An Animated David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

in Film, Psychology | September 22nd, 2016

“Where do you get your ideas?” Every artist dreads having to answer that most common of all questions. Well, every artist with the exception of David Lynch. The director of such modern cinematic quasi-nightmares as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive will gladly explain exactly where he gets his ideas: from his own consciousness, “the TV in your mind.”

He’ll also gladly explain how he gets them by, not to mix the metaphor too much, using the folksy terms of fishing: “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.” And to bait the hook with? Why, bits of other ideas. Those words come from his 2006 book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, a slim volume on this and that which gets into some detail about his use of Transcendental Meditation as a kind of fishing pole to reel those especially compelling ideas in from one’s consciousness.

A couple of years after that, Lynch sat down with The Atlantic to talk about his special brand of creativity (as distinct from his special brand of coffee, no doubt also a fuel for thought). They’ve just recently animated his remarks to make the short video above, a visualization of his idea-getting processes, including daydreaming, traveling, and looking into a puddle in the gutter.

“I always say it’s like there’s a man in another room with the whole film together, but they’re in puzzle parts,” says Lynch as hands chop a fish into frames of celluloid. “He’s flipping one piece at a time into me. At first it’s very abstract; I don’t have a clue. More pieces come, more ideas are caught. It starts forming a thing. And then one day, there it is. In a way, there’s no original ideas. It’s just the ideas that you caught.”

The ideas Lynch has caught have become, among other things, some of the most memorable films of the late 20th century — and, according to last month’s BBC poll, the best film of the 21st century so far. What’s more, he claims not to have suffered for them, illustrating his argument of suffering as antithetical to creativity with an imaginary scenario of a diarrhea-afflicted Van Gogh. As for what part of his consciousness he fished that image out of, perhaps we’d rather not know.

Patti Smith and David Lynch Talk About the Source of Their Ideas & Creative Inspiration

David Lynch Explains How Meditation Enhances Our Creativity

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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Build Your Own Miniature Sets from Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Films: My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service & More

in Creativity, Film | September 22nd, 2016

In the Shintoism from which Hayao Miyazaki’s films liberally draw, the worlds of nature and spirit are not mutually exclusive. “Shrine Shinto,” write James Boyd and Tetsuya Nishimura at The Journal of Religion and Film, “understands the whole of life, including both humans and nature, as creative and life giving. A generative, immanent force harmoniously pervades the whole phenomenal world.” But to experience this power “requires an aesthetically pure and cheerful heart/mind, an emotional, mental and volitional condition that is not easily attained.” In My Neighbor Totoro, for example, Miyazaki helps to induce this state in us with long slice-of-life passages that move like gentle breezes through tall grasses and trees. In the apocalyptic sci-fi Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the title character herself takes on the task of harmoniously reconciling man, nature, and mutant insect.

I would argue that Miyazaki’s films are not solely entertainments, but means by which we can experience “an aesthetically pure and cheerful” heart and mind. And although he has retired, we can relive those films “over and over again,” as The Creator’s Project writes, not only by watching them, but by building miniature sets from them, as you see represented here. See My Neighbor Totoro’s old, rustic house in the forest—where Satsuki and Mei come to terms with their mother’s illness while befriending the local nature spirits—get assembled at the top of the post. And just above, see the town of Koriko from Kiki’s Delivery Service take shape, a place that becomes transformed by magic, just as Kiki does by her sorties into the forest.

These kits, made by the Japanese paper craft company Sankei, are “ready to be assembled and glued together, creating your own mini movie set,” The Creator’s Project notes. Previous models include Totoro and his two small companions, above, and the bakery from Kiki; another kit recreates the deserted magical town Chihiro and her parents stumble upon in Spirited Away. The kits don’t come cheap—each one costs around $100—and they take time and skill to assemble, as you see in these videos. But like so many of the important acts in Miyazaki’s films—and like the act of watching those films themselves—we might think of assembling these models as rituals of patience and devotion to aesthetic habits of mind that slow us down and gently nudge us to seek harmony and connection.

via The Creator’s Project

Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Characters Reimagined in the Style of 19th-Century Woodblock Prints

Software Used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Animation Studio Becomes Open Source & Free to Download

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

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Ukulele Orchestra Performs Ennio Morricone’s Iconic Western Theme Song, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” And It’s Pretty Brilliant.

in Film, Music | September 21st, 2016

Last week, Josh Jones highlighted for you a free five-hour playlist featuring Ennio Morricone’s Scores for Classic Western Films. Even if you’re not deeply familiar with Morricone’s body of work, you’ve almost certainly heard the theme to The Good, the Bad & the Ugly–the iconic 1966 Spaghetti western directed by Sergio Leone. Opening with the immediately recognizable two-note melody that sounds like “the howl of a coyote,” the theme was originally recorded with the help of the Unione Musicisti di Roma orchestra.

