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.
How do you adequately portray life in a high-rise building? London filmmaker Marc Isaacs found a rather unconventional answer to this question. He installed himself inside the lift/elevator of a high rise on the East End of London. And for ten hours a day, over two months, he would ride up and down with the residents, with his camera pointing at them. It is fascinating to see how the residents react to him being there — some are suspicious or even hostile at the beginning. Others open up about their personal lives and their daily life in the building. And then others bring him something to eat, a chair to sit down on, or even little presents. The result is a moving and “quietly fascinating meditation on the mundanities of London life.” Writing about the film, the Times Online put it best: “Isaacs has an astounding gift for getting people to open up to him and he uses film the way a skilled artist uses paint. The result is beautiful, heartbreaking and profoundly humane.”
Here’s some bonus material: a review of “Lift” and Isaacs’ two other short documentaries “Calais” and “Travellers,” a Sunday Times article entitled “Marc Isaacs on his documentary art,” and an interview with Mark by The Documentary Filmmakers Group dfg.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
At first we thought it was either an Onion story or a joke: Multi-talented author, actor, sports enthusiast and Paris Revieweditor George Plimpton (1927–2003) also achieved considerable success in another medium: video games.
The Millions points us to George Plimpton’s video “Falconry,” the game Plimpton helped develop for ColecoVision in the early 80’s. You can play it here, but first be sure to catch up on the backstory (click “Backstory” button below the “Play” button), which may or may not involve high stakes double-crosses, hardcore sleuthings, and the childhood obsessions of frequent Daily Show guest John Hodgman. Maximum Fun has also posted an old commercial for the game, which we’ve reposted above. (Our apologies for the poor quality. It was apparently ripped from an old VHS tape).
If it turns out that we’ve been punked, it was worth it, if only for the joys of typing the words “Plimpton,” “Falconry” and “ColecoVision” all in one sentence. The game isn’t bad either.
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.
Andrés Segovia first visited the Alhambra, the storied 14th Century Moorish palace in Granada, Spain, when he was ten years old. “It was here,” he said, “that I opened my eyes to the beauty of nature and art. To be here is to feel oneself to be near, very near, paradise.”
Segovia is often called the father of classical guitar. As a young boy he learned to play flamenco, the traditional music of his native Andalusia, but by the time he was a teenager he was transcribing Bach and other composers, adapting music originally intended for different instruments. Over the course of his lifetime, Segovia transcribed much of the classical repertoire, refined the standard technique, and established the guitar as a serious instrument, bringing it out of the parlors and into the concert halls.
In 1976, at the age of 84, Segovia returned to the Alhambra to perform for the documentary, Andrés Segovia: The Song of the Guitar. In the excerpt above, Segovia plays one of his favorite pieces, “The Legend of Asturias,” by Isaac Albéniz, who composed it for the piano as a prelude to his “Cantos de España.” The complete documentary is available on a two-film DVD, Andrés Segovia: In Portrait.
Thirty-five years ago today, New York magazine published “Tribal Rights of Saturday Night,” a beautifully-written paean to the dancing teens of the city’s boroughs. And the story focused on a working-class disco dancer named Vincent:
Vincent was the very best dancer in Bay Ridge—the ultimate Face. He owned fourteen floral shirts, five suits, eight pairs of shoes, three overcoats, and had appeared on American Bandstand. Sometimes music people came out from Manhattan to watch him, and one man who owned a club on the East Side had even offered him a contract. A hundred dollars a week. Just to dance.
“Vincent” become the model for Tony Manero, the hero of John Badham’s 1977 disco-ganza Saturday Night Fever, a hit film which launched the 70’s hottest dance craze and the career of young John Travolta. Plus it gave us the best-selling soundtrack album of all time and introduced the line dance, an exercise in inebriated communal humiliation that would dominate the dance floors of American wedding receptions for decades to come.
With all this to its credit, perhaps it shouldn’t matter that Nik Kohn’s article was more fiction than non-fiction, and that “Vincent” was, in Kohn’s own words, “completely made up, a total fabrication.” The ostensibly conscience-stricken journalist came clean in the Guardian in 1994:
My story was a fraud, I’d only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, my story’s hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush mod whom I’d known in the Sixties, a one-time king of Goldhawk Road.” [Ed. Note: The Guardian piece is not available online, but it was quoted extensively in Charlie LeDuff’s 1996 article, “Saturday Night Fever: The Life”]
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.
Back in 2004, Bono, the co-founder of ONE (an NGO that raises awareness of AIDS and poverty in Africa), received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Of course, Bono is also the lead singer of U2, and he can command the attention of any large audience. Speaking to Penn’s graduating class of 2004, Bono didn’t give the usual advice — go forth and follow your passion. No, the message was a little different. He urged the graduates to serve their age by betraying it, by “exposing its conceits, it’s foibles, it’s phony moral certitudes … and massive moral blindspots,” Africa being perhaps the most glaring example. Then, his speech wraps up with this, the best lines saved for last.
Whether it’s this or something else, I hope you’ll pick a fight and get in it. Get your boots dirty, get rough, steel your courage…, make one last primal scream, and go. Sing the melody line you hear in your own head. Remember, you don’t owe anybody any explanations. You don’t owe your parents any explanations. You don’t owe your professors any explanations.
You know I used to think the future was solid or fixed, something you inherited like an old building that you move into when the previous generation moves out or gets chased out. But it’s not. The future is not fixed, it’s fluid. You can build your own building, or hut or condo.
