It just goes to show that, put in the right hands, you can root, or shed a tear, for any protagonist — even if it’s a plastic bag. Shot in 2009 by Ramin Bahrani (who Roger Ebert called the “new great American director”) this 18-minute film “traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it.” Adding a special touch, Werner Herzog narrates the inner thoughts of the bag as it “encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.”
Plastic Bag was one of 11 films released in the Internet Television Service’s “Futurestates” film series exploring “what life might look like in an America of the future.” Upon its release, Herzog told The Guardian, ‘I’m so glad this is not an agenda movie or I would run like mad and get away from here. I mean, we can talk about sustainability issues, about plastic, about the Earth, but the movie’s about something else, something more … it’s about a journey.” An emotional, existential one, indeed.
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If you keep up with the animation we post here at Open Culture, you’ll know we have a strong fascination with techniques that require seemingly inhuman levels of devotion to the craft. Sterling earlier examples of that include the pinscreen animation of Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker as used to envision Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” and Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” More recent practitioners of such severely labor-intensive animation include Nina Paley, the self-taught animated filmmaker who singlehandedly created Sita Sings the Blues, the feature-length jazz-scored adaptation of classic Indian myth we featured in 2009.
Since then, Paley has taken her considerable skills to a form she calls “embroidermation.” It looks how it sounds: like frame by embroidered frame sequenced into life. You can get an idea of the process at Paley’s blog. She’s done this project under the banner of PaleGray Labs, “the textile collaboration of Nina Paley and Theodore Gray” (whose slogan announces their mission to “put the NERD in quiltiNg and EmbRoiDery”). They used it to make Chad Gadya, a three-minute rendering of a traditional passover folk song. (Below it, you can also see another embroidermation made by another artist for Throne’s song “Tharsis Sleeps.”) PaleGray Labs bills Chad Gadya as “our most ridiculously labor-intensive animation ever,” which must also make it the most ridiculously labor-intensive animation we’ve yet featured on Open Culture. Its creation required not only formidable embroidery abilities, but a deft hand with industrial-strength number-crunching software Mathematica in order to create the processes that allowed them to animate the stitched figures smoothly. If the results capture your imagination, know that you can purchase the original physical materials: “Each unique, approximately 16” square, unbleached cotton matzoh cover contains 6 frames of animation and is signed by the artists,” PaleGray’s site assures us. Perhaps you’d like to consider stocking up early on gifts for next Passover?
Her husband, author Neil Gaiman, is no exception.
Neil Gaiman is a total weirdo when he’s half asleep. in a GOOD way, usually. you know all that cray shit he’s been writing for the past 30 years? it has to come from *somewhere*. the guy is a fleshy repository of surreal strangeness, and he’s at his best when he’s in the twilight zone of half-wakefulness. he’s the strangest sleeper I’ve ever slept with (let’s not get into who I’ve slept with…different animation) not just because of the bizarro things that come out of his mouth when he’s in the gray area, but because he actually seems to take on a totally different persona when he’s asleep. and when that dude shows up, the waking Neil Gaiman is impossible to get back, unless you really shout him awake.
She’s made a habit of jotting down her husband’s choicest somnambulistic mutterings. One paperless night, she repaired to the bathroom to recreate his nocturnal statements on her iPhone’s voice recorder as best she could remember.
As someone who’s sorely tempted to get incontrovertible proof of her bedmate’s erratic snoring patterns, I wonder that Palmer wasn’t tempted to hit record mid-rant, and let him hoist himself on his own petard. Revenge does not seem to be the motive here, though. Palmer uses the device as more of a diary, rarely revisiting what she’s laid down. It’s more process than product.
That said, when she rediscovered this track, she felt it deserved to be animated, a la the Blank on Blank series. (BrainPicking’s Maria Popova urged her on too.) The ever-game Gaiman reportedly “laughed his head off” at the prospect of getting the Janis Joplin found text treatment.
