Marshall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buckminster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Modern Technology & Media (1971)

in Art, Radio, Television, Theatre | October 4th, 2016

45 years ago, four eminences took the stage at the University of Toronto: Irish actor Jack MacGowran, best known for his interpretations of Samuel Beckett; English poet and dramatist W.H. Auden; American architect and theorist of humanity’s way of life Buckminster Fuller; and Canadian literary scholar turned media technology oracle Marshall McLuhan. Now only did all four men come from different countries, they came from very different points on the intellectual and cultural map. The CBC recorded them for broadcast on its long-running series Ideas, prefacing it with an announcement that “the ostensible subject of their discussion is theatre and the visual arts.”

Key word: ostensible. “That topic is soon forgotten as two modes of perception clash,” says the announcer, “that of Professor McLuhan, who is one of the most famous interpreters of contemporary 20th-century cultural trends, and that of W.H. Auden, who cheerfully admits to being ‘a 19th-century man’ and sees no reason to change.” And so, though Fuller and MacGowan do occasionally provide their perspective, the panel turns into a rollicking debate between McLuhan and Auden, more or less from the point where the former — making one of his characteristically compelling proclamations — declares that modern media brings us to a world in which “there is no audience. There are only actors.” But the latter objects: “I profoundly disapprove of audience participation.”

By the early 1970s, television had long since found its way into homes all across America, Canada, and Britain, but the thinkers of the time had only just begun to grapple with its consequences. “We’ve just seen Apollo 14, which has some visual effects going with it. It’s a new type of theater, obviously,” says McLuhan, drawing one of many audience laughs. On the subject of television’s conflation of fact and fiction, Auden doesn’t mince words: “I think TV is a very, very wicked medium. That’s all I can say.” McLuhan emphasizes that, as a professional observer of these phenomena, “I have steadfastly reserved moral judgment on all media matters.” Auden: “I don’t.”

Yet the author of The Age of Anxiety and the author of The Gutenberg Galaxy turn out to have more in common than their conflict might suggest. Both in their 60s by the time of this discussion (“Thank God I can remember the world before World War I,” says the poet) and both 1930s converts to Catholicism, they also both harbored deep suspicions of technologies like television. Auden, who insists he would never dream of owing a TV set himself, seems to look down on it as merely lowbrow, but McLuhan has darker suspicions: “You are missing the name of the game, sir. You are actually imagining that those little images you see on TV are TV. They are not. What is TV is that fire stream pouring out of that tube into your gut.”

Even while predicting still-unheard-of advances in televisual technology (at one point attempting to engage MacGowran on “the immediate prospect of four- and five-dimensional TV”), McLuhan also foresees it as the potential spark for such cataclysms as a global race war, going so far as to suggest that “if you want to save a fantastic bloodbath on this planet, which will be very traumatic, very cathartic, and very tragic — in the Greek sense — we turn off TV totally. For good.” Auden, of course, actually approves of that particular idea of McLuhan’s, though he evinces little optimism about its feasibility. “Why won’t it happen?” asks McLuhan. “Because people like the damn things,” he replies.

The Visionary Thought of Marshall McLuhan, Introduced and Demystified by Tom Wolfe

McLuhan Said “The Medium Is The Message”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Literature Syllabus Asks Students to Read 32 Great Works, Covering 6000 Pages

W.H. Auden Recites His 1937 Poem, ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’

Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975)

Bertrand Russell & Buckminster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Better Living Through Buckminster Fuller’s Utopian Designs: Revisit the Dymaxion Car, House, and Map

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Pete Seeger Teaches You How to Play Guitar for Free in The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide (1955)

in Education, Music | October 4th, 2016

Image by Josef Schwarz, via Wikimedia Commons

Along with earnest political populism and a renewed interest in regional cultures, the folk revival of the fifties and sixties brought with it a liberating sense of possibility, as young writers, singers, and artists discovered that, truly, anyone can play guitar. Or rather, anyone can pick up most any stringed instrument and, with a few fundamentals, enjoy the experience of writing and playing music in a way that seemed unavailable or forbidding before people like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan appeared on the scene.

