To get you ready for the new season of Better Call Saul, the show’s creators have put out a faux employee training video from the proprietor of Los Pollos Hermanos, Gustavo Fring. You know Gus from Breaking Bad, and something tells me you’ll be meeting him again in Season 3 of the prequel. It airs next Monday (4/10) at 10pm on AMC. Enjoy.
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Note: There are a few not-safe-for-work scenes in the film.
The world of music video was in its infancy in the late 1970s. MTV had yet to exist, and promotional films for singles were seen as useful for the times when a show couldn’t book a band to play live, or the band just didn’t play live any more. Into this world fell many a commercial director, used to the promotion side of the promo film business. But there were also directors like Derek Jarman, the punkest of UK directors at that time. This new format paid the bills in between features, and let him experiment.
Though he would go on to work with the Pet Shop Boys and The Smiths, Jarman’s first promo video is above, for three songs from Marianne Faithfull’s masterpiece of a new wave album, Broken English(1979).
Faithfull had been out of the public eye for years, having spent a lot of the ’70 trying to kick her drug habit. The anger and cynicism of this album, her cracked but commanding voice, and the electronic sounds were such that many forget she released two other “comeback albums” before this one. On Broken English she forcefully rewrites her own history as an artist, not content to be seen as a drug casualty or Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend.
Jarman was known at the time as the controversial filmmaker of both the homoerotic Sebastiane and the anti-Royal Jubilee, which more than any film at the time encapsulated the UK punk scene. It’s both brutal and romantic and charmingly D.I.Y.
The Broken English promo film features three songs, bracketed by black and white footage of Faithfull wandering around London and playing Space Invaders in a local arcade. The first, “Witch’s Song,” is the closest to Jarman’s short films during that period: languid, ambiguously gendered young people, apocalyptic dockside ruins, reflected mirrors, occultism and debauchery. The second, “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” features scenes of domesticity double exposed and/or projected over footage of Faithfull. The final one, for the title track, is a short collage of 20th century fascism and carnage, featuring Hitler, Mussolini, Oswald Mosley, British strikes, and self-immolated monks.
The two artists got along so well that she recorded the theme song for his film The Last of England, featuring a very young Tilda Swinton.
Both Jarman and Faithfull went on to successfully reinvent themselves, but for the 21st century viewer, they are also both worth rediscovering.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
A fascinating 20th century literary strain, “documentary poetics,” melds journalistic accounts, photography, official texts and memos, politics, and scientific and technical writing with lyrical and literary language. Perhaps best exemplified by Muriel Rukeyser, the category also includes, at certain times, James Agee, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and—currently—Claudia Rankine and “powerhouse” new poet Solmaz Sharif. It does not include Edgar Allan Poe, famously alcoholic 19th century master of the macabre and “father of the detective story.”
But you’ll forgive me for thinking, excitedly, that it just might, when I learned Poe had published a text called The Conchologist’s First Book (1839), a condensation, rearrangement, and “remixing,” as Rebecca Onion writes atSlate, of “an existing… beautiful and expensive” science textbook, Thomas Wyatt’s Manual of Conchology, including the original plates and a “new preface and introduction.”
My mind reeled: what wondrous horrors might the morose, romantic Poe have contributed to such an enterprise, his best-selling work, it turns out, in his lifetime. (For which Poe was paid $50 and, typically, received no royalties). What kind of experimental madness might these covers contain?
As I might have assumed from the book’s total obscurity, Poe’s writerly contributions to the project were meager. For all his genius as a storyteller, he could be a long-winded bore as an essayist. It seems he thought this aspect of his voice was best suited to the original writing he did for Conchologist’s First. His biographers, notes University of Houston professor emeritus John H. Lienhard, all “mutter an embarrassed apology for Poe’s shady side-track—then hurry back to talk about The Raven.” Onion quotes one biographer Jeffrey Meyers, who writes, “Poe’s boring pedantic and hair-splitting Preface was absolutely guaranteed to torment and discourage even the most passionately interested schoolboy.”
