Quite patiently, Ben Watts cut apart and stitched together scenes from 53 films (find a complete list here) showing characters suffering through writer’s block. Adaptation, Barton Fink, Shakespeare in Love, The Royal Tenenbaums, and, yes, Throw Momma From the Train–they’re among the films featured in the 4‑minute supercut above. If you give the clip a little time, you’ll see that the supercut has an arc to it. It tells a tale, and has an ending that Hollywood would love.
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America’s “Golden Age of Radio” lasted from the wide household adoption of wireless sets in the 1920s until the onset of the television era in the 1950s, producing a host of long-running dramas, comedies, and science-fiction shows still beloved by radio enthusiasts today. But few had a presence in the zeitgeist like Suspense, which from 1942 to 1962 offered not just guaranteed thrills but high production values as well. In the show’s heyday, that also meant hiring straight from Hollywood, for not just character voices but also high directorial talent.
Suspense’s very first episode came steered by the hand of no less a master of unease than Alfred Hitchcock. “The condition agreed upon for Hitchcock’s appearance,” writes Martin Grams, Jr. in Suspense: Twenty Years of Thrills and Chills, “was that CBS make a pitch to the listening audience about his and [producer Walter] Wanger’s latest film, Foreign Correspondent. To add flavor to the deal, Wanger threw in Edmund Gwenn and Herbert Marshall as part of the package. All three men (including Hitch) would be seen in the upcoming film, which was due for a theatrical release the next month.” Hitchcock wanted to adapt for Suspense’s premiere Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger, a story he’d previously filmed silent in 1926.
Even if they’ve never heard a single old-time radio broadcast, most people who know of Orson Welles know that the man who made Citizen Kane also made a significant mark on the airwaves. He defined the titular role of the mind-clouding crime-fighter The Shadow when that series premiered in 1937, and the very next year he aired his infamously to0-believable Halloween adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. But Welles’ radio work continued even after he launched the film career through which we’ve come to know him today, with productions such as a Suspense version of the play The Hitch-Hiker in 1942.
Welles didn’t just direct the adaptation but also starred in it, which he would do four times on the radio in total. “The Hitch-Hiker was written for Orson Welles in the days when he was one of the master producers and actors in radio,” writes its author Lucille Fletcher. “It was designed to provide a vehicle not only for his famous voice, but for the original techniques of sound which became associated with his radio presentations.” Welles and his Mercury Players “made of this script a haunting study of the supernatural, which can still raise hackles along my own spine.” Both The Hitch-Hiker and The Lodger count as high points in the two-decade run of Suspense, but if you listen to the 90 other episodes free at the Internet Archive (or by streaming the thin playlist above), you’ll feel hackles raised along your own spine in plenty of other ways as well.
An old man sits alone, ranting in a nasally monotonous drone. He breaks into rueful laughter, threats of violence, mockery, maudlin lament…. An angry drunken uncle crying out into the wilderness of a Tuesday night bender? A tough guy left behind in the world, unable to stomach its restrictions and blithe hypocrisies? A mad poet on his way to the grave? An everyman rambler whose seen-it-all candor and hardass sense of humor command the common people’s ear?
All of the above was beloved novelist, raconteur, poet, and trenchant essayist Charles Bukowski. It’s easy to caricature Bukowski for his lifelong romance with booze, a dominant theme in nearly all of his autobiographically-inspired poems and stories. But in writing of the life an alcoholic artist, himself, he also uncovered in extremis general truths about human existence that many people spend their lives trying to avoid. The pain, and solace, of loneliness, rejection, and self-doubt, the desperate need for fortitude in the face of seeming hopelessness.
Bukowski is not only a hero to so many would-be writers because of his epic barroom tales and rock-star-caliber drinking bouts. If that were so, his stories might quickly grow tedious. What Bukowski had over the run-of-the-mill pub regulars was a surprising amount of emotional vulnerability and self-awareness, and a desire to communicate his experiences with the same raw honesty as his literary hero, Dostoevsky. Put simply, Bukowski possessed an abundance of what Keats called “negative capability.”