Both popularizers of Woody Guthrie’s Depression-era ballads and of obscure blues and folk artists, Dylan and Seeger took very different approaches to their art. The former cultivated a mystique that seems impossible to penetrate, and that has made him seem—as Todd Haynes’ masterful film I’m Not There dramatizes—like a series of different people. But Seeger has always been Seeger, from his gentle, aw-shucks demeanor and warm accessibility to his staunchly progressive messages that speak to children and regular folks as well as to those with more sophisticated tastes and talents.

So it seems only natural that Seeger released an album of guitar instruction, The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide, addressed to both beginners and more advanced players. “I guess any musical instrument can be as hard to play as you want to make it,” Seeger begins, in one of his characteristically fluid transitions from song to speech: “If you wanted to be a person like Andres Segovia or Merle Travis, why it would take a lifetime of training. But for most of us, playing a guitar can be about as simple as walking.” After that reassuring comparison, he does remind us, however, that “it took us all a couple years to learn how to walk.”

Seeger begins with first steps—tuning the instrument—and patiently leads his listeners through some basic chord shapes, strumming techniques, and then more advanced picking methods, alternate tunings, and styles like Flamenco, “Rhumba Rhythm,” and “Mexican Blues.” You can listen to the album track-by-track on Spotify, further up. (You can also find it kicking around on YouTube.) Like the great educator he was, Seeger also includes some helpful visual aids in the album’s liner notes (see them here), including drawings of chord fingerings, musical notation, and guitar tablature for those who don’t read music. In addition to his readable instructions, he also includes the lyrics to all of the folk songs referenced throughout.

“Practice each small section over and over,” he writes in his introduction, “until it comes easy. Actually, if you enjoy playing the guitar, you shouldn’t think of it as practicing, in the formal sense. Rather simply play for your own enjoyment and that of your friends.” He also recommends that his listeners “beg, borrow, or steal” the records he references in the booklet, for “they will be of help to you in giving you an idea of the scope and possibilities of the instrument.” I can’t think of a music teacher more inviting than Seeger, nor a method more relaxed.

A second volume featuring Jerry Silverman appeared soon after, and upped the ante a good bit. “Musical standards are on the rise,” Silverman says in his introduction, “the virtuoso folk guitarist is on the scene.” He promises to help the “strumming population… keep pace with the upward spiral.” You can be the judge of how successful he is in that effort. Unfortunately, we don’t have Silverman’s supplementary materials available, but you can listen to the complete Folksinger’s Guitar Guide: Volume 2 above.

Learn to Play Guitar for Free: Intro Courses Take You From The Very Basics to Playing Songs In No Time

Paul McCartney Offers a Short Tutorial on How to Play the Bass Guitar

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Watch Soviet Avant-Garde Composers Create Synthesized Music with Hand-Drawn Animations (1934)

in Art, Film, Music, Technology | October 4th, 2016

The Russian Revolution not only radically reshaped social and political institutions in the soon-to-be Soviet Union, but it also radicalized the arts. “The Romanovs, who ruled Russia for 300 years,” comments Glenn Altschuler at The Boston Globe, used “culture as an instrument of political control.” As the Bolsheviks swept away lumbering czarist elitism, they brought with them an avant-gardism that also sought to be populist and proletarian—spearheaded by such experimental artists as filmmaker Dziga Vertov, poet, futurist actor, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, and “suprematist” painter Kazimir Malevich. While many of these artists were denounced as bourgeois obscurantists when the dogmas of socialist realism became their own instruments of political control, for several years, the nascent Communist state produced some of the most forward-thinking art, music, dance, and film the world had yet seen.

That includes some of the first fully synthetic music ever made, created by innovative methods that predated synthesizers by several decades. We’ve likely all heard of the Theremin, for example, invented in 1919 by Soviet engineer Leon Theremin. By the 1930s, other inventive technologists and composers had begun to experiment with oscilloscopes and magnetic tape, cutting or drawing waveforms by hand to create synthetic sounds.