As for its “shadiness,” the book also elicits embarrassment from Poe devotees because, as esteemed biologist and historian of science Stephen J. Gould wrote in his exculpatory essay “Poe’s Greatest Hit,” it was “basically a scam,” though “not so badly done” as most allege. The naturalist Wyatt, a friend of Poe’s, had begged his publisher to release an abridged student edition of his original lavish and pricey $8 textbook, which had not sold well. When the publisher balked, Wyatt contracted Poe to lend his name and considerable editorial skill to a more-or-less bootleg “CliffsNotes” version to be sold for $1.50. To make matters worse, Poe and Wyatt were both accused of plagiarism, having “lifted chunks of their book from an English naturalist, Thomas Brown,” Lienhard points out.
Gould defended Poe as a rewriter of others’ work. “Yes, Poe plagiarized,” as Lienhard summarizes the argument. He presented Brown’s, and Wyatt’s, work as his own, but, “fluent in French, [he] went back to read Georges Cuvier, the great French naturalist” and made his own translations. He wrote his own introductory material, and he reorganized Wyatt’s book in such a way as to provide “genuinely useful insight into biological taxonomy.” Poe’s edition—with its “formidable subtitle,” A System of Testaceous Malacology, arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools—actually proved a hit with students, and likely not only because it sold cheap. It was the only publication in Poe’s lifetime to make it to a second edition.
Maybe humanist readers approach the work with biases firmly in place, expecting a genre that’s dry by its very nature to contain all the literary brilliance and entertaining intrigue of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Lienhard suggests as much, describing irritation at how his “literary friends” ignore the scientific work of writers like Thoreau, Thomas Paine, Goethe, and poet Oliver Goldsmith. “Poe’s excursion into natural philosophy,” he writes, “was an embarrassment to people who are embarrassed by science in the first place.” Maybe.
Both Gould and Lienhard shrug off the less-than-scrupulous circumstances of the book’s creation, the latter citing a “cynical remark” by playwright Wilson Mizner: “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism. If you steal from many, it’s research.” At least he doesn’t go as far as Mark Twain, who once wrote in defense of Helen Keller, after she was charged with literary borrowing, “the kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterance—is plagiarism.”
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Can comedy be taught? The question has no clear answer, but if it can, Steve Martin would surely occupy the highest rank of comedy teachers. He could probably teach a fair few other crafts as well: besides his achievements as an innovator in stand-up as well as in other forms of comedy — famously appearing on Saturday Night Live so many times that even some of his fans mistake him for a regular cast member — he’s also established himself as an actor, as an essayist and novelist, and even as a respected bluegrass banjo player. Still, despite his impressive artistic Renaissance-man credentials many of us, at the mere mention of Steve Martin’s name, laugh almost reflexively.
Hence his place at the front and center of “Steve Martin Teaches Comedy,” a new online course from Masterclass, the education startup whose faculty roster, as we’ve previously featured, also includes the likes of Werner Herzog and Aaron Sorkin. “We’re going to talk about a lot of things,” says Martin in the course’s trailer above. “We’re going to talk about my specific process, performing comedy, we’re going to talk about writing.” For a cost of $90, Masterclass provides more than 25 video lessons, a downloadable workbook with supplemental lesson materials, and an opportunity to upload your own material for critiques by the rest of the class as well as maybe — just maybe — by Martin himself.
Whether or not a master comedian can pass along his knowledge as a math or a language teacher can, anyone who’s paid attention to Martin’s comedy so far, as well as his reflections on comedy, can sense how much intellectual energy he’s put into figuring it all out, even at its extremes of absurdity, for himself. Students unwilling to follow suit need not apply, nor those worried about landing agents and getting headshots, for the esteemed instructor makes it clear up front that he grapples only with the most important question in comedy, as in life: “How do I be good?” You can sign up here. Or you can purchase an All-Access Annual Pass for every course in the MasterClass catalog.
Smack in the middle of Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon sits a song many listeners may hear as an extended bridge between the two true centerpieces, “Time” and “Money.” But I’ve always thought of “The Great Gig in the Sky” as the album’s true center, a swirling, swinging, soulful prog-rock masterpiece, carried to stratospheric heights by British singer Clare Torry. The song’s wordless gospel vocal makes it an ecstatic, even hopeful, tent pole supporting Dark Side’s brilliantly cynical songs about the banality and injustice of modern life.
