Javier Jensen, an artist living down in Santiago, Chile, has breathed a little life into some beloved book covers. And when I say little, I mean little. His animated touches are nicely understated, hardly distracting from the original cover designs.
“I used to be OBSESSED with Japanese culture,” wrote an uncommonly thoughtful Youtube commenter. “I miss that part of me. Trying to search for it again. That’s when I was the happiest.” Many of us westerners — or really, many of us non-Japanese — go through similar periods of affinity and avidity for all things Japanese. Some of us put it away with our childish things; some of us make Japanese culture a lifelong interest, or even the stuff of our professions. I myself got into Japan early, at some point found myself put off by the just slightly too obsessive Japanese pop-culture fan community in the West (though I admittedly read that comment below a music video with four million views), and later returned with a much more serious intent to understand.
But to understand what? The Japanese language, certainly, and Japanese film, Japanese cities, Japanese aesthetics, Japanese technology — all the fruits of the culture that stoke in the rest of the world both deep envy and, sometimes, faint suspicion. Why do they persist in using writing systems that, despite their considerable beauty, come with such aggravating difficulty? The comprehensive subway networks in metropolises like Tokyo and Osaka function day in and day out with astonishing reach and reliability, but why do their riders tolerate crowdedness even to the point of getting uncomplainingly crammed inside the cars by white-gloved attendants? And why, despite the Japanese love for elegant design and advanced consumer technology, do their web sites look so jumbled and confusing?
NHK World can put you on the road to understanding these and other questions with Japanology, their series of English-language documentaries exploring the things large and small, all surprising to the foreigner, that make up the fabric of Japanese life. BEGIN Japanology, their series for the Japan-intrigued but not necessarily Japan-experienced, has come to six seasons so far.
At the top of the post, you can see its episode on bento, those painstakingly prepared lunch boxes, simplified versions of which even those who know nothing of Japan have seen at grocery stores the world over. To learn more about bento’s place in Japanese culture, proceed on to the relevant episode of Japanology Plus, NHK’s series for the even more insatiably curious Japanophile. And couple with an episode on Ramen above.
Japanology Plus also dedicates one of its half-hour programs to the Shinkansen, commonly known as the “bullet train,” that quintessentially Japanese mode of transportation that, with its impeccable half-century record of speed, safety, and punctuality, has become the pride of the land. (I, for one, hold out hope that Obama will make The Onion’s “Ambitious Plan to Fly Americans to Japan to Use Their Trains” a reality.) But if you don’t feel quite ready yet to board a Shinkansen, much less learn about its inner workings, try the Begin Japanology Special Mini series, which offers five-minute distilled documentaries on such icons of Japan as tea gardens, hot springs, and Mount Fuji. Watching all these, I feel glad indeed that I’ve already got the tickets booked for my next flight over there. Do you have yours?
Living in New York, it’s not unusual to encounter ardent theater lovers who’ve carefully preserved decades worth of programs, tickets, and ephemera from every play they’ve ever seen. These collections can get a bit hoarder‑y, as anyone who’s ever sorted through the belongings of a recently departed lifelong audience member can attest.
If theater is dead — as gloomy Cassandras have been predicting since the advent of screens — these monoliths of Playbills and stubs constitute one hell of a tomb.
(Go ahead, toss that 1962 program to The Sound of Music…and why not drive a stake through poor Uncle Maurice’s cold, dead heart while you’re at it? All he ever wanted was to sit, eyes shining in the dark, and maybe hang around the stage door in hopes of scoring Academy Award winner, Warner Baxter’s autograph, below. )
For those of us who conceive of theatre as a still-living entity, the New York Public Library’s recent decision to start digitizing its Billy Rose Theatre Division archive is cause for celebration. Such grand scale commitment to this art form’s past ensures that it will enjoy a robust future. Hopefully someday all of the approximately 10 million items in the Billy Rose archive can be accessed from anywhere in the world. But, for now, you can start with over 100,000 items. The comparatively small percentage available now is still a boon to directors, designers, writers, and performers looking for inspiration.