One avant-garde Soviet composer, Arseny Avraamov became inspired by the advent of sound recording technology in film. The process of optical sound uses an audio track recorded on a separate negative that runs parallel with the film (see it explained above). After the development of this technology, writes Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds, Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy suggested that “a whole new world of abstract sound could be created from experimentation with the optical film sound track.”

Taking up the challenge after the first Russian sound film—1929’s The Five Year Plan—Avraamov “produced (possibly) the first short film with a hand-drawn synthetic soundtrack.” One very short example of his technique, at the top of the post, may not sound like much to us, but it preserves a fascinating technique and a look at what might have been had this technique, and others like it, borne more fruit. Monoskop describes Avraamov as “a composer, music theorist, performance instigator, expert in Caucusian folk music, [and] outspoken critic of the classical twelve-tone system.” He was also the commissar of a ministry set up to encourage “the development of a distinctly proletarian art and literature.” It’s not entirely clear how what he called “ornamental sound” techniques fit that purpose. But along with innovators like Evgeny Sholpo and Nikolai Voinov—whose fascinating experiments you can hear above and below—Avraamov showed that technologies generally used to deliver entertainment and propaganda to passive mass audiences could be manipulated by hand to create something entirely unique.

The experiments of these sound pioneers perhaps held little appeal for the average Russian, but they were enthusiastically written up in a 1936 issue of American magazine Modern Mechanix. “Voinov and Avraamov,” notes Gallagher, “briefly formed a research institute in Moscow, where they hoped to create synthetic voices and understand the musical language of geometric shapes. It didn’t last and, alas, closed within a year.”

via @WFMU/Dangerous Minds

Soviet Inventor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Early Electronic Instrument That Could Be Played Without Being Touched (1954)

Eight Free Films by Dziga Vertov, Creator of Soviet Avant-Garde Documentaries

Watch Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Surviving Film, The Lady and the Hooligan (1918)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Helen Keller Had Impeccable Handwriting: See a Collection of Her Childhood Letters

in Education, History, Letters, Life | October 3rd, 2016

Image by Flickr, courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind

The inspirational blind and deaf activist and educator Helen Keller learned to speak aloud, but, to her great regret, never clearly.

Her careful penmanship, above, is another matter. Her impeccably rendered upright hand puts that of a great many sighted people—not all of them physicians—to shame.

Keller learned to write—and read—with the help of embossed books as a student at Perkins School for the Blind. The United States didn’t adopt Standard Braille as its official system for blind readers and writers until 1918, when Keller was in her late 30’s. Prior to that blind readers and writers were subjected to a number of competing systems, a situation she decried as “absurd.”

Some of these systems had their basis in the Roman alphabet, including Boston Line Type, the brainchild of Perkins’ Founding Director, Samuel Gridley Howe, an opponent of Braille. Students may have preferred dot-based systems for taking notes and writing letters, but Boston Line Type remained Perkins’ approved printing system until 1908.

There’s more than an echo of Boston Line Type in Keller’s blocky characters, as well as her spacing. Deviating from penmanship forms learned at school is a luxury exclusive to the sighted. Until formation became instinctual, Keller relied on a grooved board to help her size her characters correctly, an exhausting process. Small wonder that she ended many of her early letters with “I am too tired to write more.”

Perkins has published a Flickr album of letters Keller wrote between the ages of 8 and 11 to then-director Michael Anagnos, including 3 pages in French. Leafing through them, I marveled less at her ability and determination than my (sighted) 16-year-old son’s lack of interest in developing a respectable-looking hand.

Keller’s handwriting is so above reproach that it quickly fades to the background, upstaged by her charming manners and girlish preoccupations. A sample:

If you go to Roumania, please ask the good queen Elizabeth about her little invalid brother and tell her that I am very sorry that her darling little girl died. I should like to send a kiss to Vittorio, the little prince of Naples, but teacher says she is afraid you will not remember so many messages.