Above, you can watch another orchestra, The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, pay homage to Morricone’s classic theme. Described by The Guardian as “a cultish British institution” known for its expertly played covers of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the Ukulele Orchestra group scored its biggest hit with this performance. It’s an outtake from the DVD Anarchy in the Ukulele, which you can purchase through The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s website. Enjoy.

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George Harrison Explains Why Everyone Should Play the Ukulele, With Words and Music

Jake Shimabukuro Plays “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the Uke

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W.E.B. Du Bois Creates Revolutionary, Artistic Data Visualizations Showing the Economic Plight of African-Americans (1900)

in Data, Design, History | September 21st, 2016

Few people have done more to accurately foresee and help shape the century ahead of them as W.E.B. Du Bois. And perhaps few intellectuals from the early twentieth century still have as much critical relevance to our contemporary global crises. Du Bois’ incisive sociology of racism in The Souls of Black Folk, Black Reconstruction in America, and his articles for the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, remained rooted in a transcontinental awareness that anticipated globalism as it critiqued tribalism. Du Bois, who studied in Berlin and traveled widely in Europe, Africa, and Latin America, also became one of the most influential of Pan-Africanist thinkers, uniting the anti-colonial concerns of African and Caribbean nations with the post-Reconstruction issues of Black Americans.

In 1900, Du Bois attended the First Pan-African Conference, held in London at Westminster Hall just prior to the Paris Exhibition. Attendees presented papers on “the African origins of human civilization,” writes Ramla Bandele at Northwestern’s Global Mappings, on African self-government, and on the imperial aggression of European countries (including the host country). Du Bois arrived armed with what might have seemed like a dull offering to some: a collection of statistics. But not just any collection of statistics. Though they’re now an often banal staple of our everyday working lives, his presentation used then-innovative charts and graphs to condense his data into a powerful set of images.

Once again anticipating global trends of over a century hence, the activist and sociology professor at Atlanta University created around 60 eye-catching data visualizations, “charts and maps,” writes the blog All My Eyes, “hand drawn and colored at the turn of the 19th century” by Du Bois and his students.

For audiences at the time, these must have packed the evidentiary punch that Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” have recently. Du Bois and his students’ charts show us—as the first “slide” at the top of the post notes—“the condition of the descendants of former African slaves now resident in the United States of America.”

The collection of infographics, Danny Lewis argues at The Smithsonian, “is just as revolutionary now as it was when it was first created,” for an exhibit Du Bois organized with a lawyer named Thomas J. Calloway and his occasional rival Booker T. Washington. “This was less than half a century after the end of American slavery,” writes Allison Meier at Hyperallergic, “and at a time when human zoos displaying people from colonized countries in replicas of their homes were still common.” In the U.S., the grotesque stereotypes of blackface minstrels provided the primary depiction of African-American life.

“Du Bois’ students,” writes data blog Seeing Complexity, “made a radical decision when they visualized the economic plight of a group explicitly excluded from statistical analysis and thus hidden from international attention.” The level of detail—for Du Bois’ time and ours—is overwhelming, reminding us that “the simple act of disseminating information can, in itself, be a radically and potentially transformative act.” In one of Du Bois’ graphic studies, “The Georgia Negro,” he quotes his key line from The Souls of Black Folk, “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” Far too much current data demonstrates that the statement still holds true in the 21st century, as gross disparities in wealth and in the criminal justice system grimly persist, or worsen, along racial lines.

Data may not be as transformative as Du Bois had hoped, but it forces us to confront the reality of the situation—and either rationalize the status quo or seek to change it. One of three parts of the exhibit, The Georgia Negro study was Du Bois’ “most important contribution to the project,” writes Professor Eugene Provenzo in his book on the subject. The charts are truly impressive for their distillation of “an enormous amount of statistical data,” drawn from “sources such as the United States Census, the Atlanta University Reports, and various governmental reports that had been compiled by Du Bois for groups such as the United States Bureau of Labor.” (Much of the data would have gone uncollected were it not for Du Bois’ tireless efforts.)