It’s also wildly fun for those of us who never made it much past playing a poinsettia in the second grade holiday pageant.
Truly, there’s something for everyone. The library singles out a few tantalizing morsels on its website:
A researcher can examine a 1767 program for a performance of Romeo and Juliet in Philadelphia, study Katharine Hepburn’s personal papers (ed. note: witness the many moods of Kate, above), review Elia Kazan’s working script and notes for the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire, examine posters for Harry Houdini’s performances, read a script for an episode of Captain Kangaroo, view set designs for the original production of Guys & Dolls and costume designs for the Ziegfeld Follies, analyze a videotape of the original production of A Chorus Line, and find rich subject files and scrapbooks that document the most popular and obscure performances from across the centuries.
You might also prowl for Halloween costumes. What kid wouldn’t want to trick or treat as one of Robert Ten Eyck Stevenson’s 1926 designs for the Greenwich Village Follies?
There’s certainly no shame in mooning over a forgotten star… for the record, the one above is Alla Nazimova in Salomé.
And there’s something galvanizing about seeing a familiar star escaping the confines of her best known role, the only one for which she is remembered, truth be told…
For me, the hands down pearl of the collection is the telegram at the top of the page. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt sent it Gypsy Rose Lee to herald the re-opening of Gypsy, the musical based on her life.
For the uninitiated, telegrams were once an opening night tradition, as was staying up to read the review in the early edition, hot off the press.
More information on visiting the archive, online or in person, can be found here.
I first encountered bongo-playing physicist Richard Feynman in a college composition class geared toward science majors. I was not, mind you, a science major, but a disorganized sophomore who registered late and grabbed the last available seat in a required writing course. Skeptical, I thumbed through the reading in the college bookstore. As I browsed Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!—the first of many popular memoirs released by the affable contrarian scientist—the humanist in me perked up. Here was a guy who knew how to write; a theoretical physicist who spoke the language of everyday people.
Feynman cultivated his populist persona to appeal to those who might be otherwise turned off by abstract, abstruse scientific concepts. Like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, his name has come to stand for the best examples of popular science communication. It is often through one of Feynman’s accessible, non-specialist books or presentations that people learn of his work with the Manhattan project, his contributions to quantum mechanics, and his Nobel Prize. But Feynman’s extracurricular pursuits—from safe-cracking to drumming to experimenting with LSD—were also genuine expressions of his idiosyncratic character, as was another of his passions for which he is not very well known: art.
Feynman took up the pursuit at the age of 44, and continued to draw and paint for the rest of his life, signing his work “Ofey.” Many of his drawings display the awkward, off-kilter perspective of the beginner, and a great many others look very accomplished indeed. In an introductory essay to a published collection of his artwork, Feynman describes what motivated him to take up this particular avocation:
I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run ‘behind the scenes’ by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.
As you can see above, he took his work seriously. Most of his drawings consist of portraits and nudes, with the occasional landscape or still life. You can see more extensive galleries of Feynman’s art at AmusingPlanet, Museum Syndicate and Brain Pickings.
Feynman’s preoccupation—and full immersion—in the relationship between the arts and sciences marks him as a Renaissance man in perhaps the purest definition of the term: his approach closely resembles that of Leonardo da Vinci, a likeness that comes to the fore in the work below, which is either a collection of sketches doodled over with formulae, or a collection of formulae covered with doodles. Either way, it’s a perfect representation of the visionary mind of Feynman and his regard for ordinary language, people, and objects—and for “scientific awe.”
Most film-lovers must long for the next Stanley Kubrick, a new thematically adventurous, aesthetically rigorous, big budget-commanding, and take-after-take perfectionistic cinematic visionary for our time. But some film-lovers believe our time already has its own Stanley Kubrick in David Fincher, director of such highly acclaimed pictures as Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, The Game, and Seven — excuse me, Se7en. And just like Kubrick, Fincher didn’t start off at that level of the game. No, his career first gathered momentum with commercials, a bunch of music videos for the likes of The Motels, Paula Abdul, and Rick Springfield, and of course, Alien 3 — excuse me,Alien3.