My point is that the world is more malleable than you think, and it’s waiting for you to hammer it into shape.… That’s what this degree of yours is, a blunt instrument. So go forth and build something with it. Remember what John Adams said about Ben Franklin, “He does not hesitate at our boldest measures but rather seems to think us too irresolute.” Well this is the time for bold measures and this is the country and you are the generation.
If you haven’t been following the Cassini spacecraft’s second mission to Saturn, here’s a video that will hook you in. It features incredible black-and-white images of Saturn and its moons, all captured by Cassini’s “camera” — also known as the Cassini-Huygens Imaging Science Subsystem — and designer/director Chris Abbas, who edited together footage from Cassini’s archive and set it to a great Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.
According to NASA, the Cassini will continue orbiting Saturn until May 2017. It has already discovered some amazing things about Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, including the possibility that Titan’s current state, complete with its lakes, rivers, rain, snow, clouds, mountains and even volcanoes, may tell us something about what earth was like before life evolved. But Abbas’s short film would be beautiful to watch even without any knowledge of the science behind it.
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 Chronicle of Higher Education has posted a nice set of portraits called “Gallery of Minds,” featuring images of 10 world-famous philosophers, including Richard Rorty, David Chalmers, and renowned philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, who also wrote a compelling introduction. Danto focuses on the visual artistry of the series’ photographer Steve Pyke, a long-time staff member at the New Yorker, but we found the great thinkers’ own statements — their answers to the “why” of their chosen pursuits — equally, if not more, compelling. Here is MIT’s feminist metaphysician Sally Haslinger:
Given the amount of suffering and injustice in the world, I flip-flop between thinking that doing philosophy is a complete luxury and that it is an absolute necessity. The idea that it is something in between strikes me as a dodge.
And Robin Jeshion, best known for a theory of singular thought which she calls Cognitivism, has this to say:
Philosophy’s distinguishing value? For me, it resides not so much in the big questions’ multifarious answers, themselves, nor, alas, in wisdom attained through the exacting process of answering them, but rather in how it invariably reminds us how little we really do know. Philosophy is, or should be, humbling — and is, for this, ennobling.
To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to be a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was much to be said for their suggestion.
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.
On June 6, 1961, the great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung died at his villa at Küsnacht, on the shore of Lake Zurich, Switzerland. He was 86 years old.
Jung viewed death as a fulfillment, rather than a negation, of life. “As a doctor,” he wrote in his 1930 essay, The Stages of Life, “I am convinced that it is hygienic–if I may use the word–to discover in death a goal toward which one can strive, and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.”
To this end, wrote Jung many years later in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a person should follow his instinct and embrace myth: “for reason shows him nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending. Myth, however, can conjure up other images for him, helpful and enriching pictures of life in the land of the dead.”
Jung certainly embraced the myth of an afterlife, as evidenced in this excerpt from an October, 1959 interview with John Freeman for the BBC program Face to Face. The 40-minute interview–in which Jung talks about formative events of his childhood, his friendship and falling-out with Sigmund Freud, and his views on religion and death–can be viewed in its entirety here.
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A perfect way to chase away the Monday morning blues. Once obscure, the Brazilian musical group A Banda Mais Bonita da Cidade (or “The Most Beautiful Band in the City”) has been riding a wave of popularity for the past two weeks, ever since their video, guaranteed to put a little smile on your face, went viral on YouTube. Oração (or “Prayer”) is their song; and it has registered some 4.7 million views since May 17.
And if you’re looking for a parody of the viral video — it was only a matter of time, right? — you can find it here. It’s now clocking in at 1.2 million views…
In 1975 Nelson Algren left Chicago for good. The famed writer had gone to Paterson, New Jersey on a magazine assignment to cover the Rubin “Hurricane” Carter murder case and decided to stay. This rare video footage was apparently made during his brief return to the Windy City to gather his things. We watch as another of Chicago’s literary icons, Studs Terkel, corners his friend and demands an explanation. Algren, famous for his wit, responds by mocking Frank Sinatra’s anthem to Chicago: Paterson, says Algren, is “my kind of town.”
In truth, Algren felt bitter toward his native city. Ernest Hemingway had once said of Algren’s writing, “you should not read it if you cannot take a punch,” and many in the city’s civic and literary establishment could not take the punch Algren delivered in books like Chicago: City on the Make. By the time he decided to move on, many of Algren’s books–which include such classics as The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side, and The Neon Wilderness– were not even available in Chicago libraries. Algren exposed a side of America that many Americans didn’t want to know about. “He broke new ground,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut, “by depicting persons said to be dehumanized by poverty and ignorance and injustice as being genuinely dehumanized, and dehumanized quite permanently.”
Not surprisingly Algren was more popular overseas, where the punch was felt less directly. Jean-Paul Sartre translated his works into French, and Simone de Beauvoir became his lover. (The unlikely affair may soon be the subject of a film, featuring Vanessa Paradis as Beauvoir and Johnny Depp as Algren.) By the time he moved to the East Coast, many of Algren’s books were out of print, and he had become like the people he wrote about: poor and forgotten. In 1981, at the age of 72, Algren died of a heart attack in Sag Harbor, New York. Arrangements for a pauper funeral were made by the playwright and novelist Joe Pintauro, who later reflected on Algren’s treatment: “He’d gotten a lifetime of kicks in the teeth from some critics because he refused to sidestep the ugliness of life, the gnarled, stringy underside of the tapestry, the part too many artists turn their backs on, the part even God seems not to have created. By rejecting Nelson’s world, too many critics left him alone in it, a prophetic, raggedy, exiled king.”
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