“The Great Gig in the Sky,” that is to say, provides much-needed emotional release in an album that can sound, writes Alexis Petridis, “like one long sigh.” Yet if you know the story of Dark Side of the Moon and of Clare Torry’s defining contribution, you’ll know that her incredible soaring vocal was sheer happenstance, an improvisation by a young unknown singer brought in at the last minute by producer Alan Parsons—and one who wasn’t a particular fan of the band. (“If it had been The Kinks,” she remembered, “I’d have been over the moon.”)
Torry reluctantly stepped into the studio and asked the band, “’Well, what do you want?’” Basically, she says, “they had no idea.” An early instrumental mix of the song from 1972 (top), foregrounds Nick Mason’s propulsive drums, Richard Wright’s Hammond organ, and samples from Apollo 17 transmissions. (These were replaced in the final version with a snippet from conservative writer Malcolm Muggeridge.)
When Torry went into the vocal booth and put on the headphones, she would have heard an even more stripped-down mix. Given no other instruction than “we don’t want any words,” she decided, “I have to pretend to be an instrument.”
Torry’s vocal is so distinctive that she eventually won a settlement in 2004 for a co-songwriting credit with Wright—an outcome some songwriting experts agree was fully justified since she essentially created a new melody for the song. In the interview above, hear Torry describe how she “had a little go” and, after some guidance from David Gilmour and a can of Heineken, casually knocked out one of the most thrilling vocal performances in rock history.
Pretty cool item. A new exhibition in New York, called “Gulliver’s Gate,” shrinks the world’s most famous sites–everything from the Taj Mahal to The Great Wall of China–into miniature versions of themselves, roughly 87 times smaller than the original. In the video above, you can take a 360 degree tour of parts of the exhibition. Click on the clip, swirl around, and check out the tiny creations. It’s particularly neat if you try it on your phone.
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No scene in a movie counts for as much as its opening, but even before its first frame passes through the projector, its poster has already made the real first impression. This remains basically as true in the era of digital cinema as it was when film actually passed through projectors. But while filmmakers only occasionally go back and retool their past works — not that the experience of, say, George Lucas and the original Star Wars trilogy vouches for the practice — film posters can easily undergo any number of revisions through the decades. What cinephile graphic designer wouldn’t want to take a shot at creating a new face for a favorite movie?
Last year, the Sydney-based designer Peter Majarich took shots at 365 of them, creating one new poster for an existing movie each and every day. “The feat is a huge undertaking,” writes the Creators Project’s Diana Shi, “but Majarich’s final products never give the impression of last-minute creations; instead, they show off an acute attention to detail and a bold, digital-influenced style. The inventiveness of each poster reveals how much of a cinephile Majarich really is.” His selections include “a pool of zeitgeist directors, Oscar winners, and art-house films with cult followings.
A rendering of De Palma’s Scarface is a subtle assembly of white powder to starkly draw out Al Pacino’s profile. While what looks like a body of complex coding language forms the blank-staring face of Alicia Vikander’s lead in Ex Machina.” You can browse all these at A Movie Poster a Day, see them displayed in sequence in the video above, and buy them on his design company’s site.
Their simultaneous aesthetic and cinematic references will please design- and film-lovers alike (groups hardly separate on the Venn diagram anyway), and while many constitute good visual gags, the best provide new perspectives on even much-watched favorite movies.
For Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Majarich depicts the emotional submersion of its seafaring protagonist; for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigohe works only with the title itself imbuing the type with the combination of shock and dread on display in the film; for David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive he uses a pink-skied landscape of the titular Los Angeles road leading off, as Lynch’s work often does, to who knows where. After you’ve seen the first 286, you’ll come upon a selection that will hardly surprise you: Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica.
NOTE: As of July 22, we updated this post to include the videos from the class sessions. Watch the playlist of lectures above.