So what exactly went wrong with that critically savaged yet (we now realize) auteur-directed chapter of the Alien franchise? That question gets addressed in detail early on in the latest multi-part video essay from Cameron Beyl’s Directors Series.
You may remember that we featured the Directors Series’ previous essay in April, but if you don’t, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that it examined the Kubrick oeuvre. Beyl ended it with a declaration of his own membership in the aforementioned Fincher-Is-Our-Kubrick club, and cinephiles all over the internet thrilled to his announcement of Fincher as his next object of analysis.
To date, five episodes of The Directors Series: David Fincher have come out, which deal with Fincher’s career as follows:
“Baptism By Fire” (Rick Springfield’s music videos and The Beat of the Life Drum, assorted music videos and commercials, Alien 3)
Even though the series hasn’t yet reached The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Gone Girl, you won’t come away from the case Beyl has assembled so far unconvinced of Fincher’s influences, preferences, and obsessions: crime, decay, punk, obsolete technology, architecture, surveillance, corporate and personal wealth, unusual illustrative visual effects, colors like blue and orange in high contrast, nihilism, predecessors like Ridley and Tony Scott — the list goes on, and will go on as long as Fincher’s career does. It says a great deal about his filmmaking skill and style that his work has become so widely known for both its overwhelmingly “gritty, grimy” and overwhelmingly “cold, clinical” look and feel. But if any director can ever arrive at this sort of towering, contradictory reputation, Fincher can, and if any video essays can explain how he did, the Directors Series can.
In the real, “meatspace” world of organic things, it’s a little bit harder. In January 2011, a YouTuber by the name of “mcwolles” posted the video above. In it, a man pours water in a scale model of Escher’s 1961 Waterfall. The contraption, using blue water, actually seems to work. The water runs uphill through several sharp angles and finishes by tumbling off the top into the paddlewheel below, where its begins its journey again. “Mcwolles” ends the video staring into the camera as he tries to find the off switch…but also dares viewers to figure out how he did it.
The Internet had a viral freakout—check out the 9.3 million views—and promptly set about trying to offer solutions. “Look how the shadows fall!” several people pointed out. The locked-down camera was another clue.
In May of 2011, “mcwolles” offered a 360 tour of the creation in his garage that offered some suggestions, and that was all that was needed for user “LookingMercury3D” to offer their explanation of how the trick was done. (Hint: editing).
Since then, “mcwolles” has only posted two more videos: one of him losing weight and one of a dog having its way with a stuffed animal. Maybe he’s busy working on his next piece of Escher-inspired art.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
On January 28, 1986, NASA Challenger mission STS-51‑L exploded in the sky, into a twisting plume of smoke, a mere 73 seconds after takeoff. It left a nation stunned, and seven astronauts dead. Among them was the pilot, physicist and MIT grad Ronald McNair, who, in 1984, had become only the second African-American to travel into outer space.
As this animation narrated by his own brother explains, McNair’s path to becoming an astronaut wasn’t easy. Born and raised in the Jim Crow South (in Lake City, South Carolina, to be precise) McNair encountered racism in his everyday life. One touching story helps crystallize what his experience was like. As a nine-year-old, McNair tried to check out books from the “public” library — only to discover that “public” meant books were for whites, not blacks. The video tells the rest of the story. And I’ll just flag one important detail mentioned at the very end: On January 28, 2011, exactly 25 years after his death, the library was renamed The Dr. Ronald E. McNair Life History Center. You’ll also find a Ronald E. McNair Building on MIT’s campus too. And deservedly so.
Certainly for me, and perhaps for many of you, there’s something eerily familiar about the scene that plays out in this animation. Here’s the backstory: Starting when he was 12, Mike Cohen, a kid growing up in Buffalo, began recording the arguments he had with his parents (unbeknownst to them). At least one of the tapes, recorded in 1985, recently ended up in the hands of Rodd Perry, a first time animator, who created the cartoon above. By the looks of things, Brother Mike is still part of the music scene today.