Browse Perkins’ collection of Keller’s handwritten letters to Michael Anagnos here.

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties

“A Glorious Hour”: Helen Keller Describes The Ecstasy of Feeling Beethoven’s Ninth Played on the Radio (1924)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and winemaker who played Annie Sullivan in her high school’s production of The Miracle Worker. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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H.G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Silliest Film”

in Film, Sci Fi | October 3rd, 2016

When we watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis now, we see an aesthetically daring landmark work of science-fiction cinema. When H.G. Wells watched Metropolis back in 1927, the year of its release, he saw something very different indeed. “I have recently seen the silliest film,” wrote the author of The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine as an opener for his New York Times review. “I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier.”

Despite its giant budget, Metropolis gives “in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general, served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.” History remembers Lang and Wells both as visionaries who looked, often with little optimism, to the future, but clearly they had a difference of opinion as to how that future would actually play out.

The scientifically-minded Wells took the impressionistic Metropolis literally, taking issue with — among other things — how its airplanes “show no advance on contemporary types”; its “motor cars are 1926 models or earlier”; its vision of a vertically stratified city look, “to put it mildly, highly improbable”; the apparent condition that the city’s “machines are engaged quite furiously in the mass production of nothing that is ever used”; and the sentimentality of its makers, “who are all on the side of soul and love and such like.”

Metropolis opened to mixed reviews at first (some of which you can read here), but no contemporary critic could match Wells for sheer disdain. “Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; never for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary series of strained events,” he wrote, steering his point-by-point takedown to its conclusion. “It is immensely and strangely dull. It is not even to be laughed at.”

Strong stuff, but the highest form of film criticism, as the French New Wave would later articulate, is filmmaking. And so, in 1936, came Things to Come, another cinematic spectacle of the future, this one built to the ostensibly more plausible specifications Wells laid out as its screenwriter — that film itself just one more predecessor to the unending series of dystopias, utopias, and every kind of future in-between to appear on the screen over the next eight decades.

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metropolis (1927)

Things to Come, the 1936 Sci-Fi Film Written by H.G. Wells, Accurately Predicts the World’s Very Dark Future

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Hear a Playlist of the 336 Songs Mentioned in Bruce Springsteen’s New Memoir, Born to Run

in Books, Music | September 30th, 2016

Image by Michele Lucon, via Wikimedia Commons

FYI: Earlier this week, Bruce Springsteen released his highly-anticipated memoir, Born to Run. It comes accompanied by a companion album, Chapter and Verse. And now a Spotify playlist that features every single song referenced in the pages of the book–his own or others’. There’s lots of Springsteen–most of his discography, in fact–but also great tracks from Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, Cream, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and more. If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here. Then settle in and enjoy 22 hours of music. You can start streaming the music below:

For anyone interested, the novelist Richard Ford has a review of Born to Run (the autobiography) in The New York Times. Ford’s Bascombe trilogy appears on Springsteen’s List of His 20 Favorite Books.

Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? 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.

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Heat Mapping the Rise of Bruce Springsteen: How the Boss Went Viral in a Pre-Internet Era

Springsteen’s Favorite Books & Reading List

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A Complete List of the 533 Movies & TV Shows Watched on the International Space Station

in Film, Television | September 30th, 2016

Image courtesy of NASA

To keep some measure of sanity, the astronauts living aboard the International Space Station (ISS), some 220 miles above our planet Earth, make a point of unwinding. According to NASA, the astronauts get weekends off. And, “on any given day, crew members can watch movies, play music, read books, play cards and talk to their families.” Earlier this year, PaleoFuture gave us a further glimpse into what astronaut downtime looks like, when its editor, Matt Novak, printed a Complete List of Movies and TV Shows On Board the International Space Station. Acquired through a Freedom of Information request, the list is a catalogue of every film and TV show in the ISS media library. As Matt notes, there are many classics (e.g. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest), “plenty of space-themed and dystopian sci-fi movies” (2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Blade Runner), and a helpful serving of comedy (Airplane). Below, you can find the first 100 items on the list. Get the complete list–all 533 movies and TV shows–at Paleofuture.