He also had a good deal of luck. If even a handful of the stories he tells about his life are true, it’s a wonder he didn’t die several times over. Take his recounting below of a live 1979 Vancouver performance, footage of which became the documentary film There’s Gonna Be a God Damn Riot in Here. In a letter that year to a friend, he wrote:
Back from Canadian reading. Took Linda. Have video tapes of the thing in color, runs about two hours. Saw it a couple nights back. Not bad. Much fighting with the audience. New poems. Dirty stuff and the other kind. Drank before the reading and 3 bottles of red wine during but read the poems out. Dumb party afterwards. I fell down several times while dancing. They got me back on the elevator back at the hotel and I kept hollering for another bottle. Poor Linda. Afterwards in hotel room, kept falling. Finally fell against the radiator and cracked a 6 inch gash in skull. Blood everywhere. Hell of a trip…Nice Canadian people who set up reading, though. Not poet types at all. All in all, a good show…
The video tapes were Bukowski’s idea—he insisted on the recording as a condition for making the trip. And you can hear audio of the entire performance at the top on Spotify (get Spotify’s software here; or listen on Youtube here). Also on the playlist are two other Bukowski spoken-word albums, Charles Bukowski Master Collection, and Hostage. The latter, writes Amazon, “has to be one of the rowdiest poetry records ever released, which makes sense considering how drunk Bukowski plainly is.” But “the drink never gets in the way of his delivery,” and his tough-but-tender verse comes through plainly, even if it seems like there might be a riot any minute. Only Bukowski could have pulled this off and lived to tell the tale.
Keep copying those Sunday funnies, kids, and one day you may beat Al Jaffee’s record to become the Longest Working Cartoonist in History.
You’ll need to take extra good care of your health, given that the Guinness Book of World Records notified Jaffee, above, of his honorific on his 95th birthday.
Much of his legendary career has been spent atMadMagazine, where he is best known as the father of Fold-ins.
Conceived of as the satirical inverse of the expensive-to-produce, 4‑color centerfolds that were a staple of glossier mags, the first Fold-In spoofed public perception of actress Elizabeth Taylor as a man-eater. Jaffe had figured it as a one-issue gag, but editor Al Feldstein had other ideas, demanding an immediate follow up for the June 1964 issue.
Jaffe obliged with the Richard Nixon Fold-in, which set the tone for the other 450 he has hand rendered in subsequent issues.
For those who made it to adulthood without the singular pleasure of creasing Mad’s back cover, you can digitally fold-in a few samples using this nifty interactive feature, courtesy of TheNew York Times.
With all due respect, it’s not the same, just enough to give a feel for the thrill of drawing the outermost panel in to reveal the visual punchline lurking within the larger picture. The print edition demands precision folding on the reader’s part, if one is to get a satisfactory answer to the rhetorical text posed at the outset.
Jaffe must be even more precise in his calculations. In an interview with Sean Edgar of Paste Magazine, he described how he turned a Republican primary stage shared by Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater into a surprise portrait of the man who would become president five years hence:
The first thing I did was draw Richard Nixon’s face, not in great detail, just a very rough establishment of where the eyes, nose and mouth would be, and the general shape. I did an exaggerated caricature of Nixon and then I cut it in half, and moved it apart. Once the face was cut in half, it didn’t have the integrity of a face anymore — it was sort of a half of face. Then I looked at what the eyes were like, and I said, ‘what can I make out of the eyes?’ He had these heavy eyebrows. I played around with many things, but I had to keep in mind all the time what the big picture was. So there they (Goldwater and Rockefeller) were up on a stage somewhere, doing a debate, and I thought, ‘What kind of stage prop can I put alongside these guys that would seem natural there?’ I decided that I could make eyes out of the lamps, and as far as the nose was concerned, that could come out of the figures — their clothing. Then I figured the mouth; I could use some sort of table that could give me those two sides. That’s how it all came about. You have to have some kind of visual imagination to see the possibilities. I had to concentrate on stuff that looked natural on a stage.