The charts are also, Provenzo notes, “remarkable in terms of their design,” as you can see for yourself. Du Bois and his students committed to “examining everything,” Meier writes, quoting Slate’s Rebecca Onion, “from the value of household and kitchen furniture to the ‘rise of the negroes from slavery to freedom in one generation.’” And they did so in a way that still looks “strikingly vibrant and modern, almost anticipating the crossing lines of Piet Mondrian or the intersecting shapes of Wassily Kandinsky.” However much their creators had explicitly modernist intentions, these designs also draw from historical techniques in data visualization—from 17th century scientific texts to Florence Nightingale’s revolutionary 19th century epidemiological maps.

You can view and download scans of all the hand-drawn Du Bois’ Pan-African Conference charts and graphs at the Library of Congress. There, you’ll also find other features of the Du Bois/Calloway/Washington Exhibit, including photographs of several African-American men who had “received appointment as clerks in civil service departments… through competitive examinations” and a “hand-lettered description of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute” in Virginia. Du Bois’ description of his project says as much about his sense of Black Nationalism as it does about pride in the progress made a generation after slavery: “an honest straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.”

via Hyperallergic/All My Eyes/Seeing Complexity/Slate

Florence Nightingale Saved Lives by Creating Revolutionary Visualizations of Statistics (1855)

The Art of Data Visualization: How to Tell Complex Stories Through Smart Design

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

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Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketches of Broadacre City (1932)

in Architecture | September 21st, 2016

As much as we admire buildings designed by genius architects, we have to admit that — sometimes, just sometimes — those genius architects themselves can be control freaks. These tendencies manifest with a special clarity when a maker of individual structures turns his mind toward building, or knocking down and re-building, the city as a whole. The Cartesian grid of lookalike towers on the green of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City stand (or rather, the project having gone unbuilt, don’t stand) as perhaps the best-known image of urbanism re-envisioned to suit a single architect’s desires. In response, Frank Lloyd Wright came up with an urban Utopia of his own: Broadacre City.

“Imagine spacious landscaped highways,” Wright wrote in 1932, “giant roads, themselves great architecture, pass public service stations, no longer eyesores, expanded to include all kinds of service and comfort. They unite and separate — separate and unite the series of diversified units, the farm units, the factory units, the roadside markets, the garden schools, the dwelling places (each on its acre of individually adorned and cultivated ground), the places for pleasure and leisure.

All of these units so arranged and so integrated that each citizen of the future will have all forms of production, distribution, self improvement, enjoyment, within a radius of a hundred and fifty miles of his home now easily and speedily available by means of his car or plane.”

Those words appeared in The Disappearing City, a sort of manifesto about Wright’s hope for the industrial metropolis of the early 20th century: that it would go away. He “hated cities,” writes The New Yorker’s Morgan Meis. “He thought that they were cramped and crowded, stupidly designed, or, more often, built without any sense of design at all.” Visitors to 2014’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright and the City could behold not just Wright’s sketches of Broadacre City but a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot model of the (to the architect) ideal place, a re-thinking of the urban with the sensibilities of the rural. Almost eighty years before, 40,000 visitors to Rockefeller Center who first saw the model saw it emblazoned with such straightforward declarations as “No slum,” “No Scum,” and “No traffic problems.”

Nelson Rockefeller supported the idea of Broadacre city, as did Albert Einstein and John Dewey, all of whom signed a petition Wright passed around in its favor in 1943. But “even in the 1930s, urban planners were disgusted by Broadacre,” writes Next City’s Katherine Don. “Its philosophy was deeply individualistic; its layout was conspicuously wasteful. Liberals of the time who emulated the socialist spirit of Europe classified Wright as an anti-government eccentric, which indeed he was.” Matt Novak at Paleofuture describes Wright’s utopia as “ultimately an extension of the things that made him personally comfortable: open spaces, the automobile, and not surprisingly, the architect as master controller.”

Image courtesy of MoMA

Though Wright and Le Corbusier “shared an interest in dismantling the recognizable urban fabric, they had different ideas about what should replace it,” writes City Journal’s Anthony Paletta. The architect of Fallingwater thought it best for the city “not to be rationalized but to be pastoralized. Urban ills were to be diluted by ample helpings of prairie soil.” By the time he died in 1958, a sprawling postwar America had wholeheartedly adopted his “new standard of space measurement — the man seated in his automobile.” But nothing as techno-pastoral paradisiacal as a Broadacre ever came into being, and indeed, the suburbs turned out to grow in a fashion even more haphazard and irrational than the one that so disgusted him in traditional cities. Then again, a true perfectionist — and a true artist — must grow accustomed to such disappointments.