Perhaps his services will be called upon again. Gaiman reports that his very pregnant bride is also prone to nonsensical sleep talk. (“I want to go dancing and i don’t want them to take the sheep, Don’t let them take the sheep.”) Turnabout is fair play.
Last year Jonathan Nolan–screenwriter of Memento and Interstellar and not coincidentally director Christopher Nolan’s brother–announced that he would be developing Isaac Asimov’s legendary Foundation trilogy for HBO as a series. And we assume he’s still doing that, because there’s been nary a peep from the channel since. So far the Internet consensus has been a collective “well, that could be good!” instead of groans, which is a heartening thing these days.
Right from the beginning we know we are in good hands, with the analog drones of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop ushering us into a stereo landscape filled with plummy British accents and atmospheric sound effects. It’s like the best ever episode of Doctor Who without a Tardis, corridors, or the enfeebled cries of a lost companion.
Asimov’s hero in the first book, Hari Seldon, using a science called psychohistory, can see the inevitable collapse of the Galactic Empire in which he lives and sets about trying to change it by setting up an opposition called the Foundation. The novels then jump decades ahead, checking in with this essential conflict, much like Gibbon’s work goes from emperor to emperor, marking the decline of empire and its inevitability. Free of aliens and shoot-em-ups, Foundation is very human despite its galactic scope.
Adapted by Patrick Tull and Mike Stott, the eight part radio series does a good job of presenting the novels as a character-driven drama, and while it is talky (it’s radio after all), it was Orson Scott Card who said of Foundation, it is “all talk, no action — but Asimov’s talk is action.”
It also influenced many future sci-fi writers. No doubt somewhere along the way Douglas Adams was listening to the radio play’s talking encyclopedia and thinking, hmm, what if this had jokes?
And once you get through the trilogy–maybe after an eight-hour flight?–there’s more Asimov radio plays for your listening pleasure on Spotify: Hostess, Pebble in the Sky, and Nightfall.
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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.
What makes Pablo Picasso such a representative 20th-century artist? Most of it has to do with his particular achievements, such as the visual ground he broke with his Cubist painting, sure, but some of it also has to do with the fact that his interests extended so far beyond painting. We think of creators who could create across various domains as “Renaissance men,” but conditions a few centuries on from the Renaissance enabled such artists to exert their will across an even wider range of forms. Picasso, for instance, worked in not just painting but sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, and letters.
That last even includes poetry, to which Picasso announced his commitment in 1935, at the age of 53. At that point, writes Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher, “he began writing poems almost every day until the summer of 1959,” beginning “by daubing colors for words in a notebook before moving on to using words to sketch images,” ultimately producing hundreds of poems composed primarily of “stream of consciousness, unpunctuated word association with startling juxtaposition of images and at times an obsession with sex, death and excrement.”
If this sounds like your cup of tea, you can find plenty of Picasso poetry over at Ubuweb, which offers A Picasso Sampler: Excerpts from the Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems free for the viewing. “Picasso, like any poet of consequence, is a man fully into his time and into the terrors that his time presents,” writes the collection’s editor Jerome Rothenberg. His words reflect “the state of things between the two world wars — the first one still fresh in mind and the rumblings of the second starting up,” a time and place “where poetry becomes — for him as for us — the only language that makes sense.”
turn your back
but stay in view at the same time
(now look away,
anything else confuses)
stand still without saying a word
you can’t see but this is how
i separate day from night
and the starless sky
from the empty heart
“dogs”:
dogs eat at the night
buried in the yard
they chase the moon in a pack
the white of their teeth
compared to stars
the windows close against them
iron bars in transparency
life closes against them
the morning will crush them to dust
with only the wind left
to stir them up
And “the morning of the world”:
i have a face cut from ice
a heart pierced in a thousand places
so to remember
always the same voice
the same gestures
and my laughter
heavy
as a wall
between you and me
In the afterglow of the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well concerts, we highlightedThe Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, an online project launched in 1995, which provided editorial footnotes explaining the references of every original Grateful Dead song.
