articles. The depth of insight into Cold War foreign policy is impressive, and the stories contain some memorable prose: the taxis in Quito, Ecuador, “rolled back and forth like animals looking for meat.” Asuncion, Paraguay, is “an O. Henry kind of place … about as lively as Atlantis, and nearly as isolated.” La Paz, Bolivia, meanwhile, offers “steep hills and high prices, sunny days and cold nights, demonstrations by wild-eyed opposition groups, drunken Indians reeling and shouting through the streets at night — a manic atmosphere.”
Those who know the name Marcel Proust, if not his work itself, know it as that of the most solitary and introspective of writers—a name become an adjective, describing an almost painfully delicate variety of sensory reminiscence verging on tantric solipsism. Proust has earned the reputation for writing what Alain de Botton above tells us in his Proust introduction is “officially the longest novel in the world,” A la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The book—or books, rather, totaling double the number of words as Tolstoy’s War and Peace—recounts the mainly contemplative travails of a “thinly veiled” version of the author. It is, in one sense, a very long, masterfully stylized diary of the author’s loves, lusts, likes, moods, and tastes of every kind.
Those who know the iPhone app, “Proust”—a far fewer number, I’d wager—know it as a game that harnesses the combined power of social networking, instant online opinion, and survey technology in a relentlessly repetitive exercise in faceless collectivity. These two entities are perhaps vaguely related by the Proust questionnaire, but the distance between them is more significant, standing as an ironic emblem of the distance between Proust’s refined literary universe and that of our contemporary mass culture.
Proust, a constitutionally fragile elitist born to wealthy Parisian parents in 1871, concluded that a life worth living requires the uniquely sensitive, finely-tuned appreciation of everyday life that children and artists possess, uncolored by the spoils of habit and deadening routine. “Proust” the game—as the host of its viciously satirical video proclaims in an ambiguously European accent—concludes “It’s fun to judge”… in identical, rainbow-colored screens that reduce every consideration to a vapid contest with no stakes or effort. It too represents, through parody, a kind of philosophy of life. And one might broadly say we all live somewhere in-between the hyper-aestheticism of Proust the writer and the mindless rapid-fire swipe-away trivializing of Proust the app.
De Botton, consistent with the mission of his very missionary School of Life, would like us to move closer to the literary Proust’s philosophy, a “project of reconciling us to the ordinary circumstances of life” and the “charm of the everyday.” As he does with all of the figures he conscripts for his lessons, De Botton presumes that Proust’s primary intent in his interminable work was to “help us” realize this charm—and Proust did in fact say as much. But readers and scholars of the reclusive French writer may find this statement, its author, and his writing, much more complicated and difficult to make sense of than we’re given to believe.
Nonetheless, this School of Life video, like many of the others we’ve featured here, does give us a way of approaching Proust that is much less daunting than so many others, complete with clever cut-out animations that illustrate Proust’s theory of memory, occasioned by his famed, fateful encounter with a cup of tea and a madeleine. The teatime epiphany caused Proust to observe:
The reason why life may be judged to be trivial, although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful, is that we form our judgment ordinarily not on the evidence of life itself, but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life, and therefore we judge it disparagingly.
We may take or leave De Botton’s interpretation of Proust’s work, but it seems more and more imperative that we give the work itself our full attention—or as much of it as we can spare.
Has there ever been a more entertaining song containing–as critic Robert Christgau enumerated– “slavery, interracial sex, cunnilingus, and less distinctly, sadomasochism, lost virginity, rape and heroin” as the Rolling Stones’ 1971 “Brown Sugar”? The song’s lyrics lay in wait for those who hear it in passing on classic rock radio, like an un-PC land mine. And you’ll only step on one when you’re dancing.
Last week, the Rolling Stones promoted the re-release/remaster/repackage of their 1971 album Sticky Fingers with an alternative take of the song, featuring Eric Clapton on slide guitar, and a sloppier, more festive sound. It’s the first official release of a version long since bootlegged.