Frank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Creativity, Nature and Religion in Rare 1957 Audio

The Modernist Gas Stations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater Animated

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 75 Free, Classic Audio Books on Spotify: Austen, Joyce, Bukowski, Kafka, Vonnegut, Poe, Shakespeare, Kerouac & More

in Audio Books, Literature | September 20th, 2016

Here’s a little known tip. If you open Spotify, click “Browse” (in the left hand nav), then scroll way down to “Word,” you will find a number of free audiobook collections–readings by Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, and Dylan Thomas; old time crime and sci-fi dramas; a big H.P. Lovecraft compendium and more. But that way of navigating things really only scratches the surface of what Spotify has to offer.

If you rummage around enough, you’ll find many quality recordings–everything from Christopher Lee reading Dracula and Frankenstein, to Kurt Vonnegut reading four of his novels, to a 68-hour playlist of Shakespeare’s plays being performed by legendary actors. We’ve found 75+ recordings in recent months and gradually added them to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. But they seemed worth highlighting and calling to your attention here.

If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here. And if you find any other gems, please list them in the comments below and we’ll add them to our list.

Austen, Jane — Pride and Prejudice — Spotify
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot (Theatrical performance with Bert Lahr) – Spotify
Bukowski, Charles – 4 Hours of Bukowski Readings – Spotify
Bukowski, Charles – Hostage – Spotify
Bukowski, Charles – Master Collection – Spotify
Burroughs, William S. – Call Me Burroughs (his first spoken word album) – Spotify
Burroughs, William S. – Let Me Hang You (posthumous album settting readings of Naked Lunch to music) – Spotify
Carroll, Lewis – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Read by Sir John Gielgud) – Spotify
Carroll, Lewis – Through the Looking Glass (Read by Joan Greenwood, Stanley Holloway) – Spotify