For many of these songs we have Robert Hunter to thank. The majority of the Dead’s songs were Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia collaborations. Garcia composed the music, and Hunter, the lyrics. Hunter didn’t perform with the group (Garcia called him “the band member who doesn’t come out on stage with us”), but he was an integral part of the group all the same. When the Dead entered the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Robert Hunter was one of the inductees.
Being part of the Grateful Dead family, Hunter sometimes joined the band on tours, which weren’t always fun and games. As Dennis McNally, the Dead’s official historian, wrote in A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, the band, especially as it gained popularity and toured on a bigger scale, pulled some rough and tumble people into its orbit. The business managers made life difficult for the musical purists. And there was dissension at times. At one point, writes McNally, Robert Hunter wrote an open letter to the band members, structured as a sarcastic list, which “identifies the least-charitable aspects of life in the Grateful Dead hierarchy.” It reads as follows:
The Ten Commandments of Rock & Roll
1. Suck up to the top cats
2. Do not express independent opinions.
3. Do not work for common interests, only factional interests.
4. If there’s nothing to complain about, dig up some old gripe.
5. Do not respect property or persons other than band property and personnel.
6. Make devastating judgments about persons and situations without adequate information.
7. Discourage and confound personal, technical, and/or creative projects.
8. Single out absent persons for intense criticism.
9. Remember that anything you don’t understand is trying to fuck with you.
10 Destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity.
It is surprising to me, but a few people I’ve come across don’t know the name of cartoonist Robert Crumb, cult hero of underground comics and obscure Americana record collecting. On second thought, maybe this shouldn’t come as such a surprise. These are some pretty small worlds, after all, populated by obsessive fans and archivists and not always particularly welcoming to outsiders. But Crumb is different. For all his social awkwardness and hyper-obsessiveness, he seems strangely accessible to me. The easiest reference for those who’ve never heard of him is Steve Buscemi’s Seymour in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World. There’s an obvious tribute to Crumb in the character (Zwigoff previously made an R. Crumb documentary), though it’s certainly not a one-to-one relation (the film adapts Daniel Clowe’s comic of the same name.)
Whether or not Ghost World (or Zwigoff’s Crumb) rings a bell, there’s still the matter of how to communicate the lovable lewdness and aggressive anachronism that is Crumb’s art. For that one may only need to mention Big Brother & the Holding Company’s 1968 classic Cheap Thrills (top), the first album cover Crumb designed—and which Janis Joplin insisted upon over the record company’s objections. With its focus on musicians, and its appropriation of hippie weirdness, racist American imagery, and an obsession with female posteriors that rivals Sir-Mix-a-Lot’s, the cover pretty much spans the spectrum of perennial Crumb styles and themes. Above, see another of Crumb’s covers, for a compilation called The Music Never Stopped: Roots of the Grateful Dead, which collects such roots and old-school rock and roll artists as Merle Haggard, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Reverend Gary Davis, Howlin’ Wolf, and more.
Though he objected to the 1995 assignment—saying to Shanachie Records, “You want all these people on a CD cover? What are they, like, five inches across?”—Crumb must have relished the subject. (And he was paid, as per usual, in vintage 78s.) Next to those posteriors, Crumb’s true love has always been American roots music—ragtime, swing, old country and bluegrass, Delta country blues—and he has spent a good part of his career illustrating artists he loves, and those he doesn’t. From famous names like Joplin, Dylan, and B.B. King (above, whose music Crumb said he “didn’t care for, but I don’t find it that objectionable either”), to much more obscure artists, like Bo Carter, known for his “Please Warm My Wiener,” on the 1974 compilation album below.
Crumb’s use of racially questionable and sexist imagery—however satirical—has perhaps rendered him untouchable in some circles, and it’s hard to imagine many of his album covers passing corporate muster these days. His recent work has moved toward more straightforward, respectful portraiture, like that of King and of Skip James on the best-of below, from a series called “Heroes of the Blues.” (Crumb also illustrated “Heroes of Jazz” and “Heroes of Country,” as we featured in this post.) See Crumb’s inimitable, looser portrait style again further down in 2002 album art for a group called Hawks and Eagles.