Unlike many alternative versions found on deluxe editions, this recording came after the classic track was recorded, but the path of Sticky Fingers was a convoluted one.
For starters, it was Mick Jagger, not Keith Richards, who came up with the opening riff, something he wrote while in Australia filming Tony Richardson’s Ned Kelly as a way of rehabilitating his hand after injuring it. Jagger says he had Freddy Cannon’s rough-around-the-edges 1959 “Tallahassee Lassie” in mind, though you might be hard pressed to hear the influence.
The Stones recorded “Brown Sugar” at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama in early December, 1969. It was just a few days after the release of their epochal Let It Bleed, and a week after the New York and Baltimore concerts recorded for Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!. Brian Jones was nearly half a year dead. Guitarist Mick Taylor was new.
And Muscle Shoals was not yet a studio of legend. It had been the home of one hit: R.B. Greaves’ humping-the-secretary single “Take a Letter, Maria.” Memphis was nearby and had better studios, but the Stones wanted to check out this new place.
On the first night, they recorded a cover of “You Gotta Move” by Mississippi Fred McDowell that ends side one of the album. The next day, they recorded “Brown Sugar.” Mick Jagger told a reporter upon entering the studio: “I’ve got a new one myself. No words yet, but a few words in my head — called Brown Sugar — about a woman who screws one of her black servants. I started to call it Black Pussy but I decided that was too direct, too nitty-gritty.”
Jim Dickinson, Muscle Shoals producer and session piano player, is quoted in Keith Richard’s 2010 book Life, “I watched Mick write the lyrics. It took him maybe forty-five minutes; it was disgusting. He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing!” Many years later Marsha Hunt, Jagger’s secret girlfriend at the time and mother of his first child Karis, would reveal the song was indeed about her, which makes the taboos of slavery and rape in the lyrics all that more disturbing.
The band wanted to release the song, but contractual problems with former label ABKCO halted their plans.
A year later, while the majority of Sticky Fingers had been recorded, the group celebrated Keith Richards’ birthday at Olympic Studios in London. The alternative version above comes from that party and features Al Kooper on piano and Eric Clapton on slide. Richards preferred this version, but it never made the cut, and listening to it now the official version sounds like the obvious choice: the sound of Muscle Shoals is undeniable.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Sir Christopher Lee died on Sunday at the age of 93, bringing to a close a long and distinguished acting career — though one fortunately not confined only to the heights of respectability. Lee could get schlocky with the best of them, elevating otherwise clunky, broad, or overly lurid genre films with his inimitable combination of stature, bearing, and (especially) voice, most notably as Hammer Horror’s go-to Count Dracula in the 1950s and 60s, as a James Bond villain in 1974, and as various sinister gray eminences in more recent Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies.
But Lee made himself equally at home in projects involving the “better” classes of genre as well. His famous voice did supreme justice to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the 19th-century writer whose work did so much to define modern horror literature.
If you’d like to hold your own tribute to the late Sir Lee, you’ll want to listen to all his Poe-related work, watch his performances in such films as the thoroughly cult-classic The Wicker Man and the founder-of-Pakistan biopic Jinnah (in which he played the title role, his personal favorite), and play aloud a selection from his stint as a heavy-metal Christmas vocalist. Most artists who began their careers in the 1940s got publicly categorized as “highbrow” or “lowbrow”; Lee’s career, with its many forays right up to the end into the conventional and unconventional, the straight-ahead and the bizarre, existed in a reality beyond brows — the one, in other words, that we all live in now.
Saxophonist Ornette Coleman died yesterday at age 85, leaving behind one of jazz’s most interesting and illustrious legacies. Coleman strode into the fifties and sixties with a handful of vanguard artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck—and, as the New York Times writes, “widened the options in jazz.” This meant taking jazz places it had not been before, eventually into the psychedelic jams on Coleman’s 1971 Science Fiction album, which features one track with “a ‘Purple Haze’-styled bassline through a wah-wah pedal,” JazzTimes wrote in 2000, while “Ornette overdubs on trumpet and violin and Dewey Redman wails on musette over Ed Blackwell’s inimitable groove.” The track “Happy House” seems to bend space and time in new directions, pairing two trumpet players and two drummers—one for each ear in stereo recording.