Ciardi, John – As If: Poems New and Selected by John Ciardi (read by the author) –Spotify
Coleridge, Samuel – Poems (Read by Ralph Richardson) – Free Spotify
Collins, Billy – The Best Cigarette (Poetry collection read by the author) – Free Spotify
Collins, Billy – Soap – Spotify
Conan Doyle, Arthur – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (64 Hours of Readings) – Spotify
Dante Alighieri – The Inferno, Cantos I‑VIII (Read by John Ciardi) – Spotify
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe (Read by Nigel Graham)
Dickinson, Emily – Poems & Letters – Spotify
Eliot, T.S. – The Cocktail Party (Performed by Alec Guinness & Cathleen Nesbitt) – Free Spotify
Eliot, T.S. – Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (Read by T.S. Eliot) – Spotify playlist
Eliot, T.S. – T.S. Eliot Reading Poems and Choruses – Spotify
Eliot T.S. — T.S. Eliot Reads the Waste Land — Spotify
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence – A Coney Island of the Mind – Spotify
Frost, Robert – Robert Frost Reads His Poetry – Free Spotify
Ginsberg, Allen — Howl — Spotify
Ginsberg, Allen – First Blues: Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs – Spotify
Ginsberg, Allen – The Last Word on First Blues – Spotify
Ginsberg, Allen – The Lion for Real – Free on Spotify
Ginsberg, Allen – Witchita Vortex Sutra – Spotify
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter – Spotify
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Abridged version read by Christopher Lee) – Spotify
Hesse, Hermann – Siddhartha – Spotify
Hitchcock, Alfred – Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghost Stories for Young People – Spotify
Hughes, Langston – Langston Hughes Reads Langston Hughes – Spotify
Hughes, Langston – The Dream Keeper and Other Poems of Langston Hughes (Read by Hughes) – Spotify
Hughes, Langston – The Glory of Negro History – Spotify
Hughes, Langston – The Voice of Langston Hughes – Spotify
Joyce, James – Dubliners – Free on Spotify
Joyce, James – “The Dead” (Read by Bart Wolffe) – Spotify
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis – Spotify
Kerouac, Jack – 4 Albums with Kerouac Reciting Poetry & Verse – Spotify
Leroux, Gaston – The Phantom of the Opera (Abridged version read by Christopher Lee) – Spotify
Lovecraft, H.P – The Call of of Cthulhu & Other Stories – Spotify
Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick (Abridged version read by Hayward Morse) – Spotify
Miller, Arthur – Readings from The Crucible and Death of a Salesman – Spotify
Nabokov, Vladimir – Vladimir Nabokov Reads from Lolita & Selected Poems – Spotify
Nash, Ogden – Christmas with Ogden Nash – Spotify
Nash, Ogden – Ogden Nash Reads Ogden Nash – Spotify
Neruda, Pablo – Pablo Neruda Lee a Pablo Neruda (in Spanish) – Spotify
Orwell, George – Animal Farm – Spotify
Poe, Edgar Allan – The Essential Edgar Allan Poe – Spotify
Poe, Edgar Allan – The Mask of the Red Death (Read by William S. Burroughs) –Spotify
Prokofiev, Sergei – Peter and the Wolf (Narrated by David Bowie) – Spotify
Sandburg, Carl – A Lincoln Album: Readings by Carl Sandurg – Spotify
Sandburg, Carl – The People Yes – Spotify
Sexton, Anne – What’s That – Spotify
Schiller, Friedrich – Poetry of Friedrich von Schiller: Read in German by Kinski –Spotify
Shakespeare, William – A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Performed by Great Actors: Gielgud, McKellen & More – Free on Spotify
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet (French translation by Marcel Pagnol) – Spotify –YouTube
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet (Starring John Gielgud) – Spotify + Archive.org
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth (with Alec Guinness) – Free Spotify
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein (Abridged version read by Christophe Lee) – Spotify
Shelley, Percy Bysshe – Various Poems (Read by Vincent Price) – Free Spotify
Steinbeck, John – “The Snake” and “Johnny Bear” – Free Stream – Spotify
Stevenson, Robert Louis – The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (Read by Christopher Lee) – Spotify
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island (Read by Hans Conried) – Spotify
Stoker, Bram – Dracula (Read by Christopher Lee) – Spotify
Thomas, Dylan – Dylan Thomas Reads 8 Hours of His Poetry – Spotify
Thomas, Dylan – An Evening with Dylan Thomas – Spotify
Thomas, Dylan – Richard Burton Reads 15 Poems by Dylan Thomas – Spotify
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Spotify version
Vonnegut, Kurt – Slaughterhouse 5, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House (Abridged readings by Vonnegut) – Spotify
Welles, Orson — 61 Hours of Orson Welles’ Classic 1930s Radio Plays: War of the Worlds, Heart of Darkness & More — Spotify
Wells, HG – The War of the Worlds (Read by Maxwell Caulfield) – Spotify
Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest (Performed by John Gielgud) – Free
Woolf, Virginia – The Short Stories – Spotify
Yeats, William Butler – William Butler Reads His Own Work – Spotify

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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Hear George Orwell’s 1984 Adapted as a Radio Play at the Height of McCarthyism & The Red Scare (1953)

in Literature, Politics, Radio | September 20th, 2016

“If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell famously said, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.” Since his ominous warning of coming tyranny, and the publication of his dystopian novel 1984, Orwell’s grim vision has been put to various partisan uses. Conservatives lamenting the policing of speech invoke Orwell. So too does a spectrum of voices speaking out against violent authoritarianism in actual policing, and in the politics of the right—related phenomena given the willingness of police and secret service to become enforcers of a campaign’s will at rallies nationwide. The state and corporate mass media have both become complicit in fostering a climate of outrage, mistrust, and insecurity in which there seems to be, as Orwell wrote, “no loyalty except loyalty to the Party.”

How did this happen? If we, in the United States, are ever inclined to learn from our history, we might avoid falling victim to the paranoid blandishments of demagogues and fearmongers. While one current threat to democracy comes from outside the political system, in the 1950s, an insider used several of the same tactics to hold the nation in thrall. The repressive postwar climate of anti-Communist panic in which Joseph McCarthy rose to power in the late 40s and 50s entrapped even Orwell, who “named names” in a list he sent to the British Foreign Office, suggesting certain acquaintances “were not fit for writing assignments” with the government because of supposed Soviet sympathies.

This secret act would have seemed like a bitter irony to many dissidents in McCarthy’s America, who surely read 1984 with increasing alarm as the Red Scare took hold of Congress. For their part, readers fearing the Communist threat heard echoes of Orwell’s warnings in McCarthy’s propaganda.