Crumb may have shed some of his more unpalatable tendencies, but he hasn’t lost his lascivious edge. However, his work has matured over the years, taking on serious subjects like the book of Genesis and the Charlie Hebdo massacre. For an artist with such peculiar personal focus, Crumb is surprisingly versatile, but it’s his album covers that combine his two greatest loves. “What makes Crumb’s art so appropriate for the album sleeve,” writes The Guardian’s Laura Barton, “is its vividness, and its certain oomph; it’s in the mingling of sex and joy and compulsion, and the vibrancy and movement of his illustrations.”
Crumb hasn’t only combined his art with music fandom, but also with his own musicianship, illustrating covers for several of his own albums by his ragtime band Cheap Suit Serenaders. And he even provided the illustration for the soundtrack to his own documentary, as you can see above—an extreme example of the many self-abasing portraits Crumb has drawn of himself over the years. Crumb’s album cover art has been collected in a book, and you can see many more of his covers at Rolling Stone and on this list here.
My introduction to the work of James Newell Osterberg, Jr, better known as Iggy Pop, came in the form of “Risky,” a song from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Neo Geo album that featured not just singing but spoken word from the Stooges’ lead vocalist and punk icon. On that track, Pop speaks grimly and evocatively in the persona of a protagonist “born in a corporate dungeon where people are cheated of life,” repeatedly invoking the human compulsion to “climb to this point, move on, climb to this point, move on.” Ultimately, he poses the question: “Career, career, acquire, acquire — but what is life without a heart?”
Today, we give you Iggy Pop the storyteller asking what life is with a heart — or rather, one heart too many, unceasingly reminding you of your guilt. He tells the story, of course, of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” originally written by the American master of psychological horror Edgar Allan Poe in 1843.
Here, Pop takes on the role of another narrator consigned to a grim fate, though this one of his own making. As almost all of us know, if only through cultural osmosis, the titular “Tell-Tale Heart,” its beat seemingly emanating from under the floorboards, unceasingly reminds this anxious character of the fact that he has murdered an old man — not out of hatred, not out of greed, but out of simple need stoked, he insists, by the defenseless senior’s “vulture-eye.” For over 150 years, readers have judged the sanity of the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” in any number of ways, but don’t render your own verdict until you’ve heard Iggy Pop deliver the testimony; nobody walks the line between sanity and insanity quite like he does.
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In January, in the dead of winter, we got you thinking about warmer times by highlighting the Noam Chomsky Garden Gnome, a real product described as follows:
Standing at just under 17 inches, Gnome Chomsky the Garden Noam clutches his classic books, ‘The Manufacture of Compost’ and ‘Hedgerows not Hegemony’ – with his open right hand ready to hold the political slogan of your choosing. His clothes represent a relaxed but classy version of regular gnome attire, including: a nice suit jacket-tunic, jeans, boots, traditional gnome cap, and glasses. Additionally, Noam Gnome stands on a base complete with a carved title – for anyone who may not immediately realize the identity of this handsome and scholarly gnome.
Now that it’s summer, imagine Gnome Chomsky hanging in your garden with Howard the Zinn Monk. Zinn Monk, get it?
First published in 1980, Zinn’s famous book A People’s History of the United Statestells “America’s story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.” It has sold more than two million copies over the past 35 years. And, as I write this post, it’s the #1 bestselling book in US history on Amazon.
Howard the Zinn Monk isn’t quite selling at the same brisk clip. But the web site justsaygnome.net might make you a Zinn gnome if you ask nicely.
The story of the avant-garde is never just one story. But it tends to get told that way, and we tend to think we know how modernist and post-modern literature and music have taken shape: through a series of great men who thwarted convention and remade language and sound in ways their predecessors never dreamed. Arthur Rimbaud, Claude Debussy, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage… We could make many such lists, and we do, all the time, occasionally including the names of a few women—Yoko Ono, for example, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf….