I have my doubts about whether we should call regular acts of civic duty “resistance,” rather than Constitutionally-protected democratic freedoms. Yesterday we remembered Martin Luther King, Jr. on the 49th anniversary of his assassination (and the 50th anniversary of his speech opposing the Vietnam War). As King and countless other civil rights and anti-war campaigners have demonstrated—some at the cost of their lives—civil disobedience is very often required and morally justified when legal appeals for justice fail. But for better or worse, “The Resistance” has become a catch-all media term for a loose and very often fractious collection of mainstream Democrats, progressives, and radicals of all stripes, whose tactics range from polite phone lobbying to brawling with white supremacists in the streets.
Millions of people who formerly had little to no involvement in politics have thrown themselves into activism, and veteran organizers have been overwhelmed with new recruits. Just as quickly, those organizers have met the challenge by disseminating guides for lobbying representatives, running for office, and participating in more direct forms of action.
Every movement has its resident scholars and educators, whether they be erudite laypeople, professional academics, or enterprising college students. A group from the latter category, “progressive students,” writes CNN, from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, begin today what they’re calling “Resistance School,” a “4‑week course in anti-Trump activism… open to people across the country and the world.” (You can watch the video from the course above.)
The Resistance School is sure to attract criticism, not only from the expected sources but from more anti-establishment factions on the left. But that may be unlikely to deter the more than 10,000 people who have registered for the first class. Organizers have encouraged people to attend in groups, and currently have about 3,000 groups enrolled. “Some are coming with groups of 700 people,” says co-founder Shanoor Seervai, “some are smaller groups, potlucks, gathering in people’s kitchens.”
Servaai and fellow Kennedy School students have been taken aback and are now, writes CNN, “grappling with questions of scale.” How, they wonder, will such large numbers of people coordinate; how to measure the impact of the program?.… questions, perhaps, they will resolve by the fourth session, “How to Sustain the Resistance Long-Term.” But they’re certainly not alone in trying to steer a massive surge of new interest in activism and electoral politics. As the millions now planning and participating in civil actions across the country attest, people have begun to take to heart sentiments recently expressed by organizer Alice Marshall: “If we wait for some great leader to save us we are lost. We have to save ourselves.”
In 1979, French theorist Jean-François Lyotard declared the end of all “grand narratives”—every “theory or intellectual system,” as Blackwell’s dictionary defines the term, “which attempts to provide a comprehensive explanation of human experience and knowledge.” The announcement arrived with all the rhetorical bombast of Nietzsche’s “God is Dead,” sweeping not only theology into the dustbin but also overarching scientific theories, Freudian psychology, Marxism, and every other “totalizing” explanation. But as Lyotard himself explained in his book The Postmodern Condition, the loss of universal coherence—or the illusion of coherence—had taken decades, a “transition,” he wrote, “under way since at least the end of the 1950s.”
We might date the onset of Postmodernism and the end of “master narratives” even earlier—to the devastation at the end of World War II and the appearance of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenmentand of Roland Barthes’ slim volume Mythologies, a collection of essays written between 1954 and 56 in which the French literary theorist and cultural critic put to work his understanding of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics.
As a result of reading the Swiss linguist, Barthes wrote in a preface to the 1970 edition of his book, he had “acquired the conviction that by treating ‘collective representations’ as a sign-systems, one might hope to go further than the pious show of unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.”
While generally lumped into the category of “structuralist” thinkers, as opposed to “post-structuralists” like Lyotard, Barthes nonetheless paved the way for a particularly French mistrust of “petit-bourgeois culture” and its populist spectacles and all-knowing talking heads. He was an opponent of totalizing narratives just as he was “an unrelenting opponent of French imperialism,” writes Richard Brodyat The New Yorker. Like Adorno and many other post-war European intellectuals, Barthes riffed on Marx’s notion of “false consciousness”—the mental fog produced by dogmatic education, mass media, and popular culture—and applied the idea relentlessly to his analysis of the post-industrial West.