Some enthusiasts of 19th-century American psychological horror master (or, in a very real sense, 19th-century American psychological horror inventor) Edgar Allan Poe find his work best read aloud. Thus we’ve previously featured Poe delivered in the gravitas-filled voices of such noted thespians as Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Christopher Walken, Christopher Lee, and James Mason. Mason did the reading (above) as a narration for a 1953 animated short The Tell-Tale Heart, adapting Poe’s 1843 story of the same name, which drew both an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film and — perhaps more in line with the Poe sensibility — a rating of “X” from the British Board of Film Censors.
WFMU managed to dig up even more Poe as read by Mason, three tracks of which they posted to their blog one Halloween, all with “creepy and dramatic organ stylings by Buddy Cole, who no doubt wore an Inverness cape for the occasion.” They come from a 1958 release from Decca Records, featuring Mason’s readings of not just “The Tell-Tale Heart” [MP3] but Poe’s cryptic fable “Silence” [MP3—below] and haunting final poem “Annabel Lee” [MP3—bottom]. (The flip side of the album offers something completely different, in the form of Agnes Moorehead “and a supporting cast” performing Lucille Fletcher’s radio play “Sorry, Wrong Number.”)
Opinions on who reads Poe most effectively will differ from listener to listener, but if you’d like to make a partial but direct comparison for yourself, simply line up Mason’s rendition of “The Tell-Tale Heart” on a playlist with the ones we’ve previously posted by Christopher Lee, Basil Rathbone — and of course, Iggy Pop. It may have become Poe’s best-known story in the first place by having retained its impact over all these 172 years, but having such a range of performative personalities interpret it can’t hurt in keeping it as eerie as ever.
If there is any contemporary figure out there that resembles Charles Foster Kane, it is that real estate mogul and unlikely GOP front runner, Donald Trump. Like Kane, Trump was educated in, and thrown out of, some of the most elite private schools out there. Both have huge, larger-than-life personalities that readily turned them into media icons. Both had tumultuous relationships with women that ended up tabloid fodder. Both ostentatiously flaunted their wealth. And both have grandiose political ambitions.
Above you can watch The Donald expound on Orson Welles’s masterpiece in a clip directed by none other than master documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Trump is remarkably thoughtful in this piece compared to the campaign trail where he often sounds like a WWE barker channeling Mussolini. He comes to the movie from a vantage point that most of us just don’t have; namely, he knows what it’s like being obscenely wealthy.
Citizen Kane is really about accumulation. And at the end of the accumulation, you see what happens. And it’s not necessarily all positive. I think you learn in Kane that maybe wealth isn’t everything. He had the wealth; he just didn’t have the happiness. The table getting larger and larger and larger with he and his wife getting further and further apart as he got wealthier and wealthier, perhaps I can understand that…. Wealth isolates you from other people.
At the end of the piece, Morris asks Trump to give Kane some advice. His response, delivered with a smirk, is pure Trump – i.e. bombastic and misogynist. “Get yourself a different woman.”
The segment comes from an aborted project by Morris called Movie Movie, where he envisioned putting modern figures into the films they most admire. So imagine Trump actually in a re-enactment of Kane. Or, as also almost happened, imagine Mikhail Gorbachev starring in a reenactment of Dr. Strangelove. It’s a damned shame that Movie Movie never got made.
Below you can see more of Trump along with Gorbachev, Lou Reed, Walter Cronkite and others talking about their favorite movies in a video made for the 2002 Academy Awards.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
In 1962, during the height of the Cold War, the United States launched nuclear weapons (bigger than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) into space and detonated them. Ostensibly, the goal was to see what these high altitude nuclear blasts might do to the Earth’s magnetic field.
The explosions took place some 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. And, as the NPR video above describes it, folks living in the Pacific watched the light show while gathered on rooftops and blithely sipping drinks. Below, you can view arresting footage of the tests — without having to worry about getting radioactive fallout in your cocktail.
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