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The story has, over time, solidified into one of the columns of Steve Jobs lore: in the early 1970s, the man who would found Apple left for Reed College. But before long, not wanting to spend any more of his parents’ money on tuition (and perhaps not temperamentally compatible with the structure of higher education anyway), he officially dropped out, couch-surfed through friends’ pads, lived on free meals ladled out by Hare Krishnas, continued to audit a variety of classes, and generally lived the prototype techno-neo-hippie lifestyle Silicon Valley has continued relentlessly to refine.
Perhaps the least likely of those classes was one on calligraphy, taught by Trappist monk and calligrapher Robert Palladino. More than thirty years later, delivering a now-famous Stanford commencement speech, Jobs recalled his time in the calligraphy class: “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.”
And what of the calligraphy teacher who made that possible? “Palladino, who died in late February at 83, joined the Trappist order of monks in New Mexico in 1950, according to a 2003 profile in Reed Magazine,” writes the Washington Post’s Niraj Chokshi. “Just 17 at the time, his handwriting attracted the attention of the monastery scribe, who worked with him on his art. Five years later, Palladino moved to Lafayette, Ore., where local artists brought news of a skilled amateur to Lloyd Reynolds, an icon in the field and the creator of Reed’s calligraphy program.”
Now you, too, can receive instruction from Reynolds, who in 1968 starred in a series on the Oregon Education Television Service’s program Men Who Teach, shooting twenty half-hour broadcasts on italic calligraphy and handwriting. Eight years later — about the time Jobs co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak — he re-shot the series in color, and you can watch that version almost in its entirety with the playlist at the top of the post. (Reed has also made some related instructional materials available.) You may feel the temptation to turn all of Reynolds’ lessons on the art of writing toward your goal of becoming the next Steve Jobs. But try to resist that impulse and appreciate it for its own nature, which Jobs himself described as “beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.”
On the 750th birthday of Dante Alighieri—composer of the dizzyingly epic medieval poem the Divine Comedy—English professor John Kleiner pointed to one way of helping undergraduate students understand the Italian poet’s importance: an “obvious comparison” with Shakespeare. They both occupy singularly definitive places in their respective languages and literatures as well as in world literature, Kleiner suggested, and indeed no less a critical personage than T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”
And yet, those who know the epic English poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained—heavily influenced by Dante’s work—may find John Milton a more apt comparison. Milton also made complex uses of theology as political allegory, and wrote political tracts as passionate and resolute as his poetry. Both Milton and Dante were intensely partisan writers who expanded their worldly conflicts into the eternal realms of heaven and hell.
Like Milton, Dante’s formative political experience involved a civil war—in his case between two factions known as the Guelphs and the Ghibellines (then further between the “White Guelphs” and the “Black Guelphs.”) And like Milton, Dante had special access to the powerful of his day. Unlike the English poet and defender of regicide, however, Dante was a strict monarchist who even went so far as to propose a global monarchy under Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII. And while Milton veiled his political references in allegorical symbolism, Dante boldly named his adversaries in his poem, and subjected them to grisly, inventive tortures in his vivid depiction of hell.
Indeed, Dante’s literary persecution of his opponents presents one of the foremost difficulties for modern readers of the Inferno. In addition to cataloguing the number of classical and mythological characters Dante encounters in his infernal sojourn, we must wade through pages of contextual notes to find out who various contemporary characters were, and why they have been condemned to their respective levels and torments. Most of his named historical sufferers—including Pope Boniface VII—had died by the time of his writing, but some still lived. Of two such cases, one online guide notes humorously, “Dante explains their presence in Hell by saying that they were so sinful that the devil did not wait for them to die before snatching their souls…. Obviously libel laws were not that strict in Medieval Italy.”