But we might write it differently, indeed, for the simple reason that women have shaped the avant-garde just as much as men have, as prominent poets and composers, not simply spouses of famous men or guest stars in a mostly male revue. You can hear one version of such a story here, thanks to Ubuweb, “the learned and varietous online repository” of “all things avant-garde.” Their podcast Avant-Garde All the Time offers us two episodes called “The Women of the Avant-Garde,” hosted by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who admits the survey is a corrective for the podcast’s own blind spots. Through a small but select number of poets and musicians, Goldsmith aims “to show that there are dozens and dozens of great women artists on Ubuweb”—and everywhere else art lives.
Instead of a history, Goldsmith gives us something of a constellation of artists, many of them clustered tightly together in time and space. New York poets, writers, and musicians who came of age in the 70s and 80s—Kathy Acker, Lydia Lunch, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Eileen Myles—all feature in Goldsmith’s account. Theirs was a time and place the poet Myles has described as “a moment” that was “very uncensored and really excited and it just made you feel like there was room for more.”
It’s a moment that saw a revival in the 90s, when riot grrrl arose to challenge the patriarchal establishment. Around this time, artists working in a more academic context directly and indirectly engaged with literary history ancient and modern. Scholar and poet Anne Carson has twisted and translated the texts of Ovid, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the writers (and translators) of the King James Bible. And German-Norwegian-French experimental poet Caroline Bergvall, whom Goldsmith discusses in episode one above, rewrote Chaucer and rearranged Dante.
In episode two, Goldsmith reaches somewhat further back—to Yoko Ono and Denise Levertov—and farther away from New York, with work from Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad. Prominently featured in this second part of the series, and for good reason, is fierce patroness of early twentieth century avant-garde art and writing, Gertrude Stein. Stein’s own poetry radically disrupted the accepted, and acceptable, codes of speech and writing—setting a precedent for several decades of feminist writers and artists whose appearance in archives like Ubuweb, Goldsmith notes, increasingly come to match or outweigh those of their male counterparts. Hear Stein read from her own work at another such archive, PennSound, and visit the Poetry Foundation to stream and download more episodes of Ubuweb’s Avant-Garde all the Time, including an episode devoted to Stein called “Almost Completely Understanding.”
The BBC’s recent series of Nigel Warburton-scripted, celebrity-narrated animations in philosophy haven’t shied away from the hard questions the discipline touches. How did everything begin?What makes us human?What is the self?How do I live a good life? In all those videos, Gillian Anderson, Stephen Fry, and Harry Shearer told us what history’s most thought-about thinkers have had to say on those subjects. But for the latest round, Warburton and The Hobbit’s Aidan Turner have taken on what some would consider, at least for our practical purposes, the trickiest one of all: what is love?
You might not turn to Jean-Paul Sartre, life partner of Simone de Beauvoir, as a first love consultant of choice, but the series devotes an entire video to the Being and Nothingness author’s theories on emotion. The freedom-minded Sartre sees the condition of love as a “hazardous, painful struggle,” one of either masochism or sadism: “masochism when a lover tries to become what he thinks his lover wants him to be, and in the process denies his own freedom; sadism when the lover treats the loved one as an object and ties her down. Either way, freedom is compromised.”
Have we any lighter philosophical perspectives on love here? Well, we have a variety of philosophical perspectives on love, anyway: Aristophanes’ creation myth of the “missing half,” Sigmund Freud and Edvard Westermarck’s disagreement over the Oedipus complex, and the conviction of “psychological egoists” from Thomas Hobbes to Richard Dawkins that no such thing as strictly selfless love exists. The philosophy of love, like love itself, can get complicated, but the clear and witty drawings accompanying the ideas discussed in these videos can help us envision the different ideas they encompass. Should you need even clearer (or less witty) illustrations on the subject, you could always turn to Love Is…, though I have a feeling you’d find that solution a bit too simple.
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