In whatever way it was interpreted, 1984 had an immediate impact on the culture. Its first radio dramatization, starring David Niven, premiered in 1949—the year after the novel’s publication—aired by the NBC University Theater. This was followed just four years later with another radio adaptation produced by The United States Steel Hour, a radio and TV anthology program that employed Rod Serling as a scriptwriter and featured notable guest stars like James Dean, Andy Griffith, Jack Klugman, and Paul Newman.

The program’s radio dramas, called Theatre Guild on the Air, adapted classic novels like Pride and Prejudice and plays from Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Its 1953 radio play of 1984 starred Richard Widmark as “Smith” and Marian Seldes as “Julia.” The play opens—as you can hear above—with a dire announcement of “the most terrifying subject in the news today: the threat to all free men of Communism or totalitarian domination in any form.”

Whether they saw creeping Stalinism or the rabid anti-Communism of McCarthy as the more insidious force, readers of the 1950s found Orwell immediately relevant. He has remained so, such that conservative columnist David Brooks, who has made many an Orwell reference in the past, describes the recent “birtherism” turnaround as an “Orwellian inversion of the truth” in the PBS Newshour appearance above:

And so we are really in Orwell land. We are in “1984.” And it’s interesting that an authoritarian personality type comes in at the same time with a complete disrespect for even tangential relationship to the truth, that words are unmoored.

And so I do think this statement sort of shocked me with the purification of a lot of terrible trends that have been happening. And so what’s white is black, and what is up is down, what is down is up. And that really is something new in politics.

Like comparisons to another, all-too-real, totalitarian regime, references to Orwell’s authoritarian society have grown hoary over the decades, and often seem so elastic that they fall into trivializing cliché. But comparisons to fascism in a time when many vocal partisans are avowed fascists, or may as well be, seem almost tautological. The moment Brooks calls “Orwellian” above also seems precisely that—a willful, coordinated, blatant, and total reversal of political language’s relationship to anything even resembling the truth.

You can also stream the radio production at the Internet Archive, who host all 74 Theatre Guild on the Air productions. 1984 was the last of the radio dramas before The United States Steel Hour moved to television, where Rod Serling attracted controversy for his 1956 drama Noon at Doomsday, inspired by the Emmett Till case, and another Cold War work still terribly relevant to our time.

“The victim” of the play, wrote Serling in the intro to his 1957 collection Patterns, “was on old Jew who ran a pawnshop. The killer was a neurotic malcontent who lashed out at something or someone who might be materially and physically the scapegoat for his own unhappy, purposeless, miserable existence.” The episode immediately provoked “a welter of publicity that came from some 15,000 letters and wires from White Citizens Councils and the like protesting the production of the play” for its resemblance to the Till case. “I shrugged it off,” wrote Serling, “answering, ‘If the shoe fits.…’ ”

Hear the Very First Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Starring David Niven (1949)

Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

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

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Jorge Luis Borges Creates a List of 16 Ironic Rules for Writing Fiction

in Literature, Writing | September 20th, 2016

“Jorge Luis Borges 1951, by Grete Stern” via Wikimedia Commons.

When we first read the work of Jorge Luis Borges, we may wish to write like him. When we soon discover that nobody but Borges can write like Borges, we may wish instead that we could have collaborated with him. Once, he and his luminary-of-Argentine-literature colleagues, friend and frequent collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares and Bioy Casares’ wife Silvina Ocampo, got together to compose a story about a writer from the French countryside. Though they never did finish it, one piece of its content survives: a list of sixteen rules, drawn up by Borges, for the writing of fiction.

Or at least that’s how Bioy Casares told it to the French magazine L’Herne, which reprinted the list. Instead of sixteen recommendations for what a writer of fiction should do, Borges playfully provided a list of sixteen prohibitions–things writers of fiction should never let slip into their work.

Non-conformist interpretations of famous personalities. For example, describing Don Juan’s misogyny, etc.
Grossly dissimilar or contradictory twosomes like, for example, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes and Watson.
The habit of defining characters by their obsessions; like Dickens does, for example.
In developing the plot, resorting to extravagant games with time and space in the manner of Faulkner, Borges, and Bioy Casares.
In poetry, characters or situations with which the reader can identify.
Characters prone to becoming myths.
Phrases, scenes intentionally linked to a specific time or a specific epoch; in other words, local flavor.
Chaotic enumeration.
Metaphors in general, and visual metaphors in particular. Even more concretely, agricultural, naval or banking metaphors. Absolutely un-advisable example: Proust.
Anthropomorphism
The tailoring of novels with plots that are reminiscent of another book. For example, Ulysses by Joyce and Homer’s Odyssey.
Writing books that resemble menus, albums, itineraries, or concerts.
Anything that can be illustrated. Anything that may suggest the idea that it can be made into a movie.
Critical essays, any historical or biographical reference. Always avoid allusions to authors’ personalities or private lives. Above all, avoid psychoanalysis.
Domestic scenes in police novels; dramatic scenes in philosophical dialogues. And, finally:
Avoid vanity, modesty, pederasty, lack of pederasty, suicide.