1941
12 Monkeys
12 Years a Slave
2 Fast 2 Furious
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2001: A Space Odyssey
21 Jump Street
24 (Seasons 1–8)
48 Hours
8 Mile
A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Story
A Knights Tale
A Man and a Woman
A Night at the Opera
A Night at the Roxbury
A Perfect Murder
A Prairie Home Companion
A Room with a View
Absolutely Fabulous (Series 1–3)
Air Force One
Airplane
Alias Season 1
Alien
Alien 3
Alien Resurrection
Aliens
All Good Things
Along Came Polly
Always
American Gangster
American Sniper
American Wedding
An American in Paris
An Article of Hope
Analyze This
Anchorman
Anchorman 2
Animal House (1978)
Argo
Armageddon
Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
Around the World in 80 Days (2004)
Arrow Season 1
Arsenic and Old Lace
As Good as it Gets
Austin Powers International Man of Mystery
Austin Powers The Spy Who Shagged Me
Australia
Avatar
Baby Mama
Back to Bataan
Back to the Future
Back to the Future Part II
Back to the Future Part III
Backdraft
Band of Brothers Season 1
Bataan
Batman Forever
Batman Returns
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
Battle of Britain
Battleship
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Ben-Hur
Better Call Saul Season 1
Beverly Hills Cop II
Beverly Hills Cop III
Big Bang Theory (Seasons 1–8)
Big Eyes
Big Jake
Billy Jack
Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance
Black Hawk Down
Black Mask
Black Swan
Blade Runner
Blazing Saddles Blended
Blue Planet Frozen Seas
Blue Planet Ocean World
Blues Brothers
Bob Newhart Button-Down Concert
Body of Lies
Braveheart
Breaking Bad Seasons 1–6
Bridesmaids
Bull Durham
Caddyshack
Cahill United States Marshal
Captain America: The First Avenger
Captain America: The Winter Soldier Captain Phillips
Casablanca
Cast Away
Catch-22
Celtic Woman Songs from the Heart
Chance Are
Chariots of Fire
Charlie St Cloud
Children of Men
Chisum

Find the complete list of 533 films and TV shows here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Everything You Wanted to Know About Going to the Bathroom in Space But Were Afraid to Ask

If Astronauts Cry in Space, Will Their Tears Fall?

William Shatner Puts in a Long Distance Call to Astronaut Aboard the International Space Station

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Chris Rock Creates a List of His 13 Favorite Standup Comedy Specials

in Comedy | September 30th, 2016

We know Ellen DeGeneres as the superstar host of her own talk show and the voice of cuddly, forgetful fish Dory. No doubt many of her younger fans have no idea she was a standup comic, before The Ellen DeGeneres Show, before even the 90s sitcom Ellen, which mostly gets mentioned for the “coming out” episode that supposedly ended her career almost two decades ago. But even if all the TV and movie stardom had never come her way, comedians like Chris Rock might still remember Ellen as one of their favorite standup comics.

Rock adds DeGeneres to his list of “Favorite Standup Specials” for her 2003 HBO performance Here and Now, which you can see in part above. “Most comics just talk about what they see,” he writes, “This is the first time I heard somebody talk about what they felt.” Ellen works clean, and in that respect she’s in a minority on Rock’s list (she’s also the only woman). Even the comedian Rock compares to Andy Griffith— “Blue Collar” comic Ron White—gets a raunchy asterisk next to that reference. And indeed, he’s both down home and dirty. So what connects the comedians on Rock’s list?

Aside from the fact that they’re all big names, not much, it seems. In choosing these 13 specials, Rock seems drawn not to a particular genre or brand of humor, but to the skillful, moving performance of comedy: dirty, clean, political, topical, observational—it’s all good as long as it’s funny. A good comic can make ‘em laugh by riffing on the mundane annoyances of daily life, or by telling uncomfortable truths with a smile like Dave Chappelle, above, whose special Killin’ Them Softly also appears on Rock’s list of favorites.