The Inferno treats the existence of hell and the grievous sins that consign its inhabitants there with the utmost seriousness. And yet, the presence of Dante’s many personal and political enemies injects no small amount of dark humor into the poem, such that one can read it as political satire as well as an ingenious marriage of medieval Catholic theology and philosophy with the poetry of courtly love. The richness of the Divine Comedy’s rhetorical world invites a great many interpretations, but it also demands much of its reader. To meet its challenge, we might lean on excellent reference guides like the online World of Dante, which offers a fully annotated text in English and Italian, as well as maps, charts, and diagrams of the hellish world, and visual interpretations like Gustave Doré’s illustration from Canto 6 at the top.
And we might listen to the poem read aloud. Here, we have one reading of Cantos I‑VIII of the Inferno by poet John Ciardi, from his translation of the poem for a Signet Classics Edition. Ciardi (known as “Mr. Poet” during his day) made his recording in 1954 for Smithsonian Folkways records, and the liner notes of the LP, which you can download here, contain the excerpted “verse rendering for the modern reader.” The translation preserves Dante’s terza rima in very eloquent, yet accessible language, fitting given Dante’s own use and defense of the vernacular. You can hear the complete reading on Spotify (download the software here) or on Youtube just above.
For his new album, Electronica Volume II: The Heart Of Noise, Jean-Michel Jarre, a pioneer in electronic and ambient music, collaborated on a recording with Edward Snowden, the former CIA computer analyst-turned-whistleblower. Cue up their song, “Exit,” above.
At first glance, it perhaps seems like an unlikely pairing. But if you give Jarre, the son of a French resistance fighter, a chance to explain, it all makes perfect sense. Recently, he told The Guardian:
The whole Electronica project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side we have the world in our pocket, on on the other, we are spied on constantly. There are tracks about the erotic relationship we have with technology, the way we touch our smartphones more than our partners, about CCTV surveillance, about love in the age of Tindr. It seemed quite appropriate to collaborate not with a musician but someone who literally symbolises this crazy relationship we have with technology.
A lot of what Jarre and Snowden were trying to accomplish with the song–musically, conceptually, ideologically, etc.–gets explained in the video below. Listening to Snowden talk about the meaning of the song’s title (“Exit” means “things have to change,” “it’s time to leave, it’s time to do something else, it’s time to find a better way”), you’ll get the sense that “Exit” is an electronic protest song befitting our digital age. Out with the folk music, in with the techno.
Since 1997, Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia) has directed 11 music videos (watch them here)–five alone for Fiona Apple, and now the first of hopefully many for Radiohead. Above, watch the cinematic touch Anderson puts on the new Radiohead single “Daydreaming.” And, if you want, download Radiohead’s new album, AMoon Shaped Pool, which just became available minutes ago on digital platforms (Amazon, iTunes, the band’s website, etc). A release in vinyl/CD is scheduled for June 17th.
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Anyone with a passing familiarity with the work of Sigmund Freud—which is just about everyone—knows at least a handful of things about his famous psychoanalytic theory: Ego, Super-ego, and Id, sex and death drives, Oedipal complex, “Freudian slip,” “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”… (a quote that didn’t come from Freud). Most of these terms, except that cigar thing, originate from Freud’s later period—from about 1920 to his death in 1939—perhaps his most productive from a literary standpoint, starting with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he began to develop his well-known structural model of the mind.
During these later years Freud built on ideas from 1913’s Totem and Taboo and fully expanded his psychological analysis into a philosophical and cultural theory in books like The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism. For those who have primarily encountered Freud in intro to psych classes, these works can seem strange indeed, given the sweeping speculative claims the Viennese doctor makes about religion, war, ancient history, and even prehistory. Though peppered with terminology from psychoanalysis, Freud’s more philosophical works roam far afield of his medical specializations and direct observations.
When and how did Freud’s psychiatry become philosophy, and what possessed him to apply his psychological theories to analyses of broad social and historical dynamics? We see hints of Freud the philosopher throughout his career, but it’s during his middle period—when his tripartite model of the psyche still consisted of the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious—that he began to move more fully from case studies of individual psychosexual development and interpretations of dreams to studies of human development writ large. These books are almost Darwinian expansions of what Freud called “metapsychology”—which included his theories of Oedipal neuroses, narcissism, and sadomasochism.