Coleman’s free form willingness to experiment made him a sought after collaborator (at least once against his will) with artists who also bent, or invented, their own genre boundaries. Thirty-two years after Science Fiction, Coleman made an appearance on the 2003 Edgar Allan Poe-tribute The Raven, a late album by Lou Reed, the pioneering artist who took pop and R&B down a dark, psychedelic path.
The resulting collaboration, which you can hear at the top of the post, just barely holds together in a gospel/free jazz/funk groove that hypnotizes even as it bewilders listeners, giving us an ensemble of musicians each hearing slightly different rhythms and timbres in the repetitive drone of Reed’s lead vocal.
Reed was excited about Coleman’s contribution, writing on his website, “THIS IS ONE OF MY GREATEST MOMENTS.” The jazz great “did seven versions—all different and all amazing and wondrous.” You can hear four above. “Each take,” Reed explains, “is Ornette playing against a different instrument—ie drum, guitar 1 guitar 2 etc. Listen to this!!!” And listen you should. Try to figure out which of the seven takes made the album version above. Then listen to them again. Then read this interview between Jacques Derrida and Coleman in which he explains how he came to develop his sinuous style, one writes the New York Times Ben Ratliff, less beholden to the rules of harmony and rhythm” and more in tune with “an intuitive, collective musical language.”
If it doesn’t come back to you, it was never really yours…
Or, it’s a labor of love you created under the auspices of the Brooklyn Art Library, with the full knowledge that giving it away is a cost of participation.
Artists willing to cough up a slightly more substantial fee can have their book digitized for online viewing at The Sketchbook Project.
Artist: Tim Oliveira
In their virgin state, the sketchbooks are uniform. From there, anything goes, provided they retain their original height and width, and swell to no more than an inch thick. (Messy, gooey books might face rejection, in part because they threaten to contaminate the herd.)
Dip in at random and you will find an astonishing array of finished work: messy, meticulous, intimate, inscrutable, self-mocking, sincere, abstract, narrative, carefully plotted, utterly improvisational, accomplished, amateur — rendered in a wide variety of media, including ball point pen and collage.
Artist: Estella Yu
My favorite way to browse the collection, whether in person or online, is by selecting a theme, just as the artists do when signing up for the annual project. 2016’s themes include “sandwich,” “great hopes and massive failures,” and “Ahhh! Monster!”
(“I’ll choose my own theme” is a perennial menu offering.)
The theme that guided the artists whose work is published herein is “Things Found on Restaurant Napkins.” Would you have guessed?
Artist: Christopher Moffitt
You can also search on specific words or mediums, artists’ names, and geographic locations. To date, TheSketchbook Project has received sketchbooks by creative people from 135+ countries.
Those ready to take the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project plunge can enlist here. Don’t fret about your qualifications—co-founders Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker have made things democratic, which is to say uncurated, by design.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her 2011 sketchbook, “I’m a Scavenger” is housed in the Brooklyn Art Library. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Art lovers who visit my hometown of Washington, DC have an almost embarrassing wealth of opportunities to view art collections classical, Baroque, Renaissance, modern, postmodern, and otherwise through the Smithsonian’s network of museums. From the East and West Wings of the National Gallery, to the Hirshhorn, with its wondrous sculpture garden, to the American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery—I’ll admit, it can be a little overwhelming, and far too much to take in during a weekend jaunt, especially if you’ve got restless family in tow. (One can’t, after all, miss the Natural History or Air and Space Museums… or, you know… those monuments.)
In all the bustle of a DC vacation, however, one collection tends to get overlooked, and it is one of my personal favorites—the Freer and Sackler Galleries, which house the Smithsonian’s unique collection of Asian art, including the James McNeill Whistler-decorated Peacock Room. (See his “Harmony in Blue and Gold” above.)