“Barthes’s work on myths,” writes Andrew Robinson at Ceasefire Magazine, “prefigures discourse-analysis in media studies.” He directed his focus to “certain insidious myths… particularly typical of right-wing populism and of the tabloid press.” Barthes though of populist mythology as a “metalanguage” that “removes history from language,” making “particular signs appear natural, eternal, absolute, or frozen” and transforming “history into nature.” Through its normalization, we lose sight of the artifice of cable news, for example, and take for granted its formatting as a universal standard for high seriousness and credibility (as in the portentous signification of “Breaking News”), even when we know we’re being lied to.
The Al Jazeera video at the top of the post asks us to consider the “rhetorical motifs” of such media, which construct “the biggest myth of all: that what we are watching is unmediated reality.” The observation may seem elementary, but Barthes sought to go further than “the pious show of unmasking,” as he wrote. He “would have seen,” the video’s narrator says, “the TV screen as a cultural text, and he would have unveiled its myths,” as he did the myths proffered by wrestling, advertising, popular film and novels, tourism, photography, dining, and other seemingly mundane popular phenomena.
The video above from educational company Macat offers a more formal summary of Barthes’ Mythologies. The French critic and semiotician made significant contributions to literary and critical theory, demonstrating—with the wide-ranging wit and erudition of his humanist countryman Michel de Montaigne—how “dominant ideologies successfully present themselves as simply the way the world should be.” Looking back on his book over twenty years later, after the events in Paris of May 1968, Barthes remarked that the need for “ideological criticism” had been “again made brutally evident.” Indeed, we have ample reason to think that, over sixty years since Barthes published his classic analysis, the need for a rigorously critical view of mass media, advertising, and political spectacle has become more pressing than ever.
Created by Kokichi Sugihara, a math professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, the “Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion” wowed audiences at “the Best Illusion of the Year Contest” in 2016. Here’s the general gist of the illusion:
The direct views of the objects and their mirror images generate quite different interpretations of the 3D shapes. They look like vertical cylinders, but their sections appear to be different; in one view they appear to be rectangles, while in the other view they appear to be circles. We cannot correct our interpretations although we logically know that they come from the same objects. Even if the object is rotated in front of a viewer, it is difficult to understand the true shape of the object, and thus the illusion does not disappear.
So how do those rectangles look like circles, and vice-versa? The video below–if you care to spoil the illusion–will show you. Find more videos from the Illusion Contest here.
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I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t have some gripe about the state of SNL, very often rooted in nostalgia for a simpler, funnier Golden Age. It’s hard not to associate iconic TV shows with lost youth, even shows that have moved on when some of the rest of us haven’t.
The live sketch comedy show, now two years into its fourth decade, has done its best to keep pace with changing times and tastes. While my own fandom has waxed and waned, one thing has remained a constant: my considerable appreciation for the talent and sheer moxie required to stage original live comedy on national television, week after week for forty years.
Comics and celebrity guests risk the disaster of dead air when jokes fall flat. Crewmembers rig up convincing sets only to strike them minutes later for completely different environs. Make-up artists transform Kate McKinnon from the cartoonish Jeff Sessions to the bald, jowly “Shud the Mermaid” in-between sketches, a process that seems to unfold in seconds in the sped-up behind-the-scenes video above.
Sure, everything on the show is scripted and choreographed, and the actors read from cue cards. But as the popular phenomenon of “corpsing”—breaking character by breaking into laughter—shows us, anything can go wrong live with the best-laid plans of writers and directors. The quick-change transition between the cold open and the opening monologue, which both happen on the “home base stage” of studio 8H, as you can see at the top; the rock-solid segues from the live band, below…. The SNL machine depends on every one of its many moving parts to function.
And if—or inevitably when—one of those parts malfunctions, well the show goes on… and on and on and on…. How many seasons does SNL have left in it? Another forty? A possibly infinite number? Given how well its teams of creatives and crew have mastered the art of live televised sketch comedy—not all of it to everyone’s taste, to be sure—it’s possible that Saturday Night Live will outlive even the phenomenon of television, transplanting itself somewhere in our brains in the far future, where we’ll lean back, close our eyes, and hear the saxophones and that familiar, rousing announcement, “Live, from New York….”
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