The astute reader will find much more of the counterintuitive about this list than its focus on what not to do. Didn’t Borges himself specialize in non-conformist interpretations, especially of existing literature? Don’t some of his most memorable characters obsess over things, like imagining a human being into existence or creating a map the size of the territory, to the exclusion of all other characteristics? Couldn’t he conjure up the most exotic settings — even when drawing upon memories of his native Buenos Aires — in the fewest words? And who else better used myths, metaphors, and games with time and space for his own, idiosyncratic literary purposes?

But those who’ve spent real time reading Borges know that he also always wrote with a strong, if subtle, sense of humor. He had just the kind of sensibility that would produce an ironic, self-parodying list such as this, though history hasn’t recorded whether his, Bioy Casares’, and Ocampo’s young provincial writer would have perceived it in that way or piously honored its dictates. Borges does, however, seem to have followed the bit about never writing “anything that may suggest the idea that it can be made into a movie” to the letter. I yield to none in my appreciation for Alex Cox’s cinematic interpretation of Death and the Compass, but I enjoy even more the fact that Borges’ imagination has kept Hollywood stumped.

via lasesana/faena

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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 ) |

Every Exhibition Held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Presented in a New Web Site: 1929 to Present

in Archives, Art, Design | September 19th, 2016

Images courtesy of MoMA

We all hate it when we hear of an exciting exhibition, only to find out that it closed last week — or 80 years ago. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has made great strides toward taking the sting out of such narrowly or widely-missed cultural opportunities with their new digital exhibition archive. The archive offers, in the words of Chief of Archives Michelle Elligott, “free and unprecedented access to The Museum of Modern Art’s ever-evolving exhibition history” in the form of “thousands of unique and vital materials including installation photographs, out-of-print exhibition catalogues, and more, beginning with MoMA’s very first exhibition in 1929,” a show of post-Impressionist paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh.

The photograph of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe portraits at the top of the post comes from a much more recent exhibition, 2015’s Andy Warhol: Campbell’s Soup Cans and Other Works, 1953–1967. But MoMA, of course, didn’t just just discover the king of pop art last year: search by his name and you’ll find no fewer than 128 shows that have included his work, starting with Recent Drawings U.S.A. in 1956.

You can track any number of other cultural icons through the museum’s history: Yoko Ono, for instance, a view of whose One Woman Show, 1960–1971, which also opened in 2015, appears above, but whose work you can see in eleven different exhibitions archived online.

A look through even a fraction of the 3,500 shows whose materials MoMA has so far made available (and public-domain) reveals a thematic variety throughout the museum’s entire existence: not just individual artists or groups of them, but fast cars (the idea of a “rational automobile” in general in the 1960s and the Jaguar E‑Type in particular in the 90s), travel posters, Japanese architecture (featuring an entire traditional Japanese house built in and shipped from Nagoya for the occasion), and the font Helvetica. You can also have a look at the materials archived from the various film series and performance programs they’ve put on over the years.

This sort of technological innovation demonstrates that MoMA has, since that moment in the late 1920s when “a small group of enterprising patrons of the arts joined forces to create a new museum devoted exclusively to modern art,” remained as exciting an institution as ever. But nothing can replace the experience of actually going there and seeing its exhibitions in person, which is why, whenever I pay a visit to its digital archive, I’ll also click over to its calendar of upcoming shows. For 86 years, it has given the public the chance to experience the thrill of the modern, but as a trip through the digital archive reveals, the thrill of the modern goes much deeper than the shock of the new.

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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 ( 1 ) |

A Map of Chicago’s Gangland: A Cheeky, Cartographic Look at Al Capone’s World (1931)

in Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, History, Maps, Travel | September 19th, 2016

Modern day Chicagoland gang activity does not inspire quippy cartoon “wonder maps.” Back when Al Capone ruled Chicago’s underworld, the public viewed gangsters with movie magazine breathlessness. Their violent crimes and glamorous lifestyles sold newspapers and movie tickets.