Standing in this re-creation of museum founder Charles Freer’s personal 19th century gallery—which he had relocated from London to his Detroit mansion in 1904—is an aesthetic experience like no other. And like most such experiences, there really is no virtual equivalent. Nonetheless, should you have to hustle past the Freer and Sackler collections on your DC vacation, or should you be unable to visit the nation’s capital at all, you can still get a taste of the beautiful works of art these buildings contain.
See delicate 16th century Iranian watercolors like “Woman with a spray of flowers” (top), powerful Edo period Japanese ink on paper drawings like “Thunder god” (above), and astonishingly intricate 15th century Tibetan designs like the “Four Mandala Vajravali Thangka” (below). And so, so much more.
As Freer/Sackler director Julian Raby describes the initiative, “We strive to promote the love and study of Asian art, and the best way we can do so is to free our unmatched resources for inspiration, appreciation, academic study, and artistic creation.” There are, writes the galleries’ website, Bento, “thousands of works now ready for you to download, modify, and share for noncommercial purposes.” More than 40,000, to be fairly precise.
You can browse the collection to your heart’s content by “object type,” topic, name, place, date, or “on view.” Or you can conduct targeted searches for specific items. In addition to centuries of art from all over the far and near East, the collection includes a good deal of 19th century American art, like the sketch of Whistler’s mother, below, perhaps a preparatory drawing for his most famous painting. Though I do recommend that you visit these exquisite galleries in person if you can, you must at least take in their collections via this generous online collection and its bounty of international artistic treasures. Get started today.
Johnny Rotten aka John Lydon’s closing words at the last Sex Pistols gig (watch it online) seemed apt this week when Virgin Bank announced their current line of credit cards would feature the band’s signature artwork. That Jamie Reid’s famous cut-n-paste zine-cum-Situationalist aesthetic has turned into a bit of capitalist plastic for your wallet is an irony that the Sex Pistols might never have seen coming back in 1976, when they played the “gig that changed the world.”
Recreated above in a clip from Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, the June 4, 1976 gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall spawned the British punk movement and the post-punk movement that was soon to follow in a scant two years. For in the audience were future members of the Buzzcocks Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley (who organized the gig and opened for the Pistols); a nascent version of Joy Division; the two founders of Factory Records Martin Hannet and Tony Wilson; Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Mick Hucknall of Frantic Elevators and much later Simply Red; and a one Steven Patrick Morrissey, who would form The Smiths. (That’s Steve Coogan playing Tony Wilson in the clip, by the way.)
The Sex Pistols played 13 songs in their set, including covers of Dave Berry’s “Don’t Give Me No Lip Child,” Paul Revere and the Raiders “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone”, the Small Faces “What’cha Gonna Do About It,” The Stooges’ “No Fun”, and The Who’s “Substitute.” When asked for an encore, they played “No Fun” again.
Of their originals, their two most famous songs–”God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the U.K.” had yet to be written–but “Pretty Vacant,” “Problems,” “New York,” “No Feelings” are all here in their raw form.
A few songs never made it onto their first album, but can be found on their heavily bootlegged demo tape they recorded the same year.
Also of note is how non “punk” the members are dressed, not in the sense of how Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood would design, package and sell the fashion. The boys look closer to the working class jobbers of early Devo and the Stooges. Plus: no Sid Vicious. He’d come later. That’s Glen Matlock on bass, who left the band in early ’77 after clashing with Lydon. He went on to form Rich Kids with Midge Ure.
When the Pistols returned to London, everybody in Manchester and beyond had started a band, or at least that’s how it felt. By the time the Pistols got back to London, The Clash and The Damned had formed. And even if you hadn’t been at Lesser Free Trade Hall, you told your friends you had been and picked up a guitar.
The Sex Pistols would return three weeks later to play the Hall again, playing to hundreds this time and solidifying the dawn of the punk era.
Below is a BBC documentary on the famous gig, tellingly titled I Swear I Was There, which has an accompanying book.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