From 1914 to 1915, after his break with Jung, Freud worked on a series of papers on “metapsychology,” intended, he wrote “to clarify and carry deeper the theoretical assumptions on which a psycho-analytic system could be founded.” Seven of the manuscripts from this period vanished, seemingly lost forever. In 1983, psychoanalyst Ilse Grubich-Simitis discovered one of these essays in an old trunk belonging to a friend and colleague of Freud. Published as A Phylogenetic Fantasy, this fascinating, unfinished work points the way forward for Freud, providing some connective tissue between his “ontogeny,” the development of the individual, and “phylogeny,” the development of the species.
It is here, his translators write in their introduction to this rare work, that Freud “concludes that each individual contains somewhere within himself or herself the history of all mankind; further, that mental illness can usefully be understood as a vestige of responses once necessary and highly adaptive to the exigencies of each era. Accordingly, mental illness can be understood as a set of formerly adaptive responses that have become maladaptive as the climatic and sociological threats to the survival of mankind have changed.”
These basic, yet radical, ideas may be said to form a backdrop against which we might read so much of Freud’s mature work as a means for decoding what seems puzzling, irrational, and downright maddening about human behavior. Freud’s scientific work has long been superseded, and many of the specifics of his psychoanalytic theory deemed unworkable, irrelevant, or even damaging. But there are very good reasons why his work has thrived in literary theory and philosophy. There is even a case to be made the Freud was the first evolutionary psychologist, roughly bringing Darwinian concepts of adaptation to bear on the development of the human psyche from prehistory to modernity.
For all the negative criticism his work has endured, Freud dared to explain us to ourselves, drawing on every resource at his disposal—including our most foundational narratives in mythology and ancient poetry. For that reason, his relevance, writes Jane Ciabattari, as a “theoretical catalyst” in the 21st century remains potent, and his work remains well worth reading and pondering, for any student of human behavior.
Today, on the 160th birthday of the father of psychoanalysis, we bring you a collection of Freud’s major works available free to read online or download as ebooks in the links below. Further down, find a list of Freud audiobooks to download as mp3s or stream.
Whether rooted in clinical study and research, detective-like case studies, philosophical speculations, or poetic flights of fancy, Freud’s writing draws us deeper into strange, obsessive, profound, and disturbing ways of thinking about our uneasy relationships with ourselves, our families, and our unstable social order.
Charles Bukowski could really write. Charles Bukowski could really drink. These two facts, surely the best-known ones about the “lowlife laureate” of a poet and author of such novels as Post Office and Ham on Rye(as well as what we might call his lifestyle column, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”), go together. Drinking provided enough of the subject matter of his prose and verse — and, in life, enough of the fuel for the existence he observed on the page with such rough-edged evocative artistry — that we can hardly imagine Bukowski’s writing without his drinking, or his drinking without his writing.
We would naturally expect him, then, to have written an ode to beer, one of his drinks of choice. “Beer,” which appeared in Bukowski’s 1971 poetry collection Love Is a Dog from Hell, pays tribute to the countless bottles the man drank “while waiting for things to get better,” “after splits with women,” “waiting for the phone to ring,” “waiting for the sounds of footsteps.”
The female, he writes, knows not to consume beer to excess in the male manner, as “she knows its bad for the figure.” But Bukowski, figure be damned, finds in this most working-class of all drinks a kind of solace.
“Beer” comes to life in the animation above by NERDO. “The composition is a manifesto of the author’s way of life, this is why we decided to go inside the author’s mind, and it is not a safe journey,” say the accompanying notes. “A brain solo without filter, a tale of ordinary madness, showing how much loneliness and decadence can be hidden inside a genius mind.” This wild ride passes what we now recognize as many visual signifiers of the Bukowskian experience: neon signs, cigarettes, decaying city blocks, tawdry Polaroids — and, of course, beer, literally “rivers and seas of beer,” which no less a fellow animated enthusiast of the beverage than Homer Simpson once, just as eloquently, pronounced “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”
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