Today? Gangsta rap—a genre not known for its whimsy—glorifies the hardcore existence of kids whom the system has failed, trapped in a cycle of poverty, compounding the social problems that were heaped on them at birth.

But back to 1931, the year Capone was sent to prison for tax evasion, and local firm Bruce-Roberts published Chicago’s Gangland map, above, from “authentic sources.”

As any civic minded reformer knows, the best way to “inculcate the most important principles of piety and virtue in young persons” is to pack all “the evils and sin of large cities” into something resembling a large-scale comic book.

If the 30 execution orders posted on Dead Man’s Tree doesn’t scare ‘em straight, perhaps 1750 cases of government booze and some scantily clad dancing girls will!

Naturally, the site of 1929’s Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre gets star treatment, with a graphic depiction guaranteed to stir the imagination far more than a visit to the actual site itself.

The publisher thoughtfully included a Gangland Dictionary to further inculcate the impressionable youth and explain the presence of two pineapples in the cartouche.

Click here to view the map in a larger format. Then zoom in to explore this lighthearted spin on Chicago’s wicked past in greater detail. The moral instruction continues in the form of poster-sized reproductions whose sale benefits Chicago’s Newberry Library.

via Slate

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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 ( 2 ) |

John Austen’s Haunting Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Masterpiece of the Aesthetic Movement (1922)

in Art, Books, Literature | September 19th, 2016

We’ve popularly come to think of the Victorian era as one in which a prudish, sentimental conservatism ruled with imperial force over the arts and culture. But that broad picture ignores the strong countercurrent of weird eroticism in the work of aesthetes like Dante Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley.

Beardsley’s elegant, bawdy illustrations of Wilde’s erotic play Salome scandalized British society, as did the play itself. His penchant for occult subjects and a wickedly sensuous style resonated well into the 20th century. Salome was a highlight of the Aesthetic movement,” writes the Met, “and an early manifestation of Art Nouveau in England.” By the 1920s, Beardsley was perhaps one of the most influential of literary illustrators.

Irish artist Harry Clarke took directly from Beardsley in work like his richly-detailed 1926 edition of Goethe’s Faust. And in 1922, British artist John Austen modernized Hamlet by drawing on Clarke’s earlier work, as well as, quite clearly, on Beardsley. As artist John Coulthart remarks, “If you’re going to borrow a style then you may as well take from the best.” Like Beardsley’s Salome and Clarke’s Faust, Austen’s Hamlet “is often rated as his chef d’oeuvre, and with good reason, he manages to lend some visual splendor to a play whose concerns are a lot more introspective than the usual illustration standards of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (just as T.S. Eliot had critically argued two years earlier).

Published by Dover’s Calla Editions (and recently back in print), Austen’s illustrated Hamlet takes the fine, spare lines of Beardsley—well represented in his Poe edition—and clothes them, so to speak, with Clarke’s “manga faces, spiny fingers and swathes of black.” Each of the three artists has a different take on the macabre: Beardsley’s subtle symbolism giving way to Clarke’s surrealism and the heavy iconography in Austen’s Hamlet, permeated by the play’s archetypal images of “masks, swords and skulls.” Austen would soon leave behind the influence of both artists, adopting a much blockier style for literary illustrations later in the decade. In many ways, he represents a bridge between the elegant Art Nouveau aesthetics of Beardsley and the modernism of Art Deco, by way of Clarke’s unique gothic style.

You can view and download all of the Austen illustrations online: The Folger Shakespeare Library hosts all 121 original drawings in high resolution scans, each of which is downloadable in resolutions up to 3072px. Coulthart excerpts several of these images at his blog {feuilleton}. And at fulltable.com, you can see the Austen illustrations in context with the play’s text in high resolution scans. There, you’ll also find more modernist illustrations Austen contributed to editions of Tristram Shandy, Byron’s Don Juan and E.C. Lefroy’s Echoes from Theocritus, and a 1937 instructional book on pen and ink drawing. In at least one other instance, however, Austen retained the stylized, Symbolist Clarke and Beardsley approach—an erotic pen drawing of Sheherezade that pays full homage to Beardsley’s sensual Salome illustrations.

Harry Clarke’s 1926 Illustrations of Goethe’s Faust: Art That Inspired the Psychedelic 60s

Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories (1894)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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Every Exhibition Held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Presented in a New Web Site: 1929 to Present

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John Austen’s Haunting Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Masterpiece of the Aesthetic Movement (1922)

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