Like Rock, Chappelle knows his comedy history, and fans of The Chappelle Show know too—at least when it comes to the legendary Paul Mooney, a comedian’s comedian and onetime writer for Richard Pryor. Mooney’s special Jesus is Black. So Was Cleopatra. Know Your History makes the list for “more edge than anything you are ever going to see.” And his onetime boss Pryor gets top billing for the “perfect” Live in Concert 1979—“what every comic is striving for,” says Rock, “and we all fall very short.”

Speaking of truth-tellers, the great George Carlin makes the list for his special Jammin’ in New York. Carlin spared no one, and comedians love him for it, even if few people have the courage or the wit to do what he did. Rock has come close, with routines that make people laugh as they squirm in their seats. His delivery is all his own, but we can see Carlin’s bristling social critique in his act as much as Richard Pryor’s riffs on race and sex.

Other big names on the list include Steve Harvey, Eddie Murphy, the-once-beloved Bill Cosby, George Lopez (“the Mexican Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby at the same time”), and even Andrew Dice Clay for his The Day the Laughter Died, “a comedy album only a comedian could love.”

But it isn’t solely about laughter or candor for Rock; as he noted in his Ellen pick, it’s also about feeling, and in the case of one special, Billy Crystal’s one-man-show 700 Sundays, the comedy sits side-by-side with pathos. Drawn from a bittersweet autobiography of the same title, Crystal’s show premiered in 2004 and was revived in 2013 and filmed by HBO (trailer above). “Brilliant, touching and f*cking funny,” says Rock, “First time in my life I cried at a comedy show.”

Rounding out the list is Sam Kinison, whose unforgettably unhinged role in Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School brought thousands of curious new fans to his classic album Louder than Hell. “The last original comic,” says Rock. “Most comics are derivatives of Pryor, Cosby, or Seinfeld. Sam reminded you of Billy Graham.” I’d say he was more Jimmy Swaggart, if Jimmy Swaggart screamed obscenities at starving children. See Rock’s full list below.

Richard Pryor Live In Concert 1979

Paul Mooney: Jesus Is Black. So Was Cleopatra

Dave Chappelle: Killin’ Them Softly

Eddie Murphy: Delirious

Bill Cosby: Himself

George Carlin: Jammin’ in New York

George Lopez: America’s Mexican

Steve Harvey: One Man

Billy Crystal: 700 Sundays

Andrew Dice Clay: The Day the Laughter Died

Ron White: They Call Me Tater Salad

Ellen DeGeneres: Here and Now

Sam Kinison: Louder Than Hell

via Austin Kleon

Steve Martin & Robin Williams Riff on Math, Physics, Einstein & Picasso in a Heady Comedy Routine (2002)

Bill Hicks’ 12 Principles of Comedy

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How the Coen Brothers Storyboarded Blood Simple Down to a Tee (1984)

in Film | September 30th, 2016

Seldom, in the films of the Joel and Ethan Coen, do characters’ schemes go according to plan. You can watch it happen all across their filmography: the baby theft in Raising Arizona, the own-wife kidnapping and ransom in Fargo, the casino-vault tunnel heist in The Ladykillers, the Communist conversion of a screen idol in Hail, Caesar! But they’ve earned their enormous cinematic reputation not just for their themes, but for the precision with which they construct movies around them; it sometimes seems that the more dissolute the characters and ultimately disastrous the plot they fall into, the more carefully-made the picture.

This pattern began in 1984 with their first feature, the Texas neo-noir Blood Simple. Despite its relatively small-scale production (especially by the standards of their period piece-heavy recent work), it showcases every element their fans love: the sense of place, the sharp dialogue, the fascination with “low” life, the dark humor, the attention to detail.

No wonder, then, that it has now arrived in the Criterion Collection, in an edition which includes supplementary materials like the comparison between the storyboard and finished scene above, featuring commentary from the Coens Joel and Ethan both, as well as director of photography Barry Sonnenfeld and actor Frances McDormand.

“There are directors who are completely comfortable extemporizing on the set, and others who are not,” say Joel and Ethan, trading off observations. “Some directors want to throw everything up in the air and just see where it lands; that’s really how they work, fundamentally, and get great results. We’re kind of the… other end of the spectrum. We’re more comfortable if we have a plan, even if we stray quite a distance from that plan while we’re shooting.” They seem not to have strayed at all in the particular scene in this video, but their filmography boasts more than enough vitality to rule out the possibility of complete, control-freakish rigidity. All of it shows us how the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry — but only because the Coen Brothers lay even better plans first.

via No Film School

Watch the Coen Brothers’ TV Commercials: Swiss Cigarettes, Gap Jeans, Taxes & Clean Coal

Tuileries: A Short, Slightly Twisted Film by Joel and Ethan Coen

World Cinema: Joel and Ethan Coen’s Playful Homage to Cinema History

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

When an Octopus Caused the Great Staten Island Ferry Disaster (November 22, 1963)

in Art, Comedy, History, Life | September 30th, 2016

Where were you on November 22, 1963?

I had yet to be born, but am given to understand that the events of that day helped shape a generation.

Documentarian Melanie Juliano knows this too, though she’s still a few months shy of the legal drinking age. The 2014 recipient of the New Jersey Filmmakers of Tomorrow Festival’s James Gandolfini Best of Fest Award uses primary sources and archival footage to bring an immediacy to this dark day in American history, the day a giant octopus—“a giant fuckin’ octopus” in the words of maritime expert Joey Fazzino—took down the Cornelius G. Kolff and all 400 hundred souls aboard.

What did you think I was talking about, the Kennedy assassination?

Image via the Facebook page of the Staten Island Ferry Octopus Disaster Memorial Museum

Those who would question this tragedy’s authenticity need look no further than a recently dedicated bronze memorial in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park. To require more proof than that is unseemly, nay, cruel. If an estimated 90% of tourists stumbling across the site are willing to believe that a giant octopus laid waste to a Manhattan-bound Staten Island ferry several hours before John F. Kennedy was shot, who are you to question?

The memorial’s artist, Joe Reginella, of the Staten Island-based Super Fun Company, is finding it hard to disengage from a disaster of this magnitude. Instead the craftsman, whose previous work includes a JAWS tribute infant crib, lingers nearby, noting visitors’ reactions and handing out literature for the (non-existent) Staten Island Ferry Disaster Memorial Museum.

(New York 1 reports that an actual museum across the street from the address listed on Reginella’s brochures is not amused, though attendance is up.)

A Staten Island Octopus Disaster website is there for the edification of those unable to visit in person. Spend time contemplating this horrific event and you may come away inspired to learn more about the General Slocum disaster of 1904, a real life New York City ferry boat tragedy, that time has virtually erased from the public consciousness.

(The memorial for that one is located in an out of the way section of Tompkins Square Park.)

H/T to reader Scott Hermes/via Colossal

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Benedict Cumberbatch Sing Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” with David Gilmour Live on Stage

in Music | September 29th, 2016

Around here, when we talk about Benedict Cumberbatch, we usually talk about his knack for reading classic texts–Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Melville’s Moby-Dick, a poignant letter by Alan Turing, even passages from a Guantánamo prisoner’s diary. But today we’re putting another one of his talents on display.

Above, watch Cumberbatch join David Gilmour live on stage to perform Pink Floyd’s 1979 song, “Comfortably Numb.” The performance took place last night at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Enjoy.

Note: You can download free audiobooks read by Benedict Cumberbatch if you sign up for a 30-Day Free Trial with Audible .com. That includes readings of Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen and Neil Gaiman. Find more information on Audible’s Free Trial program here.

via Rolling Stone

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Hear Lost Recording of Pink Floyd Playing with Jazz Violinist Stéphane Grappelli on “Wish You Were Here”

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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Watch Benedict Cumberbatch Sing Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” with David Gilmour Live